9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page i

The ISA
Handbook in

Contemporary
Sociology
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page ii
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page iii

The ISA
Handbook in

Contemporary
Sociology
Conflict, Competition, Cooperation

Edited by
Ann Denis
and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page iv

Editorial arrangement © Ann Denis and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman 2009

Chapter 1 © Ann Denis and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman
2009
Chapter 2 © Lauren Langman and Devorah Kalekin-
Fishman 2009
Chapter 3 © Nira Yuval-Davis 2009
Chapter 4 © Kjeld Hogsbro, Hans Pruijt, Nikita
Pokrovsky and George Tsobanoglou 2009
Chapter 5 © Reza Banakar 2009
Chapter 6 © Elisa P. Reis 2009
Chapter 7 © Jaime Jiménez 2009
Chapter 8 © Ulrike Schuerkens 2009
Chapter 9 © Elianne Riska, Ellen Annandale and
Robert Dingwall 2009
Chapter 10 © Julia Evetts, Charles Gadea, Mariano
Sánchez and Juan Sáez 2009
Chapter 11 © Fabien Ohl 2009
Chapter 12 © Jan Marontate 2009
Chapter 13 © Robert van Krieken and Doris Bühler-
Niederberger 2009
Chapter 14 © Stéphane Moulin and Paul Bernard 2009
Chapter 15 © Bali Ram and Shefali S. Ram 2009
Chapter 16 © David R. Segal, Christopher Dandeker,
and Yuko K. Whitestone 2009
Chapter 17 © Paul Leduc Browne 2009
Chapter 18 © Edward Webster and Robert Lambert
2009
Chapter 19 © Marco Silvestro 2009
Chapter 20 © Markus S. Schulz 2009
Chapter 21 © Joseph F. Donnermeyer, Pat Jobes, and
Elaine Barclay 2009
Chapter 22 © Mustafa Koc 2009
Chapter 23 © Maria da Glória Gohn 2009
Chapter 24 © Victor Armony 2009
Chapter 25 © Ari Sitas 2009
Chapter 26 © Alexius A. Pereira 2009
Chapter 27 © Henry Teune 2009
Chapter 28 © Sandi Michele de Oliveira 2009
Chapter 29 © Philippe Couton, Ann Denis, Leslie
Laczko, Linda Pietrantonio, and Joseph-Yvon Thériault
2009
Chapter 30 © Ann Denis and Devorah Kalekin-
Fishman 2009

First published 2009

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private
study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright,
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only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in
the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the
terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be
sent to the publishers.

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9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page v

Contents

Diagrams, Figures, and Tables viii

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xiv

Reviewers xvi

About the Contributors xix

INTRODUCTION 1

1 Introduction 3
Ann Denis and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman

PART ONE: ANALYSES OF APPROACHES TO RESEARCH 7

2 Alienation: Critique and Alternative Futures 9

Lauren Langman and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman

3 Identity, Citizenship and Contemporary, Secure, Gendered Politics of

Belonging 29
Nira Yuval-Davis

4 Sociological Practice and the Sociotechnics of Governance 42

Kjeld Hogsbro, Hans Pruijt, Nikita Pokrovsky, and George Tsobanoglou

5 Law Through Sociology’s Looking Glass: Conflict, and Competition

in Sociological Studies of Law 58
Reza Banakar

6 New Ways of Relating Authority and Solidarity: Theoretical

and Empirical Explorations 74
Elisa P. Reis

7 New Collaborative Forms of Doing Research 91

Jaime Jiménez
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page vi

vi CONTENTS

PART TWO: TRENDS IN CONCEPTUALIZING CONFLICT, COMPETITION,

AND COOPERATION IN SUBFIELDS OF SOCIOLOGY 107

8 Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation in the Sociology of

Development and Social Transformations 109
Ulrike Schuerkens

9 Health Sociology: Conflict, Competition, Cooperation 124

Elianne Riska, Ellen Annandale and Robert Dingwall

10 Sociological Theories of Professions: Conflict, Competition

and Cooperation 140
Julia Evetts, Charles Gadea, Mariano Sánchez and Juan Sáez

11 Competition, Conflict and Cooperation, and the Naturalization

of Social Difference in Sport 155
Fabien Ohl

12 Controversies as Sites of Conflict and Collaboration: Insights

from the Sociology of the Arts 170
Jan Marontate

13 Rethinking the Sociology of Childhood: Conflict, Competition

and Cooperation in Children’s Lives 185
Robert van Krieken and Doris Bühler-Niederberger

14 The Lifecourse of the Social Mobility Paradigm 201

Stéphane Moulin and Paul Bernard

PART THREE: RESEARCH ON SOCIAL ISSUES – INTERWEAVING

PROCESSES 221

15 Health, Illness, and Mortality in Less Developed Countries: Convergence,

Divergence, and Stagnation 223
Bali Ram and Shefali S. Ram

16 Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation in Twenty-First Century Military

Peacekeeping Operations 236
David R. Segal, Christopher Dandeker, and Yuko K. Whitestone

17 Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation in the Social Division of Health Care 250
Paul Leduc Browne

18 Markets Against Society: Labour’s Predicament in the Second

Great Transformation 265
Edward Webster and Robert Lambert

19 Political Consumerism: An Extension of Social Conflict or a Renewed

Form of Economic Collaboration? 278
Marco Silvestro
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page vii

CONTENTS vii

20 Modes of Structured Interplay in the Modeling of Digital Futures 291

Markus S. Schulz

21 Sociological Theory, Social Change, and Crime in Rural Communities 305

Joseph F. Donnermeyer, Pat Jobes, and Elaine Barclay

PART FOUR: ILLUSTRATIVE CASE STUDIES 321

22 Hunger and Plenty: Fragmented Integration in the Global Food System 323
Mustafa Koc

23 Social Movements in Brazil: Characteristics and Research 336

Maria da Glória Gohn

24 Making Sense of Social Justice and Social Mobilization in Latin

America: A Discourse Analysis 351
Victor Armony

25 Industrial and Labour Studies, Socio-Economic Transformation,

Conflict, and Cooperation in KwaZulu Natal 368
Ari Sitas

26 Economic Globalization and Singapore’s Development Policies:

Competition, Cooperation, and Conflict 384
Alexius A. Pereira

27 The Dynamics of Local-Global Relations: Conflict and Development 400

Henry Teune

28 Negotiating Identity, Conflict, and Cooperation within a Strategic

Model of Address 416
Sandi Michele de Oliveira

29 Conflict and (Ethno-Linguistic) Diversity: Canada/Québec 433

Philippe Couton, Ann Denis, Leslie Laczko, Linda Pietrantonio,
and Joseph-Yvon Thériault

PART FIVE: CONCLUSION 459

30 Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation: Means and Stratagems

for Shaping Social Reality in the Twenty-First Century 461
Ann Denis and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman

Index 468
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page viii

Diagrams, Figures,
and Tables

5 Law through Sociology’s Looking Glass. Conflict, and Competition in

Sociological Studies of Law 58
Reza Banakar
Diagram 5.1 Relationship between Socio-Legal Approaches 65

6 New Ways of Relating Authority and Solidarity: Theoretical

and Empirical Explorations 74
Elisa P. Reis
Figure 6.1 Distribution of NGOs According to Year of Establishment 82
Table 6.1 Changes in Objectives and/or Publics of NGOs According to Date
Established 83
Table 6.2 Changes in Objectives and/or Publics According to Main Area
of Activity 83
Table 6.3 Major Source of Support of NGOs According to Date Established 84
Table 6.4 Major Sources of Financial Support of NGOs Ten Years Ago 84
Table 6.5 Number of Paid Workers of the NGOs According to Year
of Establishment 85
Table 6.6 Leaders Consult Their Constituencies? 85
Table 6.7 How Often Is the Webpage Updated 86
Table 6.8 Major Purpose of the Webpage 86
Table 6.9 Partnership with the Federal Government According to
Characteristics of the NGO 87
Table 6.10 Partnership with Local Government According to
Characteristics of the NGO 87
Table 6.11 Partnership with the Regional Government According to
Characteristics of the NGO 88

7 New Collaborative Forms of Doing Research 91

Jaime Jiménez
Table 7.1 Comparison of the Characteristics of Mode 1 and Mode 2 of
Knowledge Production 93

11 Competition, Conflict and Cooperation, and the Naturalization of Social

Difference in Sport 155
Fabien Ohl
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page ix

DIAGRAMS, FIGURES, AND TABLES ix

Figure 11.1 Distribution of Articles Concerning Conflict, Cooperation,

and Competition 156

18 Markets Against Society: Labour’s Predicament in the Second Great

Transformation 267
Edward Webster and Robert Lambert
Diagram 18.1 The Northern Compromise 268
Diagram 18.2 The Global South: The Case of South Africa 269
Diagram 18.3 The Critical Strategic Choice for Trade Unionism 271

22 Hunger and Plenty: Fragmented Integration in the Global Food System 323
Mustafa Koc
Table 22.1 Level of Concentration in the US Food Processing Sectors
(2005 figures) 327
Graph 22.1 Market Net Income in Farming in Canada, 1926–2005 328

24 Making Sense of Social Justice and Social Mobilization in

Latin America: A Discourse Analysis 351
Victor Armony
Table 24.1 ‘What Are the Main Injustices in this Country?’ 357
Table 24.2 ‘Who Benefits from this Situation?’ 359
Table 24.3 ‘What Should be Done in Order to Put the Country on
the Right Track?’ 360
Table 24.4 ‘Who Speaks on Behalf of the People?’ 361
Table 24.5 ‘What Is Your Role in the Movement?’ 363
Table 24.6 Activists’ Distinctive Vocabulary by Gender (El Salvador
and Honduras) 364

25 Industrial and Labour Studies, Socio-Economic Transformation, Conflict and

Cooperation in KwaZulu Natal 368
Ari Sitas
Table 25.1 Culture Activists in Natal’s Trade Unions: Index of Hardships,
1986–92 (N = 120) 379

26 Economic Globalization and Singapore’s Development Policies: Competition,

Cooperation and Conflict 384
Alexius A. Pereira
Table 26.1 Cases of Biotechnology Foreign Direct Investment in Singapore
(selected) 394

27 The Dynamics of Local Global Relations: Conflict and Development 400

Henry Teune
Table 27.1 Demscore (Mean Score) 410
Table 27.2 Trust in People: Percentage Yes 411
Table 27.3 Groups Not Wanted as Neighbors: Percentages 411
Table 27.4 Having Local Autonomy: Mean 412
Table 27.5 Influence across Policy Areas: 14 areas 412
Table 27.6 Local Priorities vs. National Priorities – Mean Score 412
Table 27.7 Conflicts Interfere with Public Action – Mean 412
Table 27.8 Number of Support Groups Sought Across 16 Groups – Mean 413
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page x

x DIAGRAMS, FIGURES, AND TABLES

28 Negotiating Identity, Conflict, and Cooperation within a Strategic Model

of Address 416
Sandi Michele de Oliveira
Table 28.1 Simplified Schema of the Address Form System in Portugal 420
Diagram 28.1 Stages of Address Form Relationships 422
Diagram 28.2 Strategic Level of the Conventionalized Plane 424
Diagram 28.3 Strategic Level of the Negotiated Plane 425
Table 28.2 Applicability of Hierarchy to Other Languages 428

29 Conflict and (Ethno-Linguistic) Diversity: Canada/Québec 433

Philippe Couton, Ann Denis, Leslie Laczko, Linda Pietrantonio,
and Joseph Yvon Thériault
Table 29.1 Top 10 Source Countries, Montréal, Toronto, Vancouver, 2002 442
Figure 29.1 Québec’s Proportion of Canada’s Immigrants and of Canada’s
Population, 1970–2000 443
Figure 29.2 Proportion of Foreign-born, Top 10 Countries and Québec, 2000 443
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page xi
In our era, which is apparently dominated on
the one hand, by violence, communally based
divisions of all kinds, and war, and, on the
other, by phenomena of exclusion and social
vulnerability, and the intensification of indi-
vidualism connected with economic global-
ization; how refreshing it is to encounter
discussions of competition, or at least of con-
flict – that is, of conflictual relations and not
of impasses – and of cooperation!
In the period from the end of World War II
to the mid-1970s, there were two great con-
flicts which constituted a double principle
structuring the world, at least for a number of
societies, especially in the West. The Cold
War, in which the threat of nuclear attack
played a major role as a deterrent, regulated
the opposition between two blocs, except for
an exceptional moment of crisis which was
quickly resolved (the affair of the Cuban mis-
siles). This made it possible for the planet to
avoid violence between the two super-
powers. Ultimately, they never made war
directly and never went too far locally,
because a local war always carried the risk of
expanding into a confrontation at the
summit, which neither the West nor the East
wanted.
And in the industrialized countries, at any
rate in the West, social relations took the form
of a central oppositional conflict, in the factory
and in the workshop, between the workers’
Preface
Michel Wieviorka,
President,
International Sociological Association
movement and the masters of their work
(the employers). This conflict structured col-
lective life well beyond the places where it
was initiated. Politics, notably the left/right
cleavage, was informed by this, as were many
other social or cultural movements, including
those of students, grass roots associations,
peasants, consumers, families, movements
for children’s education, and so on.
But we are no longer concerned with those
conflicts. The Cold War is behind us, and by
and large, the workers’ struggles have lost
their centrality, their ability to make the pro-
letariat the main actor in collective life, the
one who is called upon to lead.
The post-War years were also those of decol-
onization, and today we often have the feeling
of living in societies where the debates and the
problems owe a good deal to the impact of the
end of the colonial era. This is true both in the
formerly colonized as well as in the formerly
colonizing societies which, in fact, now often
receive fairly large-scale migrations from their
former colonies. In some ways, we may say
that we are orphans of two great conflicts
which were the Cold War and the struggles of
the workers’ movements. Moreover, from the
logic of the shattering of colonialism, we see
the growth of new highly charged conflicts
based on cultural and historical factors as well
as on collective memories. These conflicts are
sometimes described as ‘post-colonial’.
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page xii
xii PREFACE
These new conflicts are certainly not the
only ones, and they do not preclude diverse
forms of cooperation. In my view, they are
the opposite of a crisis, and are best thought
of as opposed to, rather than as complemen-
tary to the idea of violence. To my mind, there
is conflict when actors oppose one another for
control of the same stakes, when they
acknowledge that they are in a relationship,
that they are adversaries; at the same time this
does not entail their being transformed into
enemies who make war against each other,
and, in extreme cases, destroy one another.
Conflict is a relation, while crisis is a break-
down or a dysfunction of a system of action.
Violence is the indicator of an extreme crisis –
complete disintegration, the absence of any
relation.
The book edited by Ann Denis and
Devorah Kalekin-Fishman invites us there-
fore to give the attention they deserve to the
concepts of conflict, cooperation, and com-
petition. Even if most of the authors do not
take the same approach as I do to these ques-
tions, examining them is, in my opinion,
decisive: it is important, in effect, to give
voice to those who are studying the world as
it is, without reducing it to worst dramas of
violence, mass crime, fundamentalisms of all
sorts, nor to the effects of globalization
alone. In conflict, cooperation, and competi-
tion, there are actors, social relations, and
intercultural relations, all at various levels,
and not only victims, criminals, armies,
remote economic forces, or communities
which have withdrawn into themselves. By
examining the available paradigms and
approaches, by reflecting on the possible
articulations of these concepts, in attempting
to apply them in diverse fields of social sci-
ence, including in the framework of mono-
graphs dedicated to case studies, the authors
recruited by Ann Denis and Devorah
Kalekin-Fishman perform the service of
returning a set of concepts, approaches, or
paradigms to their legitimate place.
Furthermore, they provide us as well with an
original instrument, a Handbook, which is all
the more useful because it was conceived and
carried out from a comparative (or transver-
sal) perspective.
I would also like to add a more institu-
tional statement to this preface. This
Handbook is the first published by the ISA in
this millennium, and it is clear that this pub-
lication will be followed by further editorial
initiatives. There are certainly a number of
edited works in sociology which deal with
major themes in the discipline. Their quality
depends, in large part, on their contributors,
but also on the way in which the authors were
solicited, on the preparatory work by the edi-
tors, on the guidelines given to the authors,
and on all the work invested in editing the
contributions. Here, the volume was pre-
ceded by an important conference, which
attests to the vitality of the Research
Committees (RCs) of the International
Association of Sociology (ISA). The ISA has
more than 50 of them, not to mention the
Thematic Groups and the Working Groups
which pave the way for tomorrow’s Research
Committees. Each RC has its own intellec-
tual life, its agenda, its own, often highly
impressive, dynamism. For instance, I am
writing these lines after having participated
in a conference of RC 04, ‘Sociology of
Education’, which took place in Brazil (Joao
Pessoa, February 19–22, 2008) with almost
1500 participants who came from all over the
world. The RCs are a resource of the ISA,
perhaps even its principal resource; they
make our association a unique locus of intel-
lectual life, and not merely an incorporated
organization. The ISA not only encourages
its RCs to be as active as possible, to be open
to researchers from every part of the globe, to
function in the three official languages, to
give opportunities for presentations by
‘junior sociologists’ alongside those of rec-
ognized researchers; it also creates the condi-
tions which allow for their meetings and for
discovering their complementarity. This
Handbook is the fruit of in-depth dynamics,
and the conference which preceded it was
only one event, certainly a particularly intense
one, among others. Additional ISA resources
are found in the quality and substance of its
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page xiii

PREFACE xiii

publications, both its books and journals. This
publication capacity is another of the assets of
the ISA, from which this work, which is pub-
lished within a reasonable interval and with
all the care required, benefits. It is obviously
not by chance that the two editors of the book,
in addition to their competence as sociologists,
are important personalities in our associa-
tion, one having been Vice-President for
research while the other is currently Vice-
President for publications. I thank them
warmly for offering us this fine volume,
which, clearly, will be a milestone.
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page xiv
Acknowledgments
Having an academic conference in conjunc-
tion with the mandated mid-term meeting
of the Research Council (the Council of
Research Committees) had already become
an International Sociological Association tra-
dition that Ann was eager to continue after
her election as Vice-President for Research
of ISA in 2002, and a publication was a ‘nat-
ural’ outcome of such a conference. That the
publication would be a Handbook was a
result of the enthusiasm with which confer-
ence participants embraced the theme of the
conference, the quality of the revised papers
that were submitted after the conference, the
high standards of the reviewers who com-
mented on these papers, and the quality of
the authors’ final revisions.
Acknowledgments therefore begin with
those involved in the ISA Research Council
conference held at the University of Ottawa
in 2004. The scientific committee for the
conference included representatives of the
two national scholarly associations which co-
sponsored the event, members of the Faculty
of Social Sciences at the University of
Ottawa, of Carleton University, and of the
International Sociological Association. The
committee members were: Victor Armony
(Université du Québec à Montréal, for
l’Association Canadienne de Sociologues et
Anthropologues de Langue Française), Ann
Denis (University of Ottawa, Vice-President
Research, ISA), Myriam Denov (University
of Ottawa), Katherine Kelly (Carleton
University), Karen March (Carleton University,
for Canadian Sociology and Anthropology
Association), Ari Sitas (KwaZulu Natal
University, Durban, South Africa, Vice-
President Program, ISA), Piotr Sztompka
(Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland,
President, ISA), J. Yvon Thériault (Université
d’Ottawa), and Kathryn Trevenen (University
of Ottawa). We thank Professor Leslie Laczko,
Chair of the Department of Sociology, for
hosting the conference. Pierre Doucette, our
student assistant, provided invaluable admin-
istrative assistance before, during, and after
the conference. We are grateful for the
administrative support we have received
from the University of Ottawa, particularly
from Anick Mineault (Sociology) and
Ginette Rozon (Faculty of Social Science).
We also want to express our thanks for the
financial support for the conference (and the
preparation of this publication) which we
received from: the International Sociology
Association; Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada; International
Development Research Centre; the Department
of Sociology and Anthropology of Carleton
University; and at the University of Ottawa –
the Rector – Professor Gilles Patry, the
Faculty of Social Sciences, the Faculty of
Graduate Studies and Research, the Dean of
the Faculty of Social Sciences – Professor
Caroline Andrew, and the Department of
Sociology.
First the conference itself, and then the
publication, would have been impossible
without the collaboration of the authors.
We greatly appreciate the contributors’
cooperation throughout this long and some-
times arduous process. On receipt of the
revised papers after the conference, after our
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page xv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
initial reading of each text (and in some cases
requiring initial revisions), we invited up to
three experts in the field to provide double
blind anonymous peer review of each one.
Based on their comments we invited the
authors to carry out further revisions to their
draft chapters. Some chapters were rejected
at this stage because the authors did not have
the time or the inclination to make the modi-
fications that would result in a fit between
their paper and the objectives of the publica-
tion. We are immensely grateful to those who
provided the reviews. Critical assessments by
the reviewers enabled authors to strengthen
their initially interesting contributions by call-
ing attention to how analyses could be made
more focussed and more comprehensive. In
recognition of their effort, and as a gesture of
our gratitude, we have included the reviewers’
names in this volume.
Insofar as the preparation of the Handbook
itself is concerned, we are grateful for
the efficient help of our student assistants –
Pierre Doucette, Diana Reis, and Sylvie Giraud.
Madeleine Potvin of the Faculty of Social
Sciences, University of Ottawa, has provided
xv
an invaluable service in reconciling the for-
mats, particularly of the references, of all the
articles. Throughout the publication process
we have appreciated the support of the
Executive Secretary of the ISA, Izabela
Barlinska, and of Julia Evetts, Editor of the
SAGE Studies in International Sociology
Series, as well as that of SAGE Publications
in London, in particular Chris Rojek (Senior
Editor for Sociology) and Mila Steele and Jai
Seaman (Assistant Editors). We also wish to
thank Michel Wieviorka, President of the
ISA, who kindly wrote the preface for the
collection.
Work on this Handbook has brought us the
rewards of learning about developments and
challenges in the diverse (and cross-cutting)
fields within our discipline. It has also given
us the opportunity – and pleasure – of work-
ing together on this project, and of enjoying
the stimulation of working with a very distin-
guished group of sociologists.
Ann Denis and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman
Editors
February 2008
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page xvi

Reviewers

Jon Anson, Professor, Department of Social Work, Ben Gurion University – Negev, Israel.
Farshad Araghi, Professor, Department of Sociology, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton,
United States.
Pat Armstrong, Professor, Department of Sociology, York University, Downsview, Canada.
Zabeer Baber, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, Mississauga,
Canada.
Bernadette Bawin-Legros, Professor, Nandrin, Belgium.
Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Professor, Department of Sociology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Tova Benski, PhD, Department of Behavioural Sciences, College of Management Studies,
Rishon-Leziyon, Israel.
L. M. Beukema, Professor, Department of General Studies, Utrecht University, Utrecht,
Netherlands.
Dan Cook, Professor, Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University-Camden, Camden,
United States.
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California,
San Diego, United States.
Vincenzo Ferrari, Professor, Instituto di Filosofia e Sociologia del Diritto, Facolta di
Giurisprudenza, Universita degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy.
Eliot Freidson, Professor, University of California, San Francisco, United States.
Lawrence Friedman, Professor, Stanford University, Stanford, United States.
Jan Marie Fritz, Professor, School of Planning, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, United
States.
Stefan Gandler, PhD, Facultad de Ciencias Politicas y Sociales, Universidad Autonoma
Querétaro, Querétaro, Mexico.
Madeleine Gauthier, PhD, INRS Urbanisation, Culture et Société, Québec, Canada.
Deborah Golden, PhD, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
Helga Hallgrimsdottir, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Victoria, Victoria,
Canada.
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page xvii

REVIEWERS xvii

Maureen Harrington, PhD, Dept. of Tourism, Leisure, Hotel and Sports Management, Griffith
University, Mount Gravatt, Australia.
Juergen Hartmann, Professor, European Tourism Management, Dalarna University, Borlaenge,
Sweden.
Paul Higate, PhD, School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom.
Heather Hofmeister, Professor, Institut für Soziologie, RWTH-Aachen University, Aachen,
Germany.
Marjan Hocevar, PhD, Faculty of Social Sciences, Centre for Spatial Sociology, University of
Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Alexandra Hofmanner, PhD, Research Officer, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South
Africa.
Danielle Juteau, Professeure, Département de sociologie, Université de Montréal, Montréal,
Canada.
Kalpana Kannabiran, PhD, Asmita Resource Centre for Women, Secunderabad, India.
Douglas Kellner, Professor, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University
of California at Los Angeles, United States.
Bert Klandermans, Professor, Department of Social Sciences, Free University, Amsterdam,
Netherlands.
Robert Lambert, Professor, Organisational and Labour Studies, University of Western
Australia, Perth, Australia.
Paul Lamy, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada.
Lt. Col. David Last, Registrar’s Office, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Canada.
Maurice Lévesque, Professeur, Département de Sociologie, Université d’Ottawa, Ottawa,
Canada.
Loet Leydesdorff, PhD, Amsterdam School of Communications Research, University of
Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Judith Lorber, Professor, New York, United States.
Deirdre Meintel, Professeure, Département d’Anthropologie, Université de Montréal,
Montréal, Canada.
Nancy Midol, PhD, Université de Nice, Nice, France.
S.M. Miller, Professor, Commonwealth Institute, Cambridge, United States.
Melinda Mills, Professor, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of
Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands.
Barbara Misztal, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Leicester, Leicester,
United Kingdom.
Marc Molgat, Professeur, École de service social, Université d’Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada.
Arturo Rodriguez Morato, Professor, Department of Sociology, Universidad de Barcelona,
Barcelona, Spain.
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page xviii

xviii REVIEWERS

Manuel B. Moreira, Professor, Technical University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal.

Ronaldo Munck, Professor, Theme Leader: Internationalisation, Interculturalism & Social
Development, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland.
Claus Offe, Professor, Institute of Social Sciences, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.
Michèle Ollivier, Professeure, Département de Sociologie, Université d’Ottawa, Ottawa,
Canada.
Eric Ouellet, PhD, Director of Academics/Directeur des études académiques, Canadian Forces
College/Collège des Forces canadiennes, Toronto, Canada.
Frank Pinch, PhD, Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, Gloucester, Ontario, Canada.
Gilles Pronovost, Professeur, Département des Sciences de Loisirs, Université du Québec à
Trois Rivières, Trois Rivières, Canada.
P. Radhakrishnan, Professor, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India.
Karlheinz Schneider, Professor, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany.
Scott Simon, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada.
Thomas S. Smith, Professor, University of Rochester, Rochester, United States.
Raquel Sosa Elizaga, Professor, Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos, Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, Mexico.
Willfried Spohn, Professor, Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Devanayaka Sundaram, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Madras, Chennai,
India.
Heinz Sünker, Professor, Center for International Studies in Social Policy and Social Services,
Universität Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany.
Marek Szczepanski, Professor, Head, Institute of Sociology, Silesian University, Poland.
Rachel Tomer, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Israel.
Bryan Turner, Professor, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore,
Singapore.
Mariya Tysiachnuk, Professor, Centre for Independent Research, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Vivienne Wee, Professor, Department of Applied Social Studies, Chinese University, Hong
Kong, China.
Alex Ziegert, Professor, Sydney Law School, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
Dieter Zinnbauer, London School of Economics, London, England.
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page xix

About the Contributors

Ellen Annandale is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at University of Leicester, UK. She is

Vice-President of the Research Committee on Sociology of Health (RC 15) of ISA. Her main
interests are in gender and health, and medical work and practice. She is the author of
The Sociology of Health and Medicine (Polity Press, 1998) which is currently being prepared
in a 2nd edition, and Women’s Health and Social Change (Routledge, 2008). She is currently
Editor-in-Chief of the journal Social Science & Medicine.

Victor Armony is an FQRSC Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Université du

Québec à Montréal and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University
of Ottawa, both in Canada. He is a past President of the Association canadienne des socio-
logues et des anthropologues de langue française (ACSALF) and the current Editor of the
Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Reza Banakar is Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Westminster in London,

UK. He was previously Senior Research Fellow in Law at Harris Manchester College and Paul
Dodyk Research Fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford.
Among his publications are: Theory and Method in Socio-Legal Research, co-edited
with M. Travers (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2005), Merging Law and Sociology: Beyond the
Dichotomies in Socio-Legal Research (Berlin/Wisconsin: Galda + Wilch Verlag, 2003), and
Introduction to Law and Social Theory, also co-edited with M. Travers (Oxford: Hart
Publishing, 2002).

Elaine Barclay is the Director of the Centre for Rural Crime which is incorporated within the
Institute for Rural Futures, a research centre at the University of New England, Armidale,
Australia. The research program of the Centre for Rural Crime includes studies of crime in
rural communities, crime and crime prevention on farms, biosecurity on farms, and environ-
mental crime. She has authored/co-authored several journal articles and book chapters and is
co-editor of Crime in Rural Australia published by Federation Press in 2007.

Paul Bernard, PhD in Sociology, Harvard, 1974, is a Professor at the Université de Montréal,
in Canada. Research on job quality, social cohesion, social capital, welfare and gender regimes,
social inequalities of health, indicators of social development, lifecourse and social investment,
flexicurity, and poverty among single-parent families. Member of the National Statistics
Council, of the Steering Committee of the Canadian Household Panel Survey, of the Board of
Governors of the Council of the Canadian Academies, of the Board of the Social Research and
Demonstration Corporation, and of the Board of Québec’s Centre d’études sur la pauvreté et
l’exclusion sociale.
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xx ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Paul Leduc Browne has been the Professor of Political Science at the Université du Québec
en Outaouais in Gatineau, Québec, Canada, since 2002. Before that he was a Senior Research
Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in Ottawa for eight years. He has also
taught at the Universities of Sussex, Ottawa, and Regina. He is the author and editor of several
books and other publications, including Unsafe Practices: Restructuring and Privatization in
Ontario Health Care; The Commodity of Care: Home Care Reform in Ontario; Love in a Cold
World: The Voluntary Sector in an Age of Cuts; and (with Douglas Moggach) The Social
Question and the Democratic Revolution.

Doris Bühler-Niederberger, Professor for Sociology at the University of Wuppertal, Germany,

is currently the President of ISA RC 53, Sociology of Childhood, and coordinates the section
‘Sociology of Childhood’ in the German Sociological Association. Main research activities
concern political programs and debates about children, expert interventions into children’s lives
and families, scientific images of children, and socialization of self.

Philippe Couton is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Ottawa in Canada.

His areas of interest include immigration, immigrant social and political engagement, political
sociology, and labour relations.

Christopher Dandeker is the Professor of Military Sociology in the Department of War

Studies in the School of Social Science and Public Policy (where he served as Head of School
from 2005 to 2008) at King’s College, London, UK. He is a co-Director of the King’s Centre
for Military Health Research as well as a member of the executive committee of RC 01. Recent
publications include, ‘Surveillance and Military Transformation: Organizational Trends in Twenty-
First Century Armed Services’ in K Haggerty and R V Ericson (eds.), The New Politics of
Surveillance and Visibility, University of Toronto Press, 2006, 225–249.

Ann Denis is the Professor of Sociology in the Département de sociologie et anthropologie,

Université d’Ottawa, in Ottawa, Canada. Presently a member of the Executive Committee of ISA
(2006–2010), she was its Vice-President for Research (2002–2006), and is an active member of
Research Committees 5 and 32. Current and recent research interests include the effect of state
policies on women (and their work) in the Commonwealth Caribbean and among immigrants in
Canada, the use of the Internet by minority young people in Barbados and francophone Ontario,
and the effects of society-centered educational practices on women in engineering.

Robert Dingwall is Professor and Director at the Institute for Science and Society, University
of Nottingham, UK. He is Secretary of the Research Committee on Sociology of Health (RC
15), ISA. His most recent book (with Elizabeth Murphy) is Qualitative Methods and Health
Policy Research (Aldine Transaction 2003) and he has recently edited a four-volume collection
of classic works, Qualitative Health Research, published by Sage in 2008. He is currently
co-editing (with Ivy Bourgeault and Raymond De Vries) a Handbook of Qualitative Health
Research, due for publication by Sage in 2009.

Joseph F. Donnermeyer is a Professor in the Rural Sociology program at The Ohio State
University, USA, with a specialty in the study of rural crime, and the International Research
Coordinator for the Rural Crime Centre, University of New England, New South Wales,
Australia. Dr. Donnermeyer is the author/co-author of numerous journal articles, book chapters
and books on rural crime, co-editor of a recently published book on Crime in Rural Australia
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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS xxi

(Federation Press), and co-author of a policy brief on methamphetamine’s impact in rural

America for the Rural Sociological Society.

Julia Evetts is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology in the School of Sociology and Social
Policy at the University of Nottingham, UK. For a number of years she has been researching
and writing about professions and occupations including women’s and men’s careers in teach-
ing, banking, science, and engineering in industrial organizations. Currently she is working on
projects to do with professionalism in the armed forces and journalism; the increased use of the
concept of professionalism as a mechanism of occupational change and social control in work
organizations; and the role of the scientific and engineering institutes in the UK.

Charles Gadea is the Professor of Sociology at the University of Versailles, France. He is the
President of ISA RC52 ‘Sociology of Professional Groups’, President of the Association des
Sociologues Enseignants du Supérieur (ASES), and Director of the journal Knowledge, Work
& Society. He is also in charge of the thematic net ‘Knowledge, Work and Professions’ in the
Association Française de Sociologie (AFS) and the working group ‘Savoirs, metiers, identité
professionnelle’ in the Association Internationale des Sociologues de Langue Française
(AISLF). His main research themes are currently the death of the professions, medical profes-
sions, managers, and gender.

Maria da Glória Gohn, sociologist, PhD in Political Science, University of Sǎo Paulo/Brazil
(1983); Pos/PhD in the New School of University, New York (1996/97). Professor at the
University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and at the University of 9 July, S. Paulo (UNINOVE).
Researcher I of the CNPQ–National Council of Research. Secretary of the RC 47 of the
International Sociological Association since 2002. Some of her published books on social
movements: Movimentos Sociais no Inicio do Século XXI, (Vozes, 2007, 3a ed);
O Protagonismo da Sociedade Civil (Cortez, 2008, 2a ed). She had published a new book
this year, titled Novas Teorias ods Movimentos Sociais (Loyola, 2008).

Kjeld Hogsbro, Professor of Social Work, Department of Sociology, Social Work and
Organisation, Aalborg University, Denmark. PhD (1991) with a dissertation on social problems
and self-help organizations in Denmark, he has published books on disabilities, mental illness,
social work, and community development in Denmark, As senior research fellow at The Danish
Institute of Governmental Research he conducted several evaluations of programs for people
with mental illness, substance abuse, homelessness, brain injury, and pervasive developmental
disorders. He has been Secretary of ISA Research Committee on Sociotechnics and
Sociological Practice since 2002 and Vice-President since 2006.

Jaime Jiménez has a doctoral degree in Social Systems Sciences from the University of
Pennsylvania, USA. He is a full-time researcher for the Institute of Applied Mathematics and
Systems (IIMAS), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Currently, he is
involved in research in the science and technology, education, and health systems. He is spe-
cialized in development processes, participative strategic planning, quality of working life,
total quality, and group dynamics associated to organizational change. He has conducted
research projects for UNESCO, OIT, and Mexican public and private agencies. He has pub-
lished several books and research papers in specialized journals.

Pat Jobes received his PhD in sociology at the University of Washington, USA. He has held
academic positions in the United States, Romania, Pakistan, and Australia. Most of his research
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xxii ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

has analyzed social problems, deviance, and crime in rural communities by drawing upon
cross-theoretical interpretations. His most recent research has analyzed crime and law enforce-
ment in Australia. He is a past President of RC29 of the International Sociological Association.

Devorah Kalekin-Fishman, senior researcher in the Faculty of Education at the University of

Haifa, Israel, holds a doctorate from the University of Konstanz in Germany (adviser, Thomas
Luckmann). Her work centers on critical studies of alienation, everyday life, multiculturalism,
sociological perspectives on the senses, and biography in sociology. She is currently Vice-
President for Publications of the ISA, past President of ISA RC 36 (Alienation), and founding
editor of International Sociology Review of Books. Recent publications include a book on edu-
cation in Israel, one on ultra-orthodox women (with Karlheinz Schneider), and three edited vol-
umes on multiple citizenships in Europe (with Pirkko Pitkanen).

Mustafa Koc teaches as an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and the
Immigration and Settlement Studies Program at Ryerson University, Canada. He served as the
director of the Centre for Studies in Food Security (1995-2005) at Ryerson and the founding
president of the Canadian Association for Food Studies (2005-2008). His teaching and research
interests include sociology of agriculture and food, social impacts of globalization and restruc-
turing, and population movements. His publications include For Hunger-proof Cities, Working
Together, and Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Food Studies.

Leslie Laczko is Professor and Chair in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the
University of Ottawa, Canada. He holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley
and McGill University, and is the author of Pluralism and Inequality in Quebec, as well as a
number of articles on language conflict, ethnic diversity, nationalism, the welfare state, and
religious change.

Robert Lambert is an Associate Professor at the University of Western Australia, where

he is Director of the Australian Global Studies Centre. He is currently the President
of the International Sociological Association’s Labour Movements Research Committee.
His books include State and Labour in New Order Indonesia (University of Western
Australia Press, 1997); Work Choices: The New Industrial Relations Agenda, with Julian
Teicher and Anne O’Rourke (Prentice Hall, 2006), and Grounding Globalization: Labour in
the Age of Insecurity, with Edward Webster and Andries Bezuidenhout (Blackwell, March
2008). He is the founder and coordinator of SIGTUR, a southern movement of democratic
trade unions.

Lauren Langman is a Professor of Sociology at Loyola University of Chicago. He received his

PhD from the University of Chicago with further training at the Chicago Institute for
Psychoanalysis. He works in the tradition of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, especially
relationships between culture, alienation, politics/political movements, nations, and national
character. He is currently President of Research Committee 36 (Alienation) of ISA. He served
on the editorial boards of Sociological Theory, Current Perspectives in Social Theory, and
Critical Sociology. Recent publications have looked at alienation, social movements, Islamic
fundamentalism, the body, nationalism, and national character.

Jan Marontate, Hon. BA (York U.), MSc and PhD (U. Montréal) taught sociology and held a
Canada Research Chair in Technology and Culture at Acadia University in Nova Scotia before
joining the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in 2006. Her current research
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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS xxiii

projects focus on arts networks, cultural heritage institutions, collective memory, changing
forms of creative work, technological innovation, and trans-disciplinary collaboration. She is
on the board of arts research groups in the Association internationale de sociologues de langue
française (GR18) and the International Sociological Association (RC37) and a member of the
International Advisory Board of Cultural Sociology.

Stéphane Moulin is currently an Assistant Professor in social statistics in the Department of

Sociology at the University of Montréal, Canada. He was an alumnus of the ENS Lettres-
Sciences Humaines (Lyon, France), holds a Phd in economics (Aix-Marseille II, France), and
was a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre Maurice Halbwachs (Paris, France). His research inter-
ests cover the transitions between education and work in France and Canada, the empirical
measure of gender discrimination, and the sociology of social statistics.

Fabien Ohl is the Professor at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) since 2006. Before
that he was the Professor at Marc Bloch University of Strasbourg (France). His main research
topics are on sport consumption and mediasport. He recently developed research on drugs and
doping in sport. Fabien Ohl has published books and papers on sociology of sport; he edited
Sociologie du sport: Perspectives internationales et mondialisation in 2006 (Presses
Universitaires de France). He is also a Vice-President of ISSA (International Sociology of Sport
Association) and ‘Associate Editor’ of the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, a
review published by ISSA and Sage.

Sandi Michele de Oliveira is an Associate Professor of Portuguese linguistics in the Department

of Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen and current Co-President of the Research
Committee on Language and Society (RC 25 of the International Sociological Association).
Research areas include the linguistic construction and negotiation of identity within the
Portuguese-speaking world, with ongoing projects on address, cross-cultural comparisons of
politeness, and linguistic acts of identity. Under preparation is a manuscript presenting address and
identity in their kaleidoscopic complexity, as well as an integrated model to aid in their analysis.

Alexius A. Pereira is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, National

University of Singapore. He received his PhD (sociology) from the London School of
Economics and Political Science. He is the author of State Collaboration and Development
Strategies in China (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). He is currently researching the social
impact of foreign direct investments and transnational corporations in Asia. Between 2006 and
2010, he is serving as the Vice-President of the International Sociological Association’s
Research Committee 02 (Economy and Society).

Linda Pietrantonio is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and

Anthropology, University of Ottawa, Canada. Her main areas of expertise are the sociology of
ethnic, race, and gender relations, in which she concentrates on the examination of the discur-
sive aspect of majority/minority social relations. Her research and publications focus on popu-
lar and scientific uses of notions of equality, diversity, and difference. She is currently
developing a meta-analysis of the notion of ‘majority’ and conducting comparative research
(France–Canada) documenting the central role(s) of HIV/AIDS community associations in the
collective appraisal of discrimination for various population groups.

Nikita Pokrovsky is the Head of the Department of General Sociology at the State University-
Higher School of Economics in Moscow and a full Professor of sociology at Moscow
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xxiv ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

State University. He is the President of the Society of Professional Sociologists (Russia).

Dr. Pokrovsky served as a member of the Program Committee of ISA (1998–2002) and the ISA
Executive Committee (2006–2010). Currently, he is conducting a longitudinal interdisciplinary
research on ‘Cellular Globalization and Focal Economy of Rural Communities in the North of
Russia’ (2003–). Among his other scholarly interests are history of sociology, theory of glob-
alization, sociology of consumption and tourism, visual sociology, and virtual reality.

Hans Pruijt’s teaching and research focus on information technology, the organization of work,
and social movements. Key publications are Job Design and Technology, Taylorism vs. anti-
Taylorism (London, 1997, Routledge), and ‘Is the institutionalization of urban movements
inevitable? A comparison of the opportunities for sustained squatting in New York City and
Amsterdam’ (in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2003, Vol. 27, 1). He
obtained a MSc in Sociology from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD from Erasmus
University of Rotterdam. Before working in academia, he was employed by the Royal Dutch
Academy of Sciences as a scientific programmer.

Bali Ram is a Senior Research Advisor, Demography Division, Statistics Canada and Adjunct
Research Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa,
Canada. He obtained his MA in Sociology from the University of Western Ontario in 1971 and
PhD in Sociology from the Ohio State University in 1975. He is current President of ISA
Research Committee on Sociology of Population (RC41). He was President of the Federation
of Canadian Demographers during 1999–2002. Most of his research has been in the various
sub-fields of demography. His publications include a monograph, New Trends in the Family
published by Statistics Canada, Ottawa (1990).

Shefali S. Ram is a Research Associate (Epidemiology), Canadian Blood Services, Ottawa,

Canada. Formerly, she was a Research Associate with the Cancer Research Institute, Queen’s
University, Kingston, Canada. She obtained her MSc in Community Health and Epidemiology
from Queen’s University in 2005. She has published articles primarily in the area of transfu-
sion medicine.

Elisa P. Reis is the Professor of Sociology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,
and Chair of the Research Network for the Study of Inequality (NIED). She is also a fellow of
the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World
(TWAS). Her work concentrates mostly on sociological theory and on political sociology. She
is currently doing research on the changing patterns of interaction between state, market, and
civil society. Her recent publications also focus on elite perceptions of poverty and inequality.

Elianne Riska is the Professor of Sociology at the Swedish School of Social Science,
University of Helsinki, Finland. She was Chair of the Research Committee on Sociology of
Health (RC 15), ISA, during 2002–2006. She has written on women physicians and gender and
health. Her most recent book is Masculinity and Men’s Health: Coronary Heart Disease in
Medical and Public Discourse (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

Juan Sáez is a full Professor of Social Education at the University of Murcia, Spain. One of
the leaders in the process of shaping social education as an independent academic and profes-
sional field in Spain, his research and publications cover a wide range of topics including health
education, adult education, older adult education, and theory of professions. During the last couple
of decades he has concentrated on much of his efforts in revisiting theories of professions and
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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS xxv

professionalization within social sciences in order to set a theoretical and practical framework
to support Spanish social educators in their process of professionalization.

Mariano Sánchez is the Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the

University of Granada, Spain. As one of the scholars responsible for the development of
Gerontagogy, i.e., older adult education, in Spain, he is interested in researching and writing
about professional developments in this field. This interest took him, with his colleagues J.
Sáez and L. Svensson, to co-edit recently the book Sociología de las profesiones. Pasado, pre-
sente y futuro, which includes a critical assessment and an updated state-of-the-art of Sociology
of Professions in Spain. He has published articles on the professionalization of social profess-
sions, specifically social education.

Ulrike Schuerkens has doctorates in sociology, social anthropology, and ethnology, from the
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and the diploma ‘Habilitation à diriger
des recherches’ from the University Paris V – René Descartes. She is a Senior Lecturer at the
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France. She has published extensively
on development, social change, migration, multiculturalism, and colonialism. Her latest
monographs are Globalization and Transformations of Local Socio-economic Practices
(ed., Routledge, 2008); Transnational Migrations and Social Transformations (ed., Current
Sociology, 53, 4, 2005); Global Forces and Local Life-Worlds: Social Transformations
(ed., Sage, 2004).

Markus S. Schulz serves as the President of the ISA Research Committee on Futures Research
(ISA-RC07). He is a Professor with the University of Illinois and researcher at New York
University. He earned his PhD from the New School for Social Research. He co-authored a
book series of six volumes on Internet and Politics in Latin America (Vervuert, Germany).
Among his published articles is ‘Collective Action across Borders’ (Sociological Perspective).
He has won national and international awards for his research, including ISA’s Prize for the
Internationalization of Sociology. His current work focuses on new media, social movements,
and global futures.

David R. Segal received his PhD from the University of Chicago and spent the first nine years
of his career at the University of Michigan. He is currently a distinguished Scholar-Teacher,
Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the
University of Maryland, and is a member of the executive committee and past President of
Research Committee 01, Armed Forces & Society, of the International Sociological Association.
His research focuses on military organization and personnel issues, and unconventional military
operations.

Marco Silvestro has a Master’s in sociology from the Université de Montréal, Canada.
His thesis examined the institutionalization of the community movement for economic
development in Montréal. His subsequent research has dealt with links between community
and trade union movements in Québec, with self-management and ethical consumption.
His doctorate deals with protests about the agro-food system in Québec by a farmer’s
organization. He recently co-edited La consommation responsable. Entre bonne conscience
individuelle et transformations collectives (Éditions Écosociété, 2007). He teaches courses on
anarchist thought and on the sociology of social movements at the Université du Québec
à Montréal.
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xxvi ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Ari Sitas is a writer and a sociologist. He is a past President of the South African Sociological
Association and on the executive of the African Sociological Association. He is based in
Durban at the University of KwaZulu Natal where he holds the Chair of Industrial,
Organizational, and Labour Studies.

Henry Teune is the Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He
is a principal investigator of two on-going research programs, Universities as Sites of
Citizenship, and Democracy and Local Governance. The latter has conducted surveys on dem-
ocratic values and practices of thousands of local political leaders in 30 countries, in many of
them for two and more points in time. He was President of the International Studies Association
and has been active in both the International Political Science and Sociological Associations
since the 1970s. His theoretical interests and writings continue to address relationships among
development, democracy, and globalization.

Joseph-Yvon Thériault is the Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at

the Université d’Ottawa, Canada where he holds the Research Chair on ‘Identité et
Francophone’. A political sociologist, his work has focussed on relations between collective
identity and democracy (citizenship) within the perspectives of the history of ideas and the
comparative analysis of small societies. His work on Canadian society has concentrated on
Québec, Acadia, and minority francophones in Canada. He was elected to the Academy of
Social Sciences of the Royal Society of Canada in 2004 and holds the Trudeau Foundation
Prize (2007–2010).

Georgios Odysseus Tsobanoglou is the President of ISA-RC26, and Professor of

Sociology of Work, Sociology Department, Aegean University, Greece. He obtained
his PhD from Carleton’s Sociology Department. Member of CIRIEC, Liege, LEED, OECD,
and IIAS, Brussels, Belgium, his publications include ‘The Ombudsman System in Greece’
in R. Gregory and P. Giddings (eds.) Righting Wrongs, ‘Aspects of the Public Justice
System in Greece’, in M. Fabri and P. M. Langbroek (eds.) Changing Positions of Courts
in Society, The Challenge of Change for Judicial Systems, ‘The Struggle for Integration
in the Greek Juridical System’ in M. Fabri and F. Contini (eds.) Justice and Technology in
Europe.

Robert van Krieken is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Sydney,

Australia. Author of Children and the State (1992), Norbert Elias (1998), lead author of the
Australian sociology textbook, Sociology: Themes and Perspectives (2004) and numerous jour-
nal articles on the history and sociology of Australian childhoods. He is currently working on
a book titled Civilizing Divorce, which develops a sociological account of the changes to the
legal regulation of parent–child relations after separation and divorce. He is also past President
of RC53, Sociology of Childhood, Vice-President of RC17, Sociology of Organizations, and a
member of the ISA Executive.

Edward Webster is Emeritus Professor and a former director of the Sociology of Work
Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He was a senior
Fulbright Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1995. He is past President
of the Research Committee on Labour Movements for the International Sociological
Association. He is co-editor, with Glenn Adler, of Trade Unions and Democratisation in South
Africa, 1985–1997 (NY: St Martin’s Press, 2000) and, with Karl von Holdt, of Beyond the
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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS xxvii

Apartheid Workplace: Studies in Transition (University of KwaZulu Natal Press:

Pietermaritzburg). He is author, with Rob Lambert and Andries Bezuidenhout, of Grounding
Globalisation: Labour in the Age of Insecurity (Blackwell, 2008).

Yuko K. Whitestone is a Research Associate at the Center for Research on Military

Organization at the University of Maryland, USA. Her dissertation was on the impact of peace-
keeping participation on professional identity of Japanese service members.

Nira Yuval-Davis BA, etc. is a past President of the International Sociological Association
Research Committee on Nationalism, Racism, and Ethnic Relations and appointment member of
the UK 2008 RAE Sociology panel. She has written extensively on issues of racism, nationalism,
multiculturalism, fundamentalisms, citizenship, identity, and gender relations in Britain, Europe,
Israel, and other settler societies. Among her books are: Racialized Boundaries (Routledge,
1992); Unsettling Settler Societies (Sage, 1995); Gender and Nation (Sage 1997 [translated
into seven languages]); Women, Citizenship and Difference (Zed Books, 1999); Warning Signs
of Fundamentalisms (WLUML, 2004); and The Situated Politics of Belonging (Sage, 2006).
9781412934633-FM 1/12/09 4:18 PM Page xxviii
9781412934633-Chap-01 1/10/09 8:39 AM Page 1

Introduction
9781412934633-Chap-01 1/10/09 8:39 AM Page 2
9781412934633-Chap-01 1/10/09 8:39 AM Page 3
Ann Denis and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman 1
This book is an outcome of the mid-term
Research Council Conference of the
International Sociological Association (ISA),
which Ann Denis, as Vice-President for
Research of the ISA (2002–2006) organized
at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
in May 2004. Some of the local members
of the Scientific (Program) Committee (Ann
Denis, Victor Armony, Karen March, Joseph-Yvon
Thériault) developed the conference theme,
in consultation with its international members
(Ari Sitas, ISA Vice-President for Program,
2002–2006 and Piotr Sztompka, ISA
President, 2002–2006). Our challenge was to
provide an opportunity for representatives of
the Research Committees, Working Groups,
and Thematic Groups of the ISA (who col-
lectively make up its Research Council), to
discuss contributions/approaches of their
respective specialized branches of sociology
in a collective reflection around a common
theme. Our chosen theme was Conflict,
Competition, Cooperation: Contemporary
Sociological Theory and Research in the
XXIst Century.
In our call for papers, addressed both to
representatives from the ISA Research
Council (as well as the ISA Officers and
members of the ISA Executive Committee’s
Research Coordinating (sub)-Committee)
and to members of the Canadian Sociology and
1
Introduction
Anthropology Association and l’ Association
canadienne de sociologues et anthropologues
de langue française, the national associations
which were co-sponsoring the conference,
we invited participants to discuss how spe-
cialized fields of sociology contribute
to the description, interpretation and expla-
nation of conflict, competition and coopera-
tion as contemporary processes of social and
societal relations. The conference and this
Handbook provide an unparalleled opportu-
nity to share, identify commonalities among,
and establish links between different fields
of research. At the same time it has allowed
us to document and extend our analyses –
both theoretical and empirical – of these
social processes in societies throughout the
world.
In our elaboration on the theme, both in
the call for conference papers and in the sub-
sequent invitation to submit revised papers
for publication, we provided the following
guidelines to participants.
Conflict, competition, cooperation: these classical
notions within sociology remain very pertinent for
the analysis of the aspirations and realities within
and among contemporary societies in our globaliz-
ing world. Equally, these are notions which can
have distinctive meanings, depending on the
field of sociology, the theoretical approach,
and/or the cultural context, both within and
across societies.
9781412934633-Chap-01 1/10/09 8:39 AM Page 4
4 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
We went on to point out that theoretically
these notions may be conceived of as being on
a continuum, as being unconnected, mutually
exclusive poles of social relations, or as being
intertwined (and perhaps complementary).
From some theoretical perspectives, we noted,
only one – conflict, for instance – is consid-
ered key to the analysis of social (and societal)
relations; from others, two – competition and
cooperation, for instance – are concurrently
important.
We suggested that the importance and
the meaning of these concepts can also vary
within a particular field of sociology due to
diverse theoretical, methodological, and epis-
temological perspectives. These variations
may be – but are not necessarily – related
to the specifics of national sociologies, to
addressing international comparisons, or to
questions of particular salience within a
given socio-historical context.
In addressing conflict/competition/cooper-
ation, one may also ask: from whose per-
spective and at what level of analysis?
Analysis may be from the perspective of, for
example, the majority, one or more minori-
ties, and/or (relative) equals. It may be at the
macro, the meso or the micro level – about
societies, states, nations, or groups (local,
national or transnational), which are based on
such criteria as ethnicity, gender, social class,
occupation, kinship etc. The possible impact
of individuals’ multiple (and potentially con-
flicting) social locations and identities may be
a preoccupation.
How and to what extent can actors choose
or are they constrained to participate in
social relations characterized by cooperation,
competition, conflict? Again this question
can be addressed at one or more of the micro,
meso, or macro levels.
In brief, in their papers participants were
invited to present a synthesis of how and to
what extent the themes of conflict, com-
petition, and cooperation are examined
within contemporary analyses in the field
of specialization of the Research Committee,
Working Group or Thematic Group they rep-
resented.2 In relation to one or more of the
main topics of analysis in this field of
specialization, and bearing in mind the ques-
tions suggested above, they were invited to
consider what types of questions are
addressed, what types of explanations are
proposed, and, perhaps, what some of the
main empirical findings are. Where social
policy (national or international) is of rele-
vance, the authors were encouraged to con-
sider its implicit theoretical agenda, and the
constraints that it imposes on the options of
conflict, competition, cooperation in social
and societal relations, and/or the constraints
which other socio-political factors impose on
it. Authors were encouraged to highlight
alternative approaches, tensions, and
contradictions within the field, drawing on
material from several societies, and,
ideally, from more than one region of the
world. In short, within the analytical frame-
work of the classical notions of conflict,
competition, and cooperation, an invitation
was launched which aimed to be very inclu-
sive, providing ‘space’ for contributions from
the wide range of specialities and approaches
represented within the International
Sociological Association.
Ann Denis and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman,
then a member of the Research Coordinating
Committee (2002–2006) and now Vice-
President for Publications (2006–2010), have
worked together on this Handbook. Authors
of each of the 52 presentations at the confer-
ence were invited to revise and submit their
papers for consideration for publication.
While some had already committed their
paper to another publication outlet, and for
others the time-lines or the focus of the book
were not appropriate, a total of 28 chapters
have been accepted, double the number ini-
tially anticipated for publication. Given the
rich selection available, the publication, orig-
inally to have been a special journal issue
and/or a regular length monograph volume,
was transformed, at Sage’s recommendation,
into a Handbook.
Using the prisms of conflict, competition,
and cooperation for focusing on what it
means to be doing sociology, researchers
9781412934633-Chap-01 1/10/09 8:39 AM Page 5
INTRODUCTION
from the global South as well as from the
global North were able to provide integrative
descriptions of theoretical orientations,
salient subfields of sociology, and sociologi-
cal interpretations of general and specific
social problems. Thus the collection intro-
duces readers to ways in which the focal con-
cepts are used in diverse fields of sociology
and how they are applied to research by
scholars from different national traditions
working within the same discipline. The
material covered is of interest to researchers
and practitioners in anthropology, psychol-
ogy, economics, political science as well as
in sociology. Both experts in the subfields
and those with a more general interest in
them will find the chapters informative and
engaging. Because the chapters all deal with
issues that are relevant to contemporary reality,
the Handbook is appropriate for university
use, especially for graduate seminar courses
but also for advanced undergraduate courses
that focus on research, analysis, and application.
Following this Introduction, the chapters
have been divided into four main sections:
(1) ‘Analyses of Approaches to Research’;
(2) ‘Trends in Conceptualizing Conflict,
Competition, and Cooperation in Subfields of
Sociology’; (3) ‘Research on Social Issues –
Interweaving Processes’; (4) ‘Illustrative Case
Studies’. The concluding chapter highlights
the commonalities, divergences, insights, and
challenges which have been presented.
The six papers in Part 1 (‘Analyses of
Approaches to Research’) provide a discipli-
nary overview of how conflict, competition,
and cooperation figure in broad orientations
to sociology. Their dialectical inter-relation-
ship is evident on the macro, meso, and
micro levels when examined through the lens
of theories of alienation (Langman and
Kalekin-Fishman, ‘Alienation: Critique and
Alternative Futures’), and when considering
the concept of belonging (Yuval-Davis,
‘Identity, Citizenship and Contemporary,
Secure, Gendered Politics of Belonging’).
They show that the processes can be traced in
research that focuses on the level of wide-
ranging governmental practices (Hogsbro,
5
Pruijt, Pokrovsky, and Tsobanoglou,
‘Sociological Practice and the Socio-
Technics of Governance’), and in the devel-
opment of appropriate methodologies in a
specific field (Banakar, ‘Law through
Sociology’s Looking Glass’). Further permu-
tations of the three processes can be seen to
characterize developments in the analysis of
community organizations (Reis, ‘New Ways
of Relating Authority and Solidarity’) as well
as in ‘New Collaborative Forms of Doing
Research’ (Jimenez).
With the complexification of the social
world, sociology has responded by making
room for subfields each of which focuses on
a different domain. Thus, in Part 2 of the
Handbook (‘Trends in Conceptualizing
Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation in
Subfields of Sociology’), the seven chapters
sketch how conflict, competition, and
cooperation are theorized and underlie
research in the sociology of development and
social transformations (Schuerkens), health
sociology (Riska, Annandale, and Dingwall),
sociology of the professions (Evetts, Gadea,
Sanchez, and Saez), sociology of sport (Ohl),
sociology of the arts (Marontate), sociology
of childhood (Van Krieken and Bühler-
Niederberger) and the study of social mobility
(Moulin and Bernard). Although the articles
make no pretense to being exhaustive, the
subfields described in this section provide
insights into the range of interests that soci-
ologists deal with as well as into the diverse
ways in which an orientation to processes can
be adapted to different aspects of social life.
Part 3 of the Handbook (‘Research on
Social Issues – Interweaving Processes’)
is devoted to discussions of some of the
problems – and betimes to the types of solu-
tions – that can be better understood with the
help of theories of conflict and/or competi-
tion and/or cooperation. In the seven articles,
researchers present sociological approaches
to problems that arise in health, illness
and mortality in Less Developed Countries
(Ram and Ram) and in Military Peacekeeping
Operations (Segal, Dandeker, and Whitestone).
They also look at how reductions of social
9781412934633-Chap-01 1/10/09 8:39 AM Page 6
6 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
benefits are raising new problems worldwide,
among them, Health Care (Browne).
Additional problems are pin-pointed in the
domain of economic life: Markets and Labour
(Webster and Lambert) and Political
Consumerism (Silvestro). The two remaining
chapters relate to the problems that computer
development has created – Digital Futures
(Schulz), and to the prevalence of Crime
in Rural Communities (Donnermeyer, Jobes,
and Barclay). This last article constitutes
a reminder that crime is not exclusively a
function of modern urbanism.
By contrast with the first three sections
which provide wide-ranging views of orien-
tations, subfields, and problems, the eight
chapters of Part 4 present ‘Illustrative
Case Studies’ which exemplify the workings
of conflict, competition, and cooperation in
particular contexts. Koc brings findings from
research on the distribution of food through-
out the world. Gohn describes how different
theoretical orientations interpret social
movements in Brazil as moved by conflict or
by competition or by cooperation. Armony
analyzes the meanings of social justice and
social mobilization in El Salvador and
in Honduras by examining the discourse of
activists in responses to open questions. Sitas
looks at industrial relations in South Africa,
while Pereira explains how Singapore’s
continuously evolving investment strategy
illustrates the impact of choices by the State
on national economic outcomes. Teune looks
at attitudes toward democracy among heads
of local councils in Sweden, Russia, and
Poland, and presents insights into how the
local may be aligned with global institutions
to reduce conflicts. De Oliveira discusses
how modes of address reflect and guide the
tangling and untangling of negotiation.
Finally, five researchers, Couton, Denis,
Laczko, Pietrantonio, and Theriault, examine
different aspects of ethno-linguistic diversity
in Canada and more specifically in Québec,
with a special emphasis on how the issues are
often dealt with in contradictory ways
between the two jurisdictional levels.
In the final chapter of the Handbook, we
sum up implications for the development of
sociology in the twenty-first century of
the various meanings of conflict, competition,
and cooperation that are elaborated in
the kaleidoscope of approaches presented here.
NOTES
1 Authors’ names are listed alphabetically, since
both contributed equally.
2 In the case of those not representing a Research
Committee, Working Group or Thematic Group, par-
ticipants were asked to examine the issues in the field
of research in which they had an interest.
9781412934633-Chap-02 1/10/09 8:40 AM Page 7

PART ONE

Analyses of Approaches
to Research
9781412934633-Chap-02 1/10/09 8:40 AM Page 8
9781412934633-Chap-02 1/10/09 8:40 AM Page 9
Alienation: Critique and
Alternative Futures
Lauren Langman and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman
The burden of this chapter is to show how,
despite a multiplicity of interpretations and a
great number of conceptual critiques, alien-
ation theory remains a valuable analytical
tool in the social sciences. By looking at
social reality in the twenty-first century with
the theoretical apparatus derived from analy-
ses of alienation, we commit ourselves at the
outset to grasping the world as a site of con-
flict, oppression, and exploitation which con-
textualizes social life and is likely to foster
alienation. More recently, however, many
researchers are concluding that a dialectical
analysis of social processes and social struc-
tures reveals that alienation can also give rise
to moments of competition and even of
cooperation. Alienation has been, is and will
remain a central concept for sociologists
insofar as it reveals how life within the frag-
mented communities of meaning of modern,
technologically advanced, hierarchical soci-
eties inform the nature of deviant and crimi-
nal behavior, community, and personal life.
Alienation can be seen as a way the social
thwarts the freedom and fulfillment of the
personal. In this chapter we discuss how
insight into the diverse workings of alienation
2
shows its enduring value for sociological
inquiry.
INTRODUCTION
Derived from the Latin word for ‘other,’ the
concept of alienation has been applied to
various domains of living in order to describe
different types of conditions and situations.
In Roman law the concept has been deployed
to refer to the transfer of property and giving
up all claims upon sale. In the Middle Ages,
it was used by the early psychiatrists, the
alienists, to mean the loss of normal mental
competence. More recent meanings have
included the surrender of personal privilege
for the good of the collective, or the Hegelian
notion of estrangement of the world from
transcendental spirit (cf. Israel, 1971;
Meszaròs, 1970; Smith, 2005). In the
nineteenth century the term alienation was
adapted to explaining the unsettling struc-
tural dysfunctions that were making radical
changes in the world people knew. Social
theorists were confronted with the upheavals
9781412934633-Chap-02 1/10/09 8:40 AM Page 10
10 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
of social life that followed upon the develop-
ment of capitalism. The on-going concentra-
tion of industry, the fragmentation of the
labor process, and attendant intensive urban-
ization that atomized social relationships
required new tools for investigating society.
In attempting to explain the adversities of a
rapidly expanding modernity, the fathers of
sociology pinpointed different foci as the
dynamic mechanisms of change.
Emphasizing the centrality of rationality,
the primary value of modernity, Weber
(1958/1946) saw that Enlightenment based
rationality of capitalism had expanded to
almost every realm of social and personal
life. Capitalism, as a rationally organized
economic system, depended on a rationalized
administrative apparatus that entrapped
people into ‘iron cages.’ The bureaucratic
implementations of rules and regulations
which were efficient in the workplace were
debilitating in social life, and caused an
imprisonment of the body and the mind.
Following upon the positivist legacy of
Comte, Durkheim (1951/1897) attempted to
understand the shifting normative sands of
modernity as driven by a disruption of stan-
dards for behavior. As traditional precepts
waned, new rules emerged that were not
however widely shared in a society with an
advanced division of labor. In the varied
experiences of daily life, people were faced
with ‘anomie,’ uncertainty about what norms
were applicable to novel situations, and
about how norms were to govern action.
In contrast with the attempts to situate the
effects of capitalism as limitations on action
or on thinking about rules, Marx (1978/1844)
argued that alienation was an inherent conse-
quence of a capitalist society in which one
class owned private property and another
class, the workers, sold their labor power as a
commodity. Capitalism, as the latest expres-
sion of an economic system based on classes
with competing interests, most clearly
revealed how the wealth of the ruling class,
the bourgeoisie, was based on the exploita-
tion of the workers, the proletariat. But wage
labor, necessarily fostered alienation that
thwarted workers’ humanity in every domain
of their existence. In his analysis, alienation
followed the estrangement of the worker
from his/her tools on the one hand, and from
the products of his/her labor, on the other.
The capitalist mode of production resold the
labor the worker expended in the production
of commodities, but that ‘surplus value’ went
to the owners of capital, not the workers who
produced it. The sale of labor as a commod-
ity that produced commodities, created a
system that stood outside the worker and
refluxed back upon her. Workers were ren-
dered powerless, their communities lost
coherence, and their selfhood was truncated.
Work no longer provided workers with
sources of meaning and/or self expression.
Moreover, people who had to earn their
livelihood according to arrangements
imposed by the capitalist system could not
escape its pervasive effects. Notwithstanding
the radical transformations of the current
world by a globalized capitalist political
economy, the Marxist critique remains a
viable framework for revealing the nature of
late capitalism and unpacking its manifold
consequences.
Current theorization of alienation builds
upon the shift in Marxian theory that recap-
tured the concerns with culture that began
with the neo-Marxian analyses of Korsch
(1923), Lukacs (1971/1920), and the Frankfurt
School (see Jay, 1996; Kellner, 1989) in the
first half of the twentieth century. Against the
economistic reductionism of the Second
International, these theorists defended the
role of culture and subjectivity first articulated
by Marx in his Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts (1978/1844), The German
Ideology (1978/1846), and The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1978/1852). In
the twentieth century, the concept of alien-
ation was central to the Frankfurt School’s
understanding of the rise of fascism, and
somewhat later, to their analyses of the
nature of consumerism. They synthesized
Weber’s discussions of Protestantism and
rationality with Freud’s notions of individual
character and his understandings of group
9781412934633-Chap-02 1/10/09 8:40 AM Page 11
ALIENATION: CRITIQUE AND ALTERNATIVE FUTURES
psychology when they noted how alienation
prompted ‘an escape from freedom’ espe-
cially among ‘authoritarian character types’
with attenuated social ties and difficulties in
fathoming the deeper significance of their
actions (Adorno et al., 1950; Fromm, 1965).
Following World War II, they explored
insights into the effects of the ‘culture
industries,’ the frameworks in which both high
and popular art were, to their minds, mass
produced for the sake of both profits and
ideologies of deception that sustained ‘one
dimensional’ consumer society. While con-
cerns with alienation were rooted in the
nature of wage labor in a class society, in
more recent conceptualizations, thinking
about alienation led to a migration of its
locus from production to the nature of
modern consumption and contemporary
forms of self-expression. For example,
Adorno (2000) explored the pervasiveness of
alienation in the arts and in personality, and
concluded that the alienation that was grow-
ing out of conflict was an indicator of the
inevitable deterioration of humanity.
Ironically, Gramsci (1991), who spent ten
years in fascist prisons until his death in 1937
at the age of 46, found ways to describe the
dialectical possibility of overcoming alien-
ation. In his view, capitalism was deeply
entrenched in the twentieth century not only
because the historic bloc (ruling classes) con-
trolled the institutions of force and violence,
i.e., the police, the courts, and the army, but
also because it ruled indirectly by means of a
hegemonic ideology that engineered ‘willing
consent.’ By hegemony, Gramsci meant that:
the entire system of values, attitudes, beliefs, and
morality which permeated society had the effect of
supporting the status quo in power relations. …
To the extent that this prevailing consciousness is
internalized by the population, it becomes part of
what is generally called ‘common sense’ so that
the philosophy, culture, and morality of the ruling
elite comes to appear as the natural order of things
(Boggs, 1976: 39).
Nevertheless, Gramsci did not believe that
the hegemonic culture imposed by the tradi-
tional intellectuals allied to the historic bloc –
the coalition of economic, political, and
11
cultural elites – was all powerful. Hegemony
was an on-going process located within a
larger social reality ever subject to change,
and therefore the nature of hegemony con-
stantly needed to be revised. His analysis
revealed that openings for contestation and
challenge were especially likely at moments
of crisis. While one such opening was seen in
attempts to organize and unite the Southern
Italian peasants and Northern workers, the
Church subverted these efforts by demoniz-
ing communists and warning that those
who joined unions would perish in hell.
Moreover, as the appeal of religion waned,
consumerism emerged as the dominant hege-
monic justification. Nevertheless, Gramsci
remained convinced that workers would be
able to escape the impasse of alienation. As
he put it, society at best sustains only a few
‘formal’ intellectuals, but the fact is that all
people are intellectuals. Dialectically, he
could show that the ‘organic intellectuals’
among workers would eventually be able to
forge counter-hegemonic understandings and
articulate a culture that would both reflect
their true position and be able to envision
alternatives.
In sum, successive re-conceptualizations
of alienation have provided seminal perspec-
tives on the failure to realize the emancipa-
tory promise of the Enlightenment. As we
will show, however, in the spirit of Gramsci,
alienation has become a tool of analysis that
offers not only a political critique but also
images of alternative futures that could envi-
sion the overcoming of alienation. Thus
while alienation was first theorized in terms
of powerlessness, social fragmentation, and
the warping of selfhood in industry. Marx
would later extend his analysis to the political
alienation of the French peasants. Further, his
analysis of Hegel and the German ideology as
alienated consciousness moved the analysis
to the cultural/ideological levels. Finally, his
notion of commodity fetishism, as a reifica-
tion, when a class relationship appeared as a
thing, completed the move of alienation to
the cultural realms – though it would need to
await Lukacs for a comprehensive analysis of
9781412934633-Chap-02 1/10/09 8:40 AM Page 12
12 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
the reification of consciousness. We would
note that not only has alienation expanded
from the factory floor to culture, but so too
do we now look at alienation more dialecti-
cally. Today we also look at how even within
contexts that might be considered alienating,
there are ways people attempt to find agency,
community, and forms of subjectivity that
overcome their alienation. Thus the very
existence of wage labor presupposes its nega-
tion, creative labor, political alienation pre-
supposes freedom and democracy, and
cultural alienation promises transcendence
and freedom, what Hegel claimed the ‘joyous’
consciousness.
Finally, we would note that the concept of
alienation has important implications for
many other basic sociological concepts such
as social conflict, criminal, and deviant
behavior, and even religious behavior, such
as the various ways many people turn to fun-
damentalism as a way to overcome alienation
qua powerlessness, meaninglessness and/or
social fragmentation.
In the community of sociologist-
researchers, interest in the concept of alien-
ation has flourished, waned, and flourished
again. There was widespread interest in
alienation in the 1950s and 1960s, with
studies focusing on the workplace and its
impact on selected aspects of social life.
At that time, researchers operationalized
alienation as a delimited quantitative index
of attitudes (see Ludz, 1973; Seeman, 1991).
Concerns with alienation declined as politi-
cal activism among minorities, women,
and anti-war crusaders in the late 1960s over-
came alienation and fostered progressive
political changes in the Americas and in
Europe. Meanwhile, inspired by semiotics
and critiques of language and signification,
post-modern and post-structural critiques of
de-centered selfhood, and the implosion of
institutional boundaries signaled a shift from
actually existing conditions to texts, represen-
tations, and simulations. Thus, many scholars
embraced perspectives in which alienation
was regarded as an essentialist concept
located in now outmoded grand narratives.
Social critique centered on the anxious inter-
ests of consumer society. Post-modern and
post-structural theories, concerned with rep-
resentation and meanings decoupled from the
political economy, viewed selfhood as a dis-
connected series of self presentations, while
social life and interaction were described as
little more than a pastiche of free-floating
signifiers (Gergen, 1991; Ritzer, 1997; Rosenau,
1992; Turner, 1990). This vision of social
relations as random and fragmented left no
room for conceiving of alienation.
ALIENATION IN SOCIOLOGICAL
RESEARCH
In the dominant sociological literature of the
twenty-first century, however, alienation,
interpreted as estrangement, dehumanization,
stunting of relationships, and the hegemonic
domination of consciousness, remains salient.
The globalized production of McJobs
(Ritzer, 2004) and the ever more relentless
colonization of selfhood and desire
(Hochschild, 1986) underscore the insight
that alienation in the classical Marxist sense
has not disappeared. The soaring accumula-
tion of wealth by trans-national capitalist
elites, whose intellectuals celebrate neo-
liberalism, has been accompanied by the
expansion of labor saving technologies of
production as well as outsourcing work to
developing countries, and has had adverse
consequences for millions of people.
Increasingly workers have to contend with
the erosion of job security, the contraction of
entitlement programs, and growing instability
in the quality of life as standards of living
decline.
Some of the responses to the adverse,
destabilizing, and alienating effects of glob-
alization range from fundamentalism and
reactionary politics on the one hand, to
extravagant machinations in popular culture.
Exemplars of these contemporary forms of
alienation can be found among racist, anti-
Semitic, and homophobic clusters of groups
9781412934633-Chap-02 1/10/09 8:40 AM Page 13
ALIENATION: CRITIQUE AND ALTERNATIVE FUTURES
and individuals (see Berlet and Lyons,
2000).1 In popular culture, we note the rise of
MTV, Music Television, a channel devoted to
the youth market consisting primarily of
music videos, songs with a variety of visuals
from street scenes to dancers, and there may
well be a chorus dancing in the streets. The
basic content of MTV consists of unending
spectacles of song, dance, and consumerism
in which an artificial reality, or ‘hyper-reality’
is idealized. The bodies of the singers and
dancers represent an intersection of individ-
ual genetics and extensive training such that
very few viewers will ever sing, dance or
look like the performers, yet the viewers,
especially young women, will be encouraged
to spend vast sums of money on clothes,
adornments, cosmetics, and medications in
illusory quests to achieve the looks, lifestyles,
and perhaps the unbridled eroticism of their
favorite idols. Spectacles of ever-gyrating
bodies, qua commodified representations, are
perpetually celebrating hedonistic sexuality,
appearance, and the happiness supposedly
attainable by all. The collage of the songs,
dances, and celebrity images re-inscribe and
valorize essentialist notions of gender which,
as role models of ‘ideal’ masculinity and
femininity, are both alienating and dysfunc-
tional in the current world. Yet these images
have multiple uses; they sell clothes, cars,
jewelry, foods, medications, and beverages.
The music evokes emotions of power and
desires to live in an ideal, if imaginary world,
where the good life is promised to all, but
which, as is soon evident to youth who join
the labor force, very few can attain. Other
realms of popular culture, such as Goth,
punk, heavy metal, or ‘ghetto rap’ which cri-
tique the conformity and one-dimensional
nature of an alienated and alienating society,
create spaces for alternative, counter-cultural
life styles. Their articulation of alienation
and anger, however, as commodities pro-
duced by the culture industries, ultimately
neutralizes the promise of political impact
(see below).
In sum, we suggest three moments of con-
temporary capitalism that show why alienation
13
remains a significant aspect of late modern
social life.
1 Wages for labor in routinized services include
payment for demonstrations of emotion: While
manufacturing has declined in the developed
world, jobs today are often automated, comput-
erized, deskilled, and routinized. In interpersonal
services, workers are exploited in new ways; they
are required to do ‘emotion work,’ commodifying
their feelings to ensure corporate profits
(Hochschild, 1986). People employed in these
types of jobs have to balance their admitted
submission and their being palpably ‘other’ than
the front demanded of them (Braverman, 1998;
Goffman, 1958; Leidner, 1993; Ritzer, 2004).
2 Changes in technology: Advanced technologies
of information and production have enabled
global capital to produce a vast array of goods
from cell phones to pharmaceuticals to highly
sophisticated means of destruction. At the same
time, technologies of surveillance and control
foster new modes of domination, dehumaniza-
tion, and, indeed, of alienation (Foucault, 1995;
Gergen, 1991). In doctoral research on the func-
tions of Internet purchasing and inventory con-
trol, Zalewsky and Rezba (2000), found that not
only was on-line ordering and computer-tracked
inventory control devoid of human contact and
brutalizing, but the electronic Panopticon
enabled greater surveillance and control by man-
agement. It is important to remember, however,
that technologies can also enable new kinds of
freedom and fulfillment.
3 Culture and identity: While Mead (1934) saw the
self as an outcome of negotiation that begins in
early childhood, Erikson’s (1950) elaboration of
Freudian theory which pinpointed the crystalliza-
tion of one’s identity as a developmental
achievement of the late teens, was already out-
dated in his lifetime, something he appreciated.
Instead of finding themselves capable of defining
talents, obligations, aspirations, many young
people were seen to take out a ‘moratorium,’ so
to speak, putting off the definition of self until
the beginning of their fourth decade (Erikson,
1980; Keniston, 1965). Half a century later,
the very image of an integrated Eriksonian self-
hood is unsustainable, just as the Meadian image
of ‘I’s and ‘me’s calmly acting in tandem and
interacting with role partners has given way to a
vision of interaction as a hectic battleground
where highly calculated self presentations
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14 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
compete with each other. Prodded by a kaleido-
scope of possibilities, on the one hand, and sti-
fled by instant commodified representations, on
the other, the individual’s search for selfhood is
likely to come up against an unruly collection of
fragments that cannot, in essence, be configured
into a coherent, stable respectable self.
Deliberate escapes from the confusion lead many
of the alienated to take refuge in collective cer-
tainties such as religious fundamentalisms and
extreme nationalisms. These ideologies foster
rigid identities as adaptations to the rapidly
changing world of today. Yet such fundamentally
alienated identities (racist and xenophobic with
patriarchal and/or homophobic attitudes and
mobilizations) are ill-equipped to deal with late
modernity (Berlet and Lyons, 2000). On the other
hand, various youth cultures formulate pastiches
of identity that are marketed as ‘cool’ (Rushkoff,
2001), or shape subcultures that create a carniva-
lesque identity as bricolage (Langman, 2000,
2005a). Such subcultures may grant encapsu-
lated realms for alternative identities, meanings,
and communities, by enabling ‘escape’ from
the social and withdrawal from the political. But
in the end the presumed alternatives serve to
reproduce the alienating conditions that fostered
them.
Given the dilemmas evident in contempo-
rary life, it is understandable why there is
renewed interest in Marx’s dialectical
approach, including its dialectical methodol-
ogy for uncovering how capitalism fosters
malaise and discontent and also plants the
seeds of its own demise.
MARXIAN DIALECTICS AND
ALIENATION
One of the fundamental differences between
Marx and other theorists of modernity was
his adaptation of the dialectical approach
pioneered by Hegel. While Hegel’s analysis
was ideal and abstract, however, Marx
insisted that dialectical analysis must con-
sider first and foremost the actual corporeal
human subject that is a constituent compo-
nent of material reality. Marx appropriated
Hegel’s dialectical method and grounded it in
material conditions, the actual lives of living
people. As Marx (1978/1844: 72) put it
(emphasis in the original):
The whole history of the alienation process and the
whole process of the retraction of alienation is
therefore nothing but the history of the production
of abstract (i.e., absolute) thought – of logical,
speculative thought. The estrangement, which
therefore forms the real interest of the transcen-
dence of this alienation, is the opposition of in
itself and for itself, of consciousness and selfcon-
sciousness, of object and subject – that is to say, it
is the opposition between abstract thinking and
sensuous reality or real sensuousness within
thought itself.
Insofar as thought was the subject in
Hegel’s presentation of objectivity as the
externalization of the idea, thinking objecti-
fies and alienates itself (Entäusserung), and
objectifies the self into an object. But con-
sciousness, as externalized, doubles back on
itself, and transcends itself. Imminent in
thought is the potential of the idea to negate
itself, that is, to negate the negations.2
Marx’s critique of Hegel was based on the
separation of consciousness from the actual
human subject that is immanent within mate-
rial conditions. Overlooking material reality,
Hegel presented the subject of the dialectic
as disembodied self-consciousness, with the
result that even when Hegel did deal with
material conditions (civil society, the state,
ethical life, etc.), he reproduced the very
dualism that he had earlier critiqued in Kant.
Having concluded that the idealistic aspect of
the Hegelian dialectic was itself an expression
of alienated consciousness, Marx established
his own point of departure.
In direct contrast to German philosophy which
descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend
from earth to heaven. That is to say ... [w]e set out
from real, active men, and on the basis of their real
life-process we demonstrate the development of
the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-
process. The phantoms formed in the human brain
are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material
life-process, which is empirically verifiable and
bound to material premises. Morality, religion,
metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their cor-
responding forms of consciousness, thus no longer
retain the semblance of independence. They have
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ALIENATION: CRITIQUE AND ALTERNATIVE FUTURES
no history, no development; but men, developing
their material production and their material inter-
course, alter, along with this their real existence, their
thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is
not determined by consciousness, but consciousness
by life (Marx and Engels, 1978/1846: 154–5).
More specifically, as noted, under conditions
of wage labor, where labor power is sold as a
commodity, the product of that labor was a
commodity that was owned by the capitalist
while the whole of commodity production
now stood outside the worker. His/her labor
created that ‘externalized system that now
refluxed back upon him/her as an alien force,
as an outside power’ (Marx, 1978/1844: 72).
Yet Hegel valorized Reason, for he con-
tended that if and when people understood
the nature of domination as a historical
moment, they could transcend it. Thus within
the context of alienated labor, there was
a possibility of transcendence which would
enable the attainment of de-alienated
labor. Dunayevskaya (1965: 51) put it very
clearly:
It is here – in the second stage of Marx’s relation to
the Hegelian dialectic – that Marx fully transcended
Hegel. The split in the philosophic category of the
Absolute into two, like the split of the economic
category of labor into labor as activity and labor-
power as commodity, forged new weapons of
comprehension. It enabled Marx to make a leap in
thought to correspond to the new, the creative
activity of the workers in establishing a society on
totally new foundations which would, once and
for all, abolish the division between mental and
manual labor and unfold the full potentialities of
man – a truly new human dimension.
Thus the fundamental difference between
Marx’s notion of alienation from either
rationalization and entrapment as for Weber,
or anomie for Durkheim, was that for Marx,
social life had a material foundation and
alienation, as a cultural moment, was rooted
in wage labor, and therefore rested on contra-
dictions of class interest. For Marx, the dom-
ination of private property, inherent in
capitalism, held within itself the possibility
of overcoming its unique and tragic dysfunc-
tion, alienation. His dialectical approach made
it possible to establish a society where all
could find the full realization of their creative
15
possibilities within a meaningful and sup-
portive community. This required the nega-
tion of negation and the subsequent move
from the realm of necessity to the realm of
freedom.
But further, for Marx, the material and cul-
tural (ideological) were not separate realms,
as bourgeois thought would make it seem
(see Lukacs, 1971/1920). Bourgeois thought,
much like the fetish of commodities, was
reified and its ideologies were imbued with
contradictions revealed by critique, the
Ideologiekritik of the Frankfurt School. Their
critical analyses of the prevailing concepts
of ‘common sense’ demonstrated that the ide-
ological conceptualization of ‘freedom’ sus-
tained the freedom of the market at the expense
of alienated individuals, while the valorization
of ‘equality’ masked the inequality of a class
society. Yet the freedom and equality promised
by capital, thwarted by the alienation it gen-
erated yet immanent within its ideology,
would follow the overcoming of alienation.
This insight, examining the migration of
alienation from the specifics of labor power
commodified to diverse dimensions of the
cultural realm has been one of the major
developments in alienation research. Indeed,
on the one hand, studies show how alienation
can be discerned in unexpected domains, such
as science, culture, leisure, and the realm of
what we think of as private life. On the other
hand, researchers are uncovering the implied
dialectic to show how the very pervasiveness
of alienation provides opportunities for evad-
ing or even overcoming it.3
ALIENATION AS THE INEVITABLE
HEGEMONIC DOMINATION OF
CONSCIOUSNESS?
There is still room for clarifying Lukacs’
question of how consciousness was domi-
nated by the reified categories of bourgeois
thinking that served capitalist interests. Among
current studies of alienation, some researchers
who present theorizations of various social
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16 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
domains voice hope for change but cannot
clearly confirm that change is possible. They
show that domination is integrated into the
modes of operation of political, economic,
social, and cultural apparatuses – including
the sciences and the realm of high, as well as
mass culture. One major consequence of var-
ious institutional arrangements is the mystifi-
cation of the way they impact consciousness,
especially of language, perception, and
understanding to mystify their operations
and foster ‘willing assent’ to structures and
processes that foster alienation.
Harry Dahms (2002), for example, argues
that contemporary theorists tend to ignore
Marx’s insight into the totality of alienation’s
influence. Thus, they are likely to disregard
the fact that the very tools they employ
in studying how alienation characterizes
modern society may be determined by the
alienation they are supposed to illuminate.
Calling for an invigorated, interdisciplinary,
critical theory of society, Dahms explains
that in his view, it is highly likely that what
is defined as the work of social scientists
imposes at once both alienation and an illu-
sion that the pitfalls of alienation can be
evaded. Striving to uncover the inner mean-
ings of social phenomena, sociologists them-
selves, in his view, embracing empiricism,
as the logic of ‘rationality,’ often become
victims of an illusion of objectivity; indeed
reification based on the choices of such
methods is almost inevitable under the condi-
tions of late modernity. Much as Lukacs
showed how using the very categories of
bourgeois thought thwarted the proletariat
from seeing their own ‘standpoint,’ the
embrace of various ‘rationalist’ empirical
research strategies to study alienation fosters
the very alienation that would be studied.
Such research, by ‘disavowing’ a normative
stance, cannot inform the transcendence of
alienation.
Similar concerns underlie Matthew David’s
(2005) discussion of how contemporary
scientific projects contribute to alienation.
Reviewing recent developments in technolo-
gies of cloning, genetics, and computing,
David concludes that these fields serve
to valorize essentialist understandings of
humans as machines, albeit complex, multi-
functional machines. Based on an implicit
determinism, they lead to reductionist scien-
tific conceptions that normalize alienation
in mechanistic and fragmented accounts
of humanity. Contemporary theoretical
approaches to these developments at the
frontiers of natural science actually con-
tribute to the spread of alienation, the locus
of which is the colonization of the life-world.
The body is subjected to systematically
repressive aspects of rationality, and instru-
mental reason is implemented to distort dis-
tinctively human communicative interaction.
People are conceived of as disembodied,
insensitive to free and open communication,
and impervious to either personal or social
creativity.
Building on the neo-Marxian Ideologiekritik
of the Frankfurt School with its reliance on
Freudian theory, David N. Smith (1996)
explains the compulsivity of the ‘authoritar-
ian character’ that disposed the German
working class to support Hitler rather than
socialist or communist parties. From their
studies of authority within the family, the
psyche, the political economy, and the interi-
orization of ideologies that shape how people
think, Horkheimer and Adorno (1976),
Adorno et al. (1950), and Fromm (1965) con-
cluded that certain kinds of character struc-
tures, alienated from either power or
communities, were likely to gravitate
to conservative, if not reactionary, political
parties when faced with social crises.
Extending their theorization, Smith finds that
the constructs of projection, aggression, and
the personalization of abstract social forces
explain the world of alienated labor, as well
as how and why the alienated classes, when
made fearful or anxious by larger social
crises and contradictions, become enthralled
with the appeals of charismatic leaders.
Elaborating on what he calls ‘authority
fetishism,’ Smith claims that deference to a
person in authority does not stem, as is usu-
ally supposed, from an admiration of his/her
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ALIENATION: CRITIQUE AND ALTERNATIVE FUTURES
personal qualities. Rather, adulation of the
authority figure surfaces because he/she is a
personification, a representation of larger
economic forces. Further, deference to differ-
ent variants of authority is facilitated by the
tendency of individuals to idealize and
submit to those above them in order to gain
their love and powerful protection. The
masochism is ‘balanced’ by their denigration
of, sadism toward, and demands for dispro-
portionate obedience from those below them
in status. Tending to displace aggression,
projecting it onto ‘enemies,’ such people
embrace a Manichaean outlook on the world,
seeing it as consisting of good friends,
‘people like us,’ and vile enemies, ‘those that
are different.’
These understandings are not merely
implicit. Right-wing movements among pop-
ulations that have been alienated by neo-
liberal globalization often develop similar
conspiracy theories that become part of a
reactionary ideology (Berlet, 2005). Berlet
describes a range of perspectives (moderate,
reactionary, radical, and extreme right) that
accord with variations in group member-
ships, tactics, and agendas. Embedded narra-
tives describing conspiracies and openly
embracing scapegoating and demonization
are designed to show the alienated how history
has led to the oppression that members of
such groups are currently experiencing.
Elements of this kind are evident in some
fundamentalist versions of Islam that have
developed in the last two decades – especially
those that might be considered forms of cler-
ical fascism in which only the restoration of
the caliphate, and traditional theologies, can
purge Islamic societies of the evil influences
of the Western world. Facing economic stag-
nation, repressive governments, cultural
assaults, and powerlessness in face of the
Israeli military, the strategies and appeals of
such Islamisms are based on conspiracy nar-
ratives. The tragedy, of course, is that they
have brought hardship, misery, and poverty
to Muslims who accept their interpretation.
Berlet warns that the plight of the alienated,
the marginalized, and the downtrodden must
17
be taken into consideration just as efforts are
made to understand the rhetoric by means of
which masses are recruited by the political
right. Further, the nature of alienation today
can be seen in various conspiracy theories
of the left as well: consider the many ‘expla-
nations’ of 9/11 as the work of Mossad or the
CIA. Similarly, the operations of global cap-
ital are often explained by some leftists as
based on conspiracies of elites such as the
Bilderberg, an elite, but somewhat secretive
group that ‘controls’ global capitalism. (The
paranoid right considers Bilderberg a Zionist
cabal.)
Political rhetoric is not the only tool for
expressing alienation and furthering it. Alienation
feeds into and is fostered by various forms of
popular and popularized culture. Consider for
example the varied expression of transgres-
sion evident in popular culture and the uses
of human suffering on television. Weinstein
(2000), looking at the tradition of ‘heavy
metal,’ has argued that its seemingly ‘anti-
establishment’ head-banging culture which
celebrates masculinity is indeed a response to
the political-economic alienation of global-
ization; many men feel that they are power-
less and that their lives are meaningless in the
face of these larger forces. The concerts and
music provide transgressive erotic and/or
aggressive action, expressions of rage and
anger at the submerged political economic
arrangements, structural constraints, and
rationalized culture, but that anger is located
within the concert where it is contained and
controlled – and neutralized.
Another means for turning alienation into
profit is the ‘trash-talking’ genre of television
shows, with their claim to bestowing distinc-
tiveness on participants. Focusing on humili-
ating and degrading telecasts where ‘freaks
speak out’ (Gamson, 1998), Prosono (2005)
shows that contemporary capitalism has the
capacity to turn the suffering of human beings
into wares for entertainment. For Grindstaff
(2002), the goal of the program is to capture
the moment of intense emotion, typically the
anger, shame, or humiliation that constitutes
the ‘money shot,’ a term originally used in
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18 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
the production of porn in which the ‘action’
which most people want to see is most bla-
tantly evident. While such programs seem-
ingly provide people with opportunities to be
media stars, if only temporarily, the ‘guests’
can only achieve ‘stardom’ by publicly dis-
closing their private lives, their foibles, fail-
ures, transgressions, and/or weaknesses, by
spelling out their tribulations to a two-headed
voyeuristic audience. The audience inside the
studio is eager to perform well by applaud-
ing, booing at, shouting, and deriding the
guest ‘performers;’ while the home viewers
are busily gaping. However unfortunate the
life conditions of the studio audience and/or
the viewers, their lives are fine when com-
pared to those of the ‘stars’ on the shows.
They are mothers angry at hooker/stripper
daughters, wives angry at husbands’ infideli-
ties with mothers-in-law, or people who have
sexual relations with animals. The resentments
that might be expected to weaken or destroy
the ruling hegemony are commodified: dis-
played as ‘freaks,’ and sold as goods to the
very human beings who suffer most from the
contradictions of capitalism. According to
Prosono (2005), in junk TV, alienation suf-
fers the final indignity of becoming the raw
material of new commodities for exchange or
for entertainment. As the Frankfurt School
argued, and as Prosono demonstrates, popu-
lar culture is a commodity produced by the
‘culture industries’ for the market and in the
process, produces vast profits. In the final
analysis, popular culture is a moment of
hegemony that sustains global capital.4
Many of these specific forms of alienation
speak to a larger issue, the extent to which
capitalist modernity is itself fundamentally
alienated. There is no better place to follow
up this possibility than in the ambiguities of
community living. It is generally agreed that
community is a form of life to be desired, but
increasingly, it has been feared that commu-
nities can subvert freedom, independence,
and even civil rights. The dialectic between
the community as rigidly controlled, stifling,
and alienated, typically by Calvinist Churches,
and the frontier where anything was permitted
reflects a long standing dialectic in American
society in which the alienation of communities
takes different forms in particular historical
moments. (See below)
In American sociology, a number of recent
critiques demonstrate that the glorification of
individualism has resulted in the fragmenta-
tion of the social and the demise of various
kinds of group life. Bellah et al. (1985)
lament the demise of genuine communities
and the retreat to ‘life style enclaves,’ gated
communities divorced from larger realities.
Putnam (2000) has made a similar argument on
the basis of evidence that various community
groups from Shriners to bowling leagues are
shrinking in size. But the antidote to individ-
ualism suggested by people like Bellah is
often a communitarianism that suppresses
the individual and denies certain minorities
certain rights. For example, certain commu-
nities might not grant recognition or rights to
cohabitation or to gay marriage.
One possible result of this self-enclosure
can be seen in the work of Smith-Lovin
(1988), whose analysis of survey data shows
that, compared to 20 years earlier, people have
fewer confidantes. But Wellman et al. (2004)
have suggested that this may account for the
fact that today many people maintain relation-
ships, often quite intimate relationships,
through the Internet. While the term ‘commu-
nity’ is often used to betoken cooperation as
human salvation (Etzioni, 1993; Toennies,
1957/1887), in practice there has been long-
standing ambivalence about community in the
United States which was born of – and in turn
created – the subtle interplay of presumed
cooperation, obvious conflict, and the relent-
less implementation of competition. The
uncertainty of social life and an enigmatic
social structure have characterized American
communities since Puritan times. While the
structure of many contemporary communities
confirms the attenuation of social bonds under
capitalism as both Marx and Durkheim main-
tained, the supposition of unchallenged com-
munal social bonds in pre-capitalist eras, as
idealized by Toennies, does not hold up under
a detailed historical examination.
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ALIENATION: CRITIQUE AND ALTERNATIVE FUTURES
According to Salerno (2005; see also
Sennett, 1994, 1998), alienation is a core
problem of American communities, with
roots going back to colonial times. He shows
that American communities have been char-
acterized by different permutations of alien-
ation at different stages of their history. The
Puritan ‘cities on the hill’ were notable
emblems of cooperation because they were
ruled by strict church authorities. Their word
was law; their iron hand was feared, and they
imposed cooperation on their alienated
flocks pitilessly. Communities that sprouted
in the West during the nineteenth century
were from the first riddled with structural
conflict. Devoutly religious people, living
side by side with people whose only law was
the rule of the gun, created communities that
were chaotic – the milieu of competition
often driven to the point of small-scale war-
fare. By a curious turn of the wheel, the
‘gated communities’ of the twentieth and
the twenty-first centuries proclaim alienation
from the surrounding threat of invasion by
‘everybody.’ At the same time, they provide
an environment in which pseudo-identities
can be staged and restaged in different ways –
an environment where people’s alienated
selves can pretend to find authenticity.
Community, then, can be recognized as an
attempt to find a compromise between the
inherent psychological need for connected-
ness and solidarity, and the fear of losing
one’s individual identity. The solution of
geographical proximity does no more than
underline the inevitability of alienation –
among the sub-groups that make up the com-
munity, between the community and the
environment, as well as within the conflicting
orientations to which individuals are prone.
Scheff (2006) has pointed out that it is
impossible to grasp the nature of social rela-
tionships by thinking in terms of an alienation-
solidarity polarity; he insists that in
theorizing and researching alienation, we need
to consider both ‘inner and outer aspects of
solidarity and alienation.’ It is possible to be
engulfed within one set of relationships and,
because of that, isolated without, as in sects,
19
cults, and academic schools of thought.
Looking at the social interactions that consti-
tute solidarity as Buberian I-thou rather than
I-it relationships, he shows that Elias (1987)
comes closest to theoretically integrating
macro and micro levels of isolation, solidarity,
and engulfment. More specifically, following
Goffman, he suggests that the interactional
level of alienation comprises ‘mutual aware-
ness’ as well as emotions, especially pride
and shame. Scheff’s analysis supplements
and expands the Marxian notion of alienation
and community and has quite provocative
implications. Allied to Hegel’s description of
the struggle between bondsman and lord, and
following Goffman, Scheff’s (2006) analysis
shows that inegalitarian relationships pre-
clude genuine recognition. Where there are
blatant inequalities, mutual recognition of
the humanity of the Other is not possible,
and people are denied recognition of their
own humanity.5 We would suggest that under
conditions of capitalism, most people are
shamed and humiliated when personal status
is regarded as an indication of merit and abil-
ity (see Sennett and Cobb, 1972). We have
already seen how humiliation has been
turned into a commodity. But further, as
Sennett (2003) has noted, even those who
achieve a modicum of ‘success’ within the
system are alienated both from larger com-
munities and from the kinds of ideals of self
they might prefer to the ‘corroded’ notions of
character they experience.
Given the concern with the micro-social
and interpersonal aspects of alienation,
Kalekin-Fishman (2000, 2005) also notes that
the pervasiveness of alienation is underlined
by its migration into what would normally be
thought of as the stronghold of authentic inti-
macy, the face-to-face encounter. Here, too, it
can be shown that the alienation produced in
macro-structures is reproduced in the micro-
social realm of consciousness and in the prac-
tices of daily life. Because it facilitates reason
without having to rely on individuals’ ability to
think rationally about how to begin to solve a
multiplicity of problems (Habermas, 1998),
communicative action has been held to further
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20 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
the potential for reason embedded in different
types of everyday interactions. Unconstrained
by economic and political imperatives, talk,
qua undistorted communication, should
disclose how reason is exercised quasi-
intuitively by the individual subject. Logic,
like common sense, would seem to dictate
that when people consciously cheat, con, or
minimally misinform their fellows, they are
contributing to the perpetuation of alienation
while when they act in good faith, alienation
is weakened. According to Kalekin-Fishman,
however, this is not substantiated by close
analysis. The achievement of intimacy is
moderated by the relatively unconscious
implementation of communication tech-
niques that are alienated and alienating.
The authority of face-to-face exchanges
(whether perfunctory greetings, monitoring,
giving orders, and even consultations) stems
from the communicants’ acceptance of the
convention that talk is spontaneous and
heartfelt. But even the talk that is interpreted
subjectively by the participants as expres-
sions of interest, concern, and care frames
relationships so that principles of control and
conformity, power and social exclusion pre-
serve institutionalized alienation. Burrowing
in taken-for-granted modes of behavior and
even in the emotional tones of attempts
to maintain intimate relationships, varied
patterns of alienation intervene almost inex-
orably to undermine the achievement of
authenticity.
SEEDS OF RESISTANCE –
OVERCOMING ALIENATION IN
ALTERNATIVE FUTURES?
In stark contrast to the consistently bleak
presence of alienated and dominated con-
sciousness implicated in the work cited
above, some researchers find evidence of
processes that undermine the effects of alien-
ation. Dialectical analyses of technology,
household work, education, and different
aspects of identity lead to conclusions that
seem to promise at least partial release from
alienation.
Following Marx’s acknowledgment that
beyond the capacity to subjugate people to
capital, technology also has the potential to
set them free, Douglas Kellner (1989, 1995,
2005) examines rationality in general and
technology in particular in a dialectical cri-
tique of domination, dehumanization, and
alienation. Although technology cannot be
separated from the main trends of the society
in which it is used, Best and Kellner present
persuasive evidence that technology holds
promise of de-alienation. They look forward
to a critical theory of technology that will
celebrate the potential of the computer. Such
a society
contextualizes technology within a social, political,
and economic framework, and … assesses both
the positive and negative implications of new tech-
nologies in terms of their potential to enhance or
restrict freedom and democracy, to promote or
undermine environmental sustainability, and to
create or block the creation of a more humane and
just society (Best and Kellner, 1991: 18–19).
Such a society would provide space for the
free self-development that overcomes alien-
ation. Kellner (1995) theorizes that overcom-
ing alienation will enable new kinds of cultural
experiences which serve as the context for
the steadily changing nature of human iden-
tity and of social relations. In his view, more-
over, theories have to be tailored to analyses
of far-reaching changes and thus should
be able to propose a responsive politics.
We might further note that the Internet, while
providing the means for the control, com-
mand, and co-ordination of global capital,
has also enabled the growth of progressive
mobilizations. Thus, for example, with a
variety of alternative news sites that act
as ‘virtual public spheres,’ and the explosion
of blogging, many people have access
to counter-hegemonic information and dis-
courses. This has had far-reaching conse-
quences for emancipatory activity, from
empowering women in the Middle East
(Moghadam, 2005) to the World Social
Forum (Langman, 2005b).
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ALIENATION: CRITIQUE AND ALTERNATIVE FUTURES
In a similar vein, we might note the recent
explosion of the high tech video games, espe-
cially the violent shooter games that now
might even include sexuality such as Grand
Theft Auto. The moralistic critique would con-
demn the games as sinful, inciting violence,
wanton sexuality, and/or violent sexuality.
Notwithstanding the explosion in the popu-
larity of such games, violent crime among
young men has plummeted, and most youth
crimes are for drug use or sale. The classical
critique might say that these games foster
alienation by rendering players powerless
in face of an outside force they themselves
produced, and/or by fostering a withdrawal
from the social and indifference to the com-
munity. But closer examination shows that
despite all the imagined sins, horrors, and
imputed alienation fostered by such games,
in practice, they are most typically played in
groups in which the players demonstrate and
experience a great deal of agency – while
playing together in cohesive groups. Finally,
it has been shown that an unintended conse-
quence of playing video games has been
greater skill in geometry and greater hand – eye
coordination, skills quite important for jobs
like piloting airplanes.
Alternative futures may also be discovered
in the mundane context of maintaining
households. Considering the household as
the proverbially alienating site, some femi-
nist researchers who have built on (a phallo-
centric) Marxism have seen the household as
exclusively the ‘domestic mode of production,’
the sphere of patriarchal subjugation, sexual
exploitation of women, and alienating
domestic labor. Touted as a ‘private sphere,’
households are described as being designed
to provide the illusion of a realm of love,
warmth, intimacy, and authenticity cut off
from the domains of public institutions. It is
often emphasized that they are in fact charac-
terized by dehumanizing indifference to
others and the calculating attitude of urban
life, all of which serve the ends of capitalism.
Households are frequently documented as a
social location in advanced capitalism where
women work under alienating, exploitative
21
conditions (among others, see Coontz, 1997;
Hochschild, 1986; Rubin, 1994). In a recent
article, ‘Loving Alienation: the Contradictions
of Domestic Work,’ Martha Gimenez (2005),
long one of the strongest voices for a
Marxist, materialist feminism, shows, how-
ever, that if alienation is understood dialecti-
cally, experiences quite antithetical to the
way capitalism typically operates can also
be found in the realm of work in the home.
Gimenez contends that neither the radical
Marxist views of oppression, nor the bour-
geois illusions of ultimate fulfillment,
capture the class-based variations and the
dialectical nature of domestic labor. Upon
close examination, domestic work can be
seen as a set of socially necessary, contradic-
tory activities. Some are unpleasant, but
some are constructive with the potential to
fuel the emergence of a critical conscious-
ness, antithetical to the alienated world of
capitalist economic and social relations.
Gimenez points out two central factors that
affect the impact of household experiences:
varying conditions and opportunities for
empowerment. For one thing, the marital or
couple status, age, school/work conditions
and/or location of the household unit in the
class system affect how alienating or gratify-
ing household tasks may be. For another, the
domestic mode of production also offers
realms of creativity, recognition, and empow-
erment, allowing for experiences of agency,
self-realization, caring, reciprocity, and
cooperation. These material bases are likely
to spur the emergence of needs and values
that counter the selfish, competitive, and
dehumanizing world of capitalist work and
social relations.
The complex dialectic of alienation and
de-alienation that is played out in domestic
arrangements can also be observed in schools.
Gibson (2005) examines the intricacies of
relations in communities in and near San
Diego where there have been several inci-
dents of high school shootings. In a richly
detailed analysis, Gibson shows that alien-
ated actions stem from attempts by schools to
quantify learning so as to find reassurance of
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22 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
progress in numerical measures. Converting
knowledge into a commodity, schools com-
modify their students in turn. Well-known
Skinnerian techniques of learning objectify
students through testing and ranking, and
reinforce their alienation by making it impos-
sible for them to evade the realization that
they are found wanting. Such alienation leads
many adolescents to withdrawal and perhaps
to an alcohol- or drug-based flight from
reality. Some students, more alienated than
others, more isolated than others, and
angrier, find in violence the only way they
can express agency. Ironically, it is only
when the dehumanized take human lives that
they gain recognition. Locating these seem-
ingly isolated acts in the larger context of
capitalism, Gibson shows how the school
system exploits the marginalization of many
youths whose academic and social statuses
are closely intertwined.
By contrast, moreover, with the frequently
expressed conclusion that exploitation and
marginalization may be effected despite the
efforts of egalitarian schooling, Gibson
points out that where quantification takes
over and test scores become the be all and
end all, the efforts are minimal. In an area of
California where well-to-do neighborhoods
and impoverished neighborhoods send chil-
dren to the same schools, it is relatively easy
to show that the schools serve particular
interests. The agenda of preserving distances
between social classes is disguised as main-
taining standards of achievement and as
education for values. Alienation is insinuated
into the subtle procedural messages that con-
vince the under-classes that they deserve to
be marginalized. Through the inner convic-
tion that their isolation from the benefits of a
good education is justified, they submit to an
alienation that is cruel and unrelenting in
damning them to a kind of slavery – failure in
studies and rejection by the peers-who-count.
As Heidegger (1967) intimated, however,
eventually Slaves, with their fragmented,
ignorant, and weak selves, are likely to come
to understand the situation and refuse to
accept their subordination. Illustrating this
insight, Gibson describes how excessive
pressures led parents at one school to succeed
in mobilizing protest against mechanical
teaching and performance testing; deter-
mined teachers have also found ways of
counteracting and evading detrimental regu-
lations. This concerted ‘revolt’ is a fact, but
also an analogue of the diverse ways available
for escaping the shackles of alienation by
achieving a viable identity through insight
and action.
In modern societies, with a wide range of
options for identities, viable identities are
created, negotiated, and articulated in differ-
ent ways. Looking at the wide range of
meanings and usages that identity has
assumed in academic discourses, Langman
(2000, 2005a) defines identity as a narrative
based on group membership that becomes
part of individual selfhood, a self referential
template where memory meets the future as
people present themselves and plan agendas.
Following Castells’ (1996) analysis of
network society, he differentiates (1) con-
formist identities that legitimate the status
quo, (2) resistance identities (oppositions to
various forms of domination), (3) project
identities that articulate new forms of subjec-
tivities. But further, (4) Langman (2000) sug-
gests that Castells did not consider the ludic
identities fostered by consumerism and pop-
ular culture. Langman notes that each kind
of identity is disposed to different forms of
alienation.
He argues that identities may be alienated
in different ways, but points out, too, that
they may also exercise agency through
choices that are likely to allow escape from
alienation. Beginning by legitimating the
very conditions that victimize, they may
develop the ability to resist them, or find
ways to take part in the ‘fun and games’ that
the capitalist system provides as entertain-
ment. But there is still the possibility that in
developing the resistance, underlings will
become capable of articulating progressive
identity projects. It is only this type of
9781412934633-Chap-02 1/10/09 8:40 AM Page 23
ALIENATION: CRITIQUE AND ALTERNATIVE FUTURES
negotiation that will enable people to learn to
valorize a self-identity that is freed of the
bonds of consumption and is truly emancipa-
tory. This possibility is especially significant
in the capitalist-generated culture of con-
sumption. Ultimately, the pursuit of com-
modities, produced by the alienated labor of
remote Others, generates alienated forms of
selfhood that compulsively pursue privatized
hedonism through the accumulation of goods
or cultural experiences. But consumer-based
selfhood cannot provide individuals with
meaningful intimate ties, nor give them a
sense of control or a meaningful existence.
These consumer-based identities and lifestyles
have become an essential moment of ideo-
logical hegemony. Nowadays, however,
rampant consumerism is not available for all;
instead, people opt for more modest expres-
sions of the culture industry, from escapist
films to television programs that are an indi-
cation of alienation and at once a critique of
society and illusory palliatives. For other
people, the alienation that stems from rapid
socio-economic change, assaults on traditional
values, and the emptiness of consumerism are
assuaged by shared resistance to modernity,
such as the embrace of fundamentalist reli-
gions that provide stable identities, redemp-
tion through spiritual renewal and an
imaginary return to an earlier, golden age
that never was. The diverse guises of funda-
mentalism may well provide compensatory
gratifications within their communities, but
then prompt further conflicts, quarrels, and
often bitter animosities in the larger society.
However, these very conflicts between abso-
lutist and authoritarian values and the nature
of modern life spur vast numbers of people
throughout the world to forge ‘project’ identi-
ties from feminism to ecology that overcome
alienation by taking up globally based causes
of social justice.
The dialectical promise of de-alienation is
also evident in some of the banal incidents of
everyday life. While, as seen above, Kalekin-
Fishman demonstrates how principles of alien-
ation that are unavoidable in the macro-system
23
are likely to rule relationships in the micro,
Ahponen (2005) finds that everyday life can
offer moments of emancipation. In her
account of the media as a launch pad for
insights into the self, into family life as a
field of struggle and achievement, and into
liberation through appreciation of the Other,
she touches on themes explored in the work
of Gibson and of Gimenez. As she shows,
everyday life is strewn with demands for per-
forming alienating routines, but it is also a
site of action where one can find opportuni-
ties for experiencing the excitement and
exhilaration of heroism. Ahponen (2005)
does not ignore the fact that the content of
everyday life is saturated with thankless
tasks that are ineluctably imposed by the
conditions of an alienating environment and
entail deprivation consequent on disorienta-
tion at the macro. From her data, however,
she finds that the very same alienating envi-
ronmental conditions are likely to evoke
agency and creativity. Ironically, moreover,
when these events attract the attention of the
media, their subjective value is enhanced.
The very media that have developed modes
of exploitation for purposes of capitalist
profit can also effect turning points in
people’s lives. For everyday heroes, media
attention has created moments of emancipa-
tion from the patterns of alienation that seem
to be inevitably embedded in the routines of
everyday life.
In a similar way Porpora (2005) evokes
spirituality as a means of transcendence and
a way of overcoming alienation. He points
out that the trap of alienation that attends the-
orizing can be evaded (see discussions of
Dahms and David earlier in this chapter).
What is lacking in the efficient and productive,
but at the same time shallow, instrumental
rationality that characterizes modernity is
morality – both of action and of being.
Arguing that the spiritual alienation of our
age, an era devoid of ultimate concerns, is at
the same time alienation from one’s true self,
one’s own potential, as well as alienation
from others, Porpora (2005: 244) points
9781412934633-Chap-02 1/10/09 8:40 AM Page 24
24 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
out that religion was an essential part of
hegemony long before capitalism emerged.
Despite the fact that sociology is reluctant
to deal with spiritual alienation, Porpora
(2005: 246), much like Fromm (1965), main-
tains that human beings need rootedness, and
a frame of reference and devotion, for the
moral aspect of selfhood which is emotional
and not a matter of rational calculation.
Clearly, neither the fundamentalisms that
negate all achievements of modernity nor the
mass consumerism in which the accumula-
tion of goods becomes one’s primary aim in
life and the basis of one’s identity, fulfills
human needs. Today, it is possible, however,
to see the reinstatement of religion in differ-
ent types of configurations that do indeed
foster seeds of de-alienation. In his view,
there are such seeds in the traditions of all
religions. Among them are the group proce-
dures for learning the Holy Books of Judaism
(Heilman, 1984), the mystical experiences of
the Sufi in Islam. And he agrees that there
need be no contradictions between Christianity
and socialism, even in its most radical form
(Zižek, 2000). Denying that blind fundamen-
talisms that deepen alienation are the only
channel for religious expression, Porpora
(2005: 247) sees the various forms of
alliances with a higher spirit as fertile ground
for de-alienation.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
During the first half of the twentieth century,
Lukacs (1971/1920) argued that commodity
fetishism was no longer limited to objects
produced for their exchange value on the
market. Reification, embedded within the
very categories of bourgeois thought, had
come to colonize the totality of conscious-
ness – and by implication, subjectivity as
well. Thus proletariat understandings of self
and society were framed within the alienated
bourgeois discourses that sustain domination.
In short, the key to understanding capitalist
society writ large was ascribed to alienation.
That is why, as Lukacs asserted, explorations
of alienation have indeed moved beyond
the factory to culture, community, politics,
and the structure of the self. As an organizing
orientation, alienation enables self-criticism
as well as critique. With the pointed instru-
ments of alienation theory, researchers can
uncover the malevolent core of exuberance
(Prosono, 2005) and the unwitting invasion
of macro-structures into intimacies (Kalekin-
Fishman, 2005). Beyond these, thinking of
alienation in dialectical terms, however,
enables sociologists to show both how,
through the insidious colonization of con-
sciousness, people are incited to violence,
and how this violence impels them to active
resistance (Gibson, 2005). Yet again, a
dialectical understanding of alienation makes
it possible to discover how oppression can be
transformed into creativity (Ahponen, 2005;
Langman, 2005a), how desperation and hope
are intertwined, and how the unending rich-
ness of human experience is a constant chal-
lenge to discern opportunities as well as
hazards (Kellner, 2005).
Marx saw alienation as a concept rooted
in contradiction, as the core of conflictual
structure and the heart of conflicted con-
sciousness. At the same time he realized its
dialectical potential: out of the tormented
consciousness in a community fragmented
by conflict, people are capable of discerning
the emergent potential for agency, and the
means to re-humanization. In a word, as
conflicts ripen, it becomes possible to dis-
cover how to reconfigure cooperation. The
dialectical conceptualization and methodol-
ogy of alienation that are demonstrated in
recent writings provide ingress into the
dynamic tangle that reflects this vision of
social reality. While sociology, like so many
other disciplines, has its fashions and chang-
ing interests, some basic concepts of the
discipline, among them certainly the concept
of alienation, endure and have as much, if not
more, explanatory power today than in the past.
In a globalizing age of mass consumption, with
unprecedented kinds of advanced technologies
of production and communication, the concept
9781412934633-Chap-02 1/10/09 8:40 AM Page 25
ALIENATION: CRITIQUE AND ALTERNATIVE FUTURES
of alienation and its theorization shed light
on hitherto unexplored subtleties in social
and personal life.
NOTES
1 We acknowledge that terrorism has multiple
roots, but here we wish to underscore how alien-
ation can be recruited through popular culture.
2 Because Hegel’s Absolutes emerged out of the
French Revolution which put an end to serfdom,
Hegel’s Absolutes breathed the air, the earthly air of
freedom. Even when one reads Absolute Mind as
God, one cannot escape the earthly quality of the
unity of theory and practice, and grasp the Absolute
Reality as man’s attainment of total freedom, inner
and outer and temporal. The bondsman, having gained
through his labor, as Hegel put it, ‘a mind of his own,’
becomes part of the struggle between ‘consciousness-
in-itself’ and ‘consciousness-for-itself.’ Or, more pop-
ularly stated, the struggle against alienation becomes
the attainment of freedom (see Korsch, 1923).
3 Members of the International Sociological
Association’s Research Committee for the Study of
Alienation Theory and Research are among those
whose work is at the cutting edge of new
approaches to alienation research. They have elabo-
rated on the contemporary relevance of alienation
for theoretical critiques, descriptions of concrete
political developments that embody authoritarian
responses to alienation, as well as cultural expres-
sions of ambiguities in forms of everyday life under
late capitalism. For a wider view, see Langman and
Kalekin-Fishman (2005).
4 Sklair (2002) has argued that consumerism
serves as the ideological glue that sustains transna-
tional capitalism.
5 See, for example Fraser and Honneth (2003), or
Taylor (1994).
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9781412934633-Chap-03 1/10/09 8:41 AM Page 29
Identity, Citizenship and
Contemporary, Secure,
Gendered Politics of
Belonging
INTRODUCTION
Nationalist ideologies and practices have
sought to appropriate and to reconstruct
notions of belonging. Various historians and
theoreticians of nationalism have shown how
nationalist discourses have come to replace
other forms of belonging, whether local, reli-
gious, or associated with explicit lines of loy-
alties to specific political hierarchies. Under
hegemonic discourses of nationalist politics of
belonging the ‘nation-state’ has come to be the
Andersonian (1991 [1983]) ‘imagined com-
munity’ in which people, territories, and states
are constructed as immutably connected and
the nation is a ‘natural’ extension of one’s
family to which one should be prepared, if
necessary, to sacrifice oneself. Or is it?
Recently, under the onslaught of globaliza-
tion, very different constructions of belonging
are gaining momentum and various state
agencies are investing a lot of resources in an
3
Nira Yuval-Davis
attempt to reconstruct what they often call
‘social cohesion’, in which such naturalized
belongings can prosper. At the same time,
human rights activists are trying, with some-
what contradictory results, to nurture a sense
of global human belonging.
The chapter aims to deconstruct some con-
temporary notions of belonging as they relate
to ethnic and national processes. Its main
focus will be the contrasting multi-layered
and paradoxical narratives of the ‘authentic
indigenes’, on the one hand, who, with their
multi-faceted social, political, and spatial
dimensions, consider themselves to be the
rightful ‘owners’ of their nations; and, on the
other, those of the ‘diasporic strangers’. The
claims of the latter for such ownership might
be challenged by the indigenes in the territo-
ries in which both live together, while the
claims of the diasporic strangers to national
ownership might relate to far away, imagined
homelands. The chapter will also examine
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30 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
how these paradoxical narratives relate to
discourses on human and state security.
Finally, it will highlight some of the gen-
dered dimensions of that discourse.
Belonging is a deep emotional need.
Countless psychological, and even more,
psychoanalytical, works have been dedicated
to writings about the fears of separation of
babies from the womb, from the mother,
from the familiar (for the most elaborate
accounts of this, see, for example, Bowlby,
1969, 1973; Rank (1973 [1929]). It is impor-
tant to emphasize that the need to belong and
the fear of separation exist even in cases of
sexual and other abuse in the family, and
even when the environment of the womb
itself proves to be far from the perfect haven
in which all the needs of the baby are being
satisfied (Fodor, 1949; Lake, 1966; Mott,
19481).
Belonging and the yearning to belong,
however, have not only been central in psy-
chological discourse. To some extent, one
could claim that one of the prime concerns of
sociological theory since its establishment
has been the different ways in which people
belong to collectivities and states – as well as
the social, economic, and political effects of
instances of the displacement of such belong-
ings as a result of industrialization and/or
migration. Some classical examples are
Tönnies’ distinction between Gemeinschaft
and Gesellschaft as the two major ways in
which people belong to communities and
collectivities (1940 [1935]), Durkheim’s dis-
tinction between mechanical and organic sol-
idarity which, again, examines ‘pre-’ and
‘modern’ ways of belonging (1933 [1893]),
or Marx’s notion of alienation (1975 [1844])
which examines the effects of displacement
and human commodification. Anthony
Giddens (1991) has argued that during
modernity, people’s sense of belonging
becomes reflexive, while Manuel Castells
(1997) claims that contemporary society has
become a ‘network society’ in which effec-
tive belonging has moved from the civil soci-
eties of nations and states to reconstructed
defensive identity communities.
As will be explained later in the chapter,
neither citizenship nor identity can encapsulate
the notion of belonging which encompasses
them, but also includes the emotional dimen-
sion of attachment. Like other hegemonic
constructions, belonging tends to become
‘naturalized’ and thus invisible in hegemonic
formations. It is only when one’s safe and
stable connection to the collectivity, the
homeland, the state is threatened that belong-
ing becomes articulated and reflexive. It is
then that individual, collective, and institu-
tional narratives of belonging become politi-
cized and give rise to various social and
political movements which promote specific
constructions of belonging as their projects.
This politicization tends to focus on the
‘“dirty work” of boundary maintenance’
(Crowley, 1999: 30). Indeed, as Adrian Favell
argues (1999: 211), the ‘boundary problem’ is
archetypal to the politics of belonging.
Constructing borders and boundaries that
differentiate between those who belong and
those who do not determines and colors the
meaning of the particular belonging. All too
often people talk about otherness on the one
hand, and crossing borders on the other hand,
without paying attention to how these bor-
ders and boundaries are actually imagined by
people who are positioned towards them in
different ways. At the same time, many
recent theories of identity emphasize – and
often celebrate – the ever changing, fluctuat-
ing, and contested nature of identities. Such
theoretical articulations can sometimes dis-
guise ways in which the exercise of power
may fixate subjugated identities and create
what Amrita Chhachhi (1991) calls ‘forced
identities’, and impose what Kubena Mercer
(1990), under somewhat different conditions,
calls ‘the burden of representation’.
However, it is important to relate the
notion of belonging to the differential posi-
tionings from which belongings are imag-
ined and narrated, in terms of gender, class,
race and ethnicity, sexuality, stage in the life
cycle, etc., even in relation to the same com-
munity and in relation to the same bound-
aries and borders (Yuval-Davis, 2006a, b).
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SECURE, GENDERED POLITICS OF BELONGING
These boundaries and borders can be con-
tested not only between those who are inter-
nal or external to them, but also between
people who see themselves, and are seen, as
belonging to the same collectivity, or even by
the same people at different times and in dif-
ferent situations because of their different
social locations and different social values.
The contested and shifting nature of these
boundaries and borders may reflect not only
dynamic power relations between individu-
als, collectivities, and institutions but also
subjective and situational processes.
One of the crucial intervening factors in
these dynamics is the fact that people tend to
belong – in different ways and with different
intensities – to more than one collectivity and
polity. Local, ethnic, national, inter- and
supra-national political communities are
just some of the ‘imagined communities’
(Anderson, 1991 [1983]) with which people
may identify, in which they are active, at
least to a certain degree, and to which they
may feel a certain sense of attachment. One
level of exploration, following Anne-Marie
Fortier (2000), is that of the ways in which
common histories, experiences, and places
are created, imagined, and sustained in what
Vikki Bell (1999) calls ‘the performativity of
belonging’. Another level, however (although
interwoven with the first), is the examination
of the hierarchy and dynamics of power that
are exercised between these collectivities and
the degree of cooperation or conflict between
them. In other words, the relationship
between the society and the polity is crucial
to the understanding of the multi-layered and
multiplex constructions of belongings of
both individuals and groupings.
Following a terminology first used by
Michael Walzer (1997), Crowley argues
(1999: 22) that the idea of ‘belonging’ is an
attempt to give a ‘thicker’ account of the
political and social dynamics of integration
in relation to the concept of citizenship,
which he defines as formal membership in a
nation-state.
In my own work on citizenship (1994,
1997a, 1999; Yuval-Davis and Werbner,
31
1999) I have followed a wider definition of
the concept. Using T. H. Marshall’s definition
of citizenship (1950, 1975) as ‘full member-
ship of the community with rights and
responsibilities’, I have argued that the con-
cept can also be used in relation to other poli-
ties than the ‘nation-state’, to the extent that
membership in other collectivities endows
citizens with rights and obligations in a similar
manner.
Historically, citizenship emerged as active
participation in political communities that
evolved in cities (the Greek polis) and then
developed as a legal status in empires (such
as the Roman Empire). Jean Cohen (1999)
argues that in the nation-state these two ele-
ments of citizenship have come together.
However, as Yasemin Soysal (1994), David
Held (1995), and others have argued, new
trans-national and supra-national forms of
citizenship are developing, forms that Bryan
Turner has called (1998) post-Fordist citizen-
ship. As I have argued elsewhere (1999),
international legislation on human rights can
be seen, from such a perspective, as just
another layer of citizenship. At the same
time, I have also pointed out that in terms of
affecting personal lives and constructing
rights and obligations, sub-national and
cross-national communities can also become
bearers of significant citizenships, in specific
local, religious, and ethnic contexts.
As mentioned above, however, the notion
of citizenship needs to be differentiated from
that of belonging, which encompasses not
only the participatory dimension of citizen-
ship but also the cognitive and emotional
dimensions of identification and attachment
(Yuval-Davis, 2006a). Identities are the indi-
vidual and collective narratives people tell
themselves and others about who they are
and who they are not. However, belonging is
not only about cognitions and perceptions.
Feeling that one is (or is not) part of a
collectivity, a community, a social category,
or yearning to be so, is central to a sense of
belonging, and is not the same as actually
taking part (or not) in a political community
with all the rights and responsibilities involved.
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32 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
This is a differentiation that identity politics
has not been inclined to make, tending, as a
result, to neglect the complex and contested
relationship between individuals, groupings,
and collectivities. Since individuals and
collectivities are interchangeable emotion-
ally in identity politics, questions of repre-
sentation, accountability, and governability
have tended to be ignored (Bourne, 1987;
Cain and Yuval-Davis, 1990; Yuval-Davis,
1994, 2006c). The politics of belonging is
where the sociology of emotions and the
sociology of power intersect.
To illustrate the different ways identities,
citizenships, and belonging(s) interrelate in
different modes of the politics of belonging,
I shall now turn briefly to exploring narra-
tives of belonging of both indigenousness
and diasporism.
DISCOURSES OF INDIGENOUSNESS
To be an indigene means to ‘really’ belong to
a place, and to have the most ‘authentic’
claim for rights over it. The discourse of
‘indigenousness’ has been used by hege-
monic majorities as an exclusionary means to
limit immigration, withhold citizenship
rights, call for repatriation, and in its most
extreme forms, for ‘ethnic cleansing’. In such
a discourse, the immutable link of people,
state, and territory is formulated in its most
racialized mode.
However, the discourse of ‘indigenous-
ness’ has also played a central role in the
politics of inclusion and recognition, of claim-
ing rights. It is used by movements of
the largely excluded, dispossessed, and mar-
ginalized remnants of societies that existed
before or on the margins of settler and other
nation-states (Feldman, 2001; Stasiulis and
Yuval-Davis, 1995). These remnants are fre-
quently seen, by themselves and by others, as
an ‘organic’ part of the land and the land-
scape, and all other inhabitants are seen as
part of the ‘imposing society’ (to use an
Australian Aboriginal expression) who
dispossessed them. A major focus in their
struggles is the call for recognition of their
‘land rights’ and claims of ownership of the
lands where they used to reside before the
European invasion. As they had often been
stateless nomadic populations, they had no
official land titles registered in their name, as
would be the case under a bureaucratic state
apparatus. As the lands they claim are often
now either privately or state owned, their
claims have frequently been faced with fierce
resistance by settler societies and states, at
the same time as they are endorsed by human
rights discourse.
One of the questions that arise in the
attempts to define who the indigenous inhab-
itants of a particular territory are concerns
the temporal dimension. Although in the nar-
ratives of indigenous people’s movements
‘they have occupied a specific territory from
time immemorial’ (Abu-Saad and Champagne,
2001: 158), usually the crucial date of authen-
ticity is fixed as that of occupation at the time
of European colonization. This can prove to
be Eurocentric. It constructs the past as if his-
tory started when contact with the Europeans
was established, and covers up previous
population movements and colonizations (as
happened in Algeria, for instance, with the
Arab settlement, and, in the case of
Amerindians, with empires such as those of
the Aztecs and the Mayas).
Another question, however, even more
central to our discussion here, concerns the
form of ownership to be claimed by those
‘land rights’ movements. Should land be
given to individual members of the ‘first
nation’, in a way that would not limit their
freedom to sell it? Or should it be transferred
collectively, to families/households, or to ‘the
community’ as a whole in the form of a
Trust? Who should then have the decision-
making power in these Trusts? And who
should be included in these ‘communities’
or collectivities? Very often there are bitter
conflicts between certain kinship groups of
aboriginal people who each claim that only
they are the rightful inheritors of a specific
territory and that other Aborigines, who are
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SECURE, GENDERED POLITICS OF BELONGING
descendants of groups that were expelled
from their own lands and displaced to those
territories, are not entitled to a share in the
Trust. DNA tests are even used to prove these
exclusive essentialist belongings. The most
important question – in relation to other
Aborigines but also in relation to other mem-
bers of the settler society – is whether land
rights should be exclusive, or whether other
members of the society (as well as the state
itself) could continue to have rights to the
land as well. What are the political, let alone
the economic, consequences of indigenous
land claims? Indigenous people often claim a
spiritual unity with the land:
We are the land. More than remembered, the
Earth is the mind of the people as we are the mind
of the earth. … It is not a means of survival. …
It is rather part of our being, dynamic, significant,
real (a Laguna author, quoted in Tsosie, 2001: 184).
Feldman (2001) argues that such claims are
part of critical transformative pedagogy, a
‘strategic essentialism’, to use a well-known
expression of Gayatri Spivak (1993), which
can prepare the ground for an exclusive claim
to the land, once enough political power is
accumulated for self government as an enclave
within the nation-state, unless there is enough
power to claim a full ‘take-over’ of the state (as
happened in Algeria, Zimbabwe, and in a
somewhat different manner, in South Africa).
However, there are also arguments
(e.g., Reynolds, 1996) that the aboriginal
perception, for instance, that ‘they belong to
the land’, rather than that the land belongs
to them, paves the way for an alternative,
non-exclusive, mode of ownership and sover-
eignty. Such a claim, for an alternative inclu-
sive nationalist discourse, has also been
argued by Gilroy (1993, 1997) and others
(e.g., Boyarin, 1994; Raz-Krakotzkin, 1994),
as applying to diasporic discourses.
DIASPORISM AS AN ALTERNATIVE
DISCOURSE OF BELONGING
Gilroy (1997: 328) attempted to contrast
nationalist sentiments based on ‘notions of
33
soil, landscape, and rootedness’ with the idea
of diaspora as ‘a more refined and more
worldly sense of culture’. Avtar Brah (1996)
incorporated into her normative notion of
‘diaspora space’ not just racialized diasporic
minorities but also the hegemonic majority in
a decentred and non-privileged positioning.
Post-modernist discourses on ‘travelling cul-
tures’ (Clifford, 1992), ‘nomadism’ (Braidotti,
1991), ‘hybridity’ (Bhabha, 1994), and ‘living
at the border zones’ (Anzaldua, 1987) have
both inspired and echoed these constructions
of diasporism.
Unfortunately, as some of the critiques
of such literature (e.g., Anthias, 1998;
Helmreich, 1992; Ifekwunigwe, 1999;
Yuval-Davis, 1997a, b) have pointed out the
binary, naturalized, and essentialist ideas
about kinship, nature, and territory, so charac-
teristic of more traditional nationalist rhetoric,
often creep in ‘through the back door’ in these
theorizations. Moreover, diasporic politics often
tends to have very different sets of values and
political dynamics. Unlike the Simmelian
(1950) and Schutzian (1976) constructions of
‘the stranger’ members of diasporic commu-
nities often engage in narratives of belonging,
or of yearning to belong, not only in relation
to the country/society where they live, or even
a ‘cosmopolitan’ boundary-less humanity, but
also in relation to their country, nation, and/or
state of origin. As Sara Ahmed (2000) has
pointed out, the construction of ‘the stranger’
is a form of fetishism that is produced in the
naming, and is devoid of any real human char-
acteristics. It is just a reflection of the gaze of
the one who has named her/him as such.
As Robin Cohen (1997) has shown, dias-
poras are much more heterogeneous than the
above theories would allow us to believe.
Moreover, as the NGO document of the 2001
World Conference Against Racism in Durban
pointed out, Western people who are living
in the Third World are often described as
‘ex-patriates’ while Third World people living
in the West are described as migrants or immi-
grants. In this sense diasporism is a racialized
concept. The hegemonic Western gaze pre-
vails in this, as in so many other instances.
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34 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
Furthermore, Gilroy and some others do
not take into account the effects that ‘dias-
pora yearning and ambivalence’ can have on
‘the homeland’. Mechanisms of identity
regulation, which have the symbolic meaning
of boundary reproduction for the members of
the diasporic communities in the countries
where they live, can have serious effects
on the continuation of national and ethnic
conflicts in ‘the homeland’ (Anthias, 1998;
Yuval-Davis, 1997a). Contributing funds to
various ‘causes’ and struggles in the home-
land can often be the easiest and least threat-
ening way for members of the diaspora to
express their membership in and loyalty to
the collectivity. Such acts of symbolic identi-
fication, which are part of contemporary
identity politics (Safran, 1999; see also
Yuval-Davis, 1997b), can, however, have
very radical political and other effects in the
‘homeland’, a fact that might often be only of
marginal interest to the people of the dias-
pora. As Benedict Anderson (1995) has
pointed out, diasporic politics is often
reckless politics, without accountability and
without due democratic process. At the same
time, as more and more ethnocracies
develop, in Central and Eastern Europe as
well as in the Third World, laws parallel
to the Israeli and German ‘laws of return’ are
being developed, and states are constructed
that see as their body of citizens all the mem-
bers of their hegemonic ethnic collectivity all
over the world, rather than all those, of what-
ever ethnic origin, who are living in their
territory. In states such as Lithuania – but
also Ireland – the presidents of the state have
spent all or most of their lives outside the
borders of the state until being called to fill
the post. Diasporic communities can have
very important roles as political lobbies
of superpower governments (for instance in
the case of the Israeli lobby in the USA), as
well as constituting primary resources
for the homeland economy via the remittances
that are sent to the families that stay behind (as,
for example, is the case in the Philippines).
The development of transport and commu-
nication technologies in the second half of
the twentieth century has produced new
possibilities for maintaining contact between
diasporas and homelands. The spatial/temporal
shortcuts in communication between diaspo-
ras and homelands have intensified the level
of information, as well as the level of interac-
tion, between the two. Maybe even more
importantly, they have offered people in the
diaspora, who were previously isolated from
each other, new possibilities for getting
together, and for changed discourses of
belonging. These can be described as trans-
national (Basch et al., 1994; Cohen and
Vertovec, 1999; Grewal, 1999) rather than
diasporic. The nomadic way of life in which
people move back and forth between their
country of origin and their diasporic location
cannot be described, on a factual level, let
alone in terms of the politics of belonging, as
taking place in one country or the other, nor
can these people’s lives.
At the same time we should not forget that,
running counter to the technical ease of
communication, there is a growing strategy
of fortification of borders and securitization
of migration. More and more obstacles are
piled up, and more and more rights are
removed from those who travel from country
to country, in an attempt to escape the devas-
tating effects, economic as well as political,
that ethnic and civil strife, as well as neo-
liberal economic restructuring, have had on
their lives. Paradoxically, refugees and
asylum seekers, who have been recognized
by international laws as having a right to
escape danger and persecution from their
homelands, are now constructed as major
sources of threat to people in the countries
where they seek refuge – as criminals and
terrorists. Moreover, with the ‘global war on
terrorism’, any resistance to any regime is
easily constructed as terrorist activity, so the
whole raison d’être of giving refuge to
resisters, as happened during the Cold War,
has been undermined.
And yet, as the report of the Commission
on Human Security has commented (see also
Yuval-Davis, 2005), refugees and asylum
seekers are still the only minority among the
9781412934633-Chap-03 1/10/09 8:41 AM Page 35
SECURE, GENDERED POLITICS OF BELONGING
many millions of ‘people on the move’ glob-
ally – documented and especially undocu-
mented migrants as well as internally
displaced people – who have any formal
legal rights at all. The others become what
Giorgio Agamben (1997) has called, follow-
ing Hanna Arendt (1943), ‘bare lives’, easy
prey to extreme forms of exploitation and
abuse. Furthermore, more and more states
are now engaged in constructing ‘extra-ter-
restrial spaces’,2 such as Guantanamo Bay
and off-shore detention camps for asylum
seekers, in which the states attempt to
construct spaces where neither national nor
international laws apply.
‘SECURITY’, ‘HUMAN SECURITY’, AND
THE POLITICS OF BELONGING
Terrorists or Al-Quaida people, on the one
hand, and asylum seekers from poor
Southern countries, on the other hand, are
perceived, then, as major threats to Western
states. The latter are seeking, in a variety of
ways to contain them and keep them outside
their national borders, so as to keep their
own citizens ‘secure’. As I mentioned at the
beginning of the article, ‘security’ and
belonging are perceived to be closely related:
Michael Ignatief, while Head of the Centre
for Human Rights at Harvard University,
argued that belonging is about ‘feeling safe’
(2001).
The development of international human
rights discourse and legislation since the end
of World War II can be interpreted as one
way of ensuring that people will have the
right to feel secure, with their basic rights
respected wherever they are in the world. The
Nazi experience made it evident that national
governments cannot be given a monopoly of
guardianship of the rights of the people,
whether citizens or non-citizens, living under
their rule. The UN Human Rights declaration
aimed to create an end to ‘bare life’ situations
as a basic mission of the UN, international
relations and law.
35
The original design of the UN members who
passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
in 1948 was to consolidate the rights listed in the
declaration in a single treaty encompassing civil,
political, economic, social and cultural rights. USA
lobbying resulted in the division of the covenant
into two: an International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights and one on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights (16 December 1966). From that
time onwards, the official USA position has been
to relegate the latter rights to a lower status and
view them as something to be ‘achieved progres-
sively’ rather than implemented immediately’.
(Herman, 2002: xiii)
Therefore, during the Cold War, democ-
racy and human rights became the banner, in
different ways, of both sides of the conflict.
The West placed more emphasis on the lib-
eral civil and political rights, while the Soviet
bloc presented itself as the friend of the
developing world, with industrialization and
economic development as their priorities.
The development of international aid can be
seen as one historical manifestation of the
competition between the two blocs in the
Third World and the open door to refugees
in Western countries (who were then seen
mainly as escaping from communist regimes)
has also been a direct effect of this.
Since the end of the Cold War, which has
been accompanied by the exacerbation of
local ethnic and national conflicts, there has
been a massive increase of human rights dis-
course and legislation – partly as a replace-
ment for socialist discourse which had been
delegitimized. Another contributing factor
was the vision which, for a few years, offered
the illusion that the world was progressing
towards a unified global democracy. This
vision was aided by a series of UN confer-
ences with growing NGO participation, start-
ing with the 1994 conference in Vienna on
human rights. At this time cosmopolitan dis-
course became more dominant again (e.g.
Held, 1995; Kaldor, 2003; Pollock et al.,
2002) and the discourse on ‘human security’
became a complementary (and for some a
substitute) discourse to that of ‘human
rights’.
I have no space here to summarize in detail
the debates about human security (see, for
9781412934633-Chap-03 1/10/09 8:41 AM Page 36
36 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
example, Alkire, 2002; Basch et al., 1994;
Yuval-Davis, 2005). For many in NGOs and
development organizations, human security
discourse served as an attempt to overcome
some of the perceived shortcomings of
human rights discourse, especially its liberal
version, which excluded economic and social
rights. It was closely linked to Amartya Sen’s
(1992, 2000) ‘capabilities approach’ to
development. This approach rejects the
discourse of rights and entitlements as well
as of general measures of opulence, such as
GNP per capita, and instead focuses on how
people positioned in all groups in society are
capable of achieving quality of life in terms
of achievement and freedom. It argues that
resources have no value in themselves apart
from their role in promoting human function-
ing. This interpretation of human security
was the dominant one in the Human Security
Commission, which acted as a consultative
body to UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan.
This was how human security came to be
incorporated into his Millennium Report.
The Report of the Human Security
Commission, when it finally came out in 2003,
argued in its introduction that:
Human security complements state security, fur-
thers human development, and enhances human
rights. It complements state security by being
people-centered and addressing insecurities that
have not been considered as state security threats.
By looking at ‘downside risks’, it broadens the
human development focus beyond ‘growth with
equity’. Respecting human rights is at the core of
protecting human security (UN Human Security
Commission, 2003: 3).
However, as Basch and Timothy argue in
their articles in the special issue of Peace
Review on human security they edited in
2004, by the time the Report came out, the
subversive use of the notion of ‘security’
which had made it so popular among human
rights and peace activists, had lost much of
its flavour, as a result of the shift in discourse
on security after 9/11. In the context of the
‘global war on terror’, the changing patterns
of warfare, and the growing securitization of
borders and boundaries, the notion of human
security reflects the growing individuation of
military operations. Generally in the post
Cold War period there has been a growing
move in security concerns from inter-state to
intra-state ones, and from national territories
to ethnicized and racialized communities,
local and trans-national. Moreover, the grow-
ing use of long-distance guided missiles
which are targeted at specific people, and the
global hunting of particular terrorists, has
greatly exacerbated this tendency.
It is in this way that ‘human security’ has
been transformed from a cosmopolitan dis-
course of inclusion into a global discourse of
exclusion and fear, from a complement of
human rights to its antithesis. This can be
illustrated in the various ways ministers in
Tony Blair’s Labour government in the UK,
including the Prime Minister himself, have
publicly regretted the incorporation of the
Human Rights Act into British legislation as
blocking an efficient treatment of people
who are perceived to be security threats.
Ironically, its passage had been one of that
government’s first acts when it originally
came to power in 1997.
THE GENDERED PARADOXES OF
SECURE BELONGINGS
The security discourse is closely related to
nationalist politics of belonging. As Anderson
(1991 [1983]; see also Kitching, 1985)
pointed out, there are very few causes for
which people – traditionally men – are ready
to sacrifice their lives as well as to kill, one
being the cause of their imagined communi-
ties of belonging. Paradoxically, in the name
of communal security, real and/or imagined,
they are prepared to sacrifice their personal
security; for the ‘right of self-determination’,
they are prepared to sacrifice their right to
live; and for the sake of ‘peace’, they go
to war. With the shift from national drafts to
professional militaries, however, men – and
more and more women – are prepared to
do all this for the security of professional
military careers and – as the American and
9781412934633-Chap-03 1/10/09 8:41 AM Page 37
SECURE, GENDERED POLITICS OF BELONGING
British soldiers explained in Iraq – ‘they
were only doing their jobs’. (This is, of
course, why the growing reliance in the
American army on reservists, who are
dependent on the military for extra income
but not their main jobs, is an inherent weak-
ness in American military strategy).
The inherent paradox in women’s politics
of belonging is often somewhat different, and
relates to the different relationships that
women usually occupy in ethnic and national
collectivities. On the one hand, women
belong to and are identified as members of
the collectivity in the same way as men are.
Nevertheless, there are always rules and reg-
ulations – not to mention perceptions and
attitudes – specific to women. Such construc-
tions involve a paradoxical positioning of
women as both symbols and ‘others’ of
the collectivity. On the one hand, women are
seen as signifiers of the collectivity’s honour
(Yuval-Davis, 1997a, b; Yuval-Davis and
Anthias, 1989), in defence of which nations
go to war (‘for the sake of womenandchildren’
to use Cynthia Enloe’s (1990) expression).
On the other hand, they are a non-identical
element within the collectivity and subject to
various forms of control in the name of
‘culture and tradition’. However, such a for-
mulation reifies the notions of ‘culture and
tradition’ and homogenizes them, often
under hegemonic formulations. Cultures and
traditions are always contested as well as
constantly shifting and changing. One of the
major debates in the arena of ‘human rights’
(which, in the 1994 UN human rights confer-
ence in Vienna, was termed the debate on
‘Asian values’, see Herman, 2002; Ignatief,
2001) has been to what extent communities
have the right to keep their collective cultural
traditions, even if the latter are in conflict
with accepted rights of individual men and
women in those communities. Often the
debate is formulated in such reified terms
that any recognition of women’s rights is
equated, by those who support collective cul-
tural rights, with (undesirable) Westernization
and secularization. However, as feminists
from all over the world have pointed out, the
37
real debate is often about the right of a
particular patriarchal leadership to keep its
power to define the collective political proj-
ect. The acquisition of women’s rights often
means more changes in the communal power
relations than anything else. In fact, the
freezing of cultures in a highly selective
manner, which is beneficial to them, is often
one of the major tactics of fundamentalist
leaderships.
Another paradox which concerns the rela-
tionship between belonging and security for
women is the fact that often the highest
danger to women’s security lies where their
bonds of belonging lie as well. Feminists
have always been preoccupied with ‘the
enemy within’. They have pointed out that it
is often the woman’s nearest and dearest who
are the most violent towards her. Long before
the days of the ‘global war on terrorism’,
feminist activists had looked for ways to
make women feel secure wherever they were,
whether at home or outside at work, to
reclaim the street as a safe space, as well as
all other private and public spaces (e.g.,
Bunch, 1997; Lees, 1997). However, while
this preoccupation with women’s safety and
security has constituted a major part of fem-
inist politics, it has also always been only
part of it. Feminist politics also called for a
thorough transformation of the relations of
gender and sexuality within the family and
within society as a whole. To borrow from
the differentiation made by ‘Aunt Lydia’ in
Margaret’s Atwood’s book The Handmaid’s
Tale (1985; see also the introduction to
Sahgal and Yuval-Davis, 1992 [2002]), femi-
nist politics has always included both the notion
of ‘freedom of’ as well as that of ‘freedom
from’. It is much easier for people to per-
ceive and sympathize with the idea of nega-
tive freedom, however, than with that of a
positive one. Often demands for women’s
safety get a more sympathetic ear than those
which call for the radical transformation
of social relations that is necessary for safety
to be realized. Moreover, as Charlotte Bunch
(2002) has commented, even within such
constructions of negative freedom and
9781412934633-Chap-03 1/10/09 8:41 AM Page 38
38 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
‘human security’, the physical security risks
for women from violent men of whatever
nationality, race, and religion have been mar-
ginalized, if not completely ignored, within
the overall global concern with security.
Except, I would add, when the call to protect
and/or liberate women was useful as a rally-
ing cry for war – as, for example, happened
in the case of the war in Afghanistan and to a
lesser extent, on Iraq during the first decade
of this century.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Today – and probably always – belonging is
multiplex and multi-layered, continuous and
shifting, dynamic and attached. This is true
both in terms of the subjective and in terms
of the political. The notion of belonging
should be examined not as an abstract notion
but as one that is embedded in specific dis-
courses of power, in which gender, class,
sexual and racialized social and political
divisions, local and global, are intermeshed.
It incorporates discourses of participation, of
identification, and of emotional attachments.
The task is to explore the extent to which it
is possible to develop a politics of belonging
in which differentiated social positionings,
identifications, and political values are
acknowledged in a non-exclusionary way
and in which individual and collective emo-
tional security would not feel threatened by
permeable borders and boundaries.
Constructions of nationhood have been
changing since the late twentieth century.
Territories continue to carry crucial symbolic
and emotional meaning for nationalist dis-
courses, but in a world in which technologies
of transport and communication as well as
free market ideologies rule, and more and
more branches of the state are being priva-
tized – including large sections of the mili-
tary – ethnic boundaries and loyalties play
an increasingly central role in nationalist
ideologies. The liberating principle of ‘self-
determination’ can become a launching pad
for regressive defensive identities leading to
spatial as well as social segregation rather
than the democratic principle of pluralist
societies. These regressive, defensive identities
can take the forms of racist, extreme Right
movements on the one hand, and fundamen-
talist religious movements, which have
appeared in all major religions during the last
twenty years, on the other hand.
Yet, we should not ignore the complex emo-
tions of impotence, fear, and yearning to belong
that drive the contemporary politics of belong-
ing. They are not pre-modern relics of the past –
they have been playing major constitutive
roles in local and global politics. The Right has
always understood and used them. It is time
the rest of us do as well – but differently.
NOTES
1 Thanks to Richard Mowbray who drew my
attention to this literature.
2 Use of this expression stresses the attempt –
even though it was ultimately unsuccessful – to find
spaces where international law would not apply.
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9781412934633-Chap-04 1/10/09 8:41 AM Page 42
Sociological Practice and the
Sociotechnics of Governance
Kjeld Hogsbro, Hans Pruijt, Nikita Pokrovsky,
and George Tsobanoglou 1
INTRODUCTION
In many fields of practice (such as the organ-
ization of work, industrial relations, eco-
nomic development, housing, social services,
public administration, public safety, conflict
resolution, anti-poverty policy, health care)
the emphasis on top-down control for a long
time repressed interaction-centered para-
digms. But in the last twenty years a greater
emphasis has been put on bottom-up pro-
grams, users’ participation and developmen-
tal programs mobilizing actors in civil
society. Driving forces behind this swing are
varied and include: demands for autonomy,
disillusionment with inefficient centralized
bureaucracy, and the neo-liberal agenda of
curtailing the redistributive functions of the
state. As a result, many professionals have
become – in their own ways – experts in
stimulating, structuring and managing inter-
action. Intellectual entrepreneurs such as
4
management gurus and political ideologues
offer concepts, models and advice. The goal
of this chapter is to examine the possible role
for sociology, as policy and practice, in this
field of intervention. The point of departure
is the debate on ‘sociotechnics’, which was
once driven by the bold proposition of a
unique, universal, systematic, scientific
method for intervention based on citizen-
driven humanistic values. We will trace
how and why this vision tended to give
way to pragmatic, contextually dependent
approaches. Next, we will introduce a per-
spective which puts sociological theory and
practice into an ‘intertextual relation’ with
discourses of governance as they appear on
the global scene and, by doing this, look at
sociology as integrated in the development of
modern society. Finally, we will draw some
conclusions from this history with respect to
the request for a practical sociology in a
globalized world.
9781412934633-Chap-04 1/10/09 8:41 AM Page 43
SOCIOLOGICAL PRACTICE
FROM SOCIOTECHNICS TO
SOCIOLOGICAL PRACTICE
In 1966, the Polish sociologist Adam Podgórecki
set out to develop sociotechnics as an applied
social science that was non-ideological, but
would have the capability of unmasking the
Communist regime’s social engineering strata-
gems (Alexander and Schmidt, 1996). In the
1970s he went on by developing the ISA
Research Committee 26 on Sociotechnics.
Within the newsletter of this research commit-
tee from 1978 to 1990, discussion aimed at
developing and promoting a paradigm for
sociotechnics which could serve as an alterna-
tive to top-down social engineering traditions.
Sociotechnics, as a key concept, was then
sometimes used to label concrete forms of
social intervention (mostly in a political con-
text) and sometimes to label an academic dis-
cipline studying different forms of social
practice and governmental strategies
(Alexander and Schmidt, 1996). The point
seems to be that it is both: thus, it is an analytic
discipline producing results in the form of
recommendations. Sociotechnics was distin-
guished from earlier traditions of social engi-
neering, though it still referred to the same idea
of supporting rational choice in political
processes and social practice (Podgórecki and
Schmidt, 1977a, pp: 4–13; 1977b, pp: 13–28).
One may understand ‘sociotechnics’ as an applied
social science that may be defined as the set of
methods of engineering social action. It provides
intended social aims and goals with elaborations
of frames of references as well as effective ways
and means for their realization, relying in its oper-
ation solely on verified or verifiable propositions
that describe and explain relevant social behaviour
(Podgórecki and Schmidt, 1977a: 8).
In its ambition to be both a critical disci-
pline analyzing contemporary social policy,
legislation, mass media, management, etc.
and, at the same time, a practical one produc-
ing concepts and guidelines for social prac-
tice, action and development, sociotechnics
was supposed to tap many different sources
of sociological theory. In their book,
43
Multidimensional Sociology, Podgórecki and
Los (1979) profiled a sociology that com-
bined various theoretical perspectives and
levels of analysis referring to systems theory,
functionalism, structuralism, historical mate-
rialism, critical sociology, hermeneutic soci-
ology, phenomenology, ethnomethodology,
and symbolic interactionism. The scientific
interest that legitimized this rather eclectic
approach was the pragmatic aim of develop-
ing a useful tradition of applied sociology
which combined different contributions to the
sociological understanding of social realities
with an instrument for recommendations,
interventions and active involvement. This
multidimensional sociology represented a
multileveled methodological and conceptual
framework designed to help researchers ‘to
grasp more comprehensively the variety of
faces of social reality’ (Podgórecki and Los,
1979: 332). The authors emphasized the
importance of scrutinizing ideological dimen-
sions of various contemporary sociological
traditions by studying the social conditions
surrounding their development, success and
failure in particular socio-political contexts.
They believed that through this awareness and
reflexive multidimensionality, their proposed
approach would resist “ideological appropria-
tion by one group or one type of political
system. It would actually pose problems for
any group looking for one-sided yet ‘convinc-
ing’ ideas in order to elevate their political
programmes to [the] status of ‘science’” (Los,
1979: 136). Later contributions to the overall
paradigm of sociological practice have had the
same quest for a multidimensional approach
(Fritz, 1991; Turner, 2001).
Podgórecki’s concept of sociotechnics built
on Popper’s (1957) distinction between, on
the one hand, utopian social engineering that
was driven by an elusive vision of the ideal
society and was bound to have disastrous con-
sequences, and, on the other hand, piecemeal
social engineering, which proceeded by iden-
tifying social evils and responding to these by
cautious, reversible reform. It took the form of
an elaborate framework of consecutive steps,
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44 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
expressed in keywords (Podgórecki, 1996),
which were later developed further in
Podgórecki and Shields (1989: 15–31):
● problem recognition,
● problem identification (clarification and ranking
of values and goals),
● global evaluation (initial diagnosis of cause,
prognosis, teleological decision),
● activation of the theory base (strategy, accessible
options),
● design,
● action (experiments, implementation of final
plan) and
● evaluation.
An innovation with respect to an earlier
framework formulated by Zetterberg (1962)
was the choice to include investigation of the
‘relationship between the values of a client, a
sponsor, an expert and the public in general’
(Podgórecki, 1983: 35). Underlying the para-
digm of sociotechnics was a belief in modern
policy as based on well-defined values and
the possibility of reaching a scientifically
based consensus about the consequences
of different strategies, as Weber believed
(1922), and in rational decision-making, as
outlined by Lindblom (1968). The assump-
tion of rational decision-making was a prob-
lematic aspect, however. Maria Los pointed
out that both diagnostics and the range of
possibilities for action were inseparably
linked to politics (Los, 1978: 18–25), and
David Mills suggested that the significance
of the manner in which actors defined
problems was being overlooked in the contri-
butions by Zetterberg (1962), Lazersfeld
and Reitz (1975), and Podgórecki (1975)
(Mills, 1981).
Podgórecki was strongly influenced by the
experiences of Poland before, during and
after the breakdown of the communist
regime. This transformation of the political
system represented a dual development,
whereby a top-down social engineering tradi-
tion was confronted with a bottom-up
approach and, eventually, the emergence of
Solidarnosc as a competing political actor.
Different actors used the accumulated
sociotechnical knowledge while competing
sociotechnical experts were put to the test by
new socio-political dynamics. Influential
social actors endorsed some experts; others
were promoted by their own scientific commu-
nity (Podgórecki, 1996). These developments
reinforced Podgórecki’s belief in a sociotech-
nical tradition that aimed at equipping
common people with steering capabilities
to advance social projects on the basis of
scientifically backed means. Yet, they also
contributed to an appreciation of the
complexities surrounding interventions in a
field of actors, who have diverse understand-
ings of the problems they address. This was
made especially clear by the post-communist
realities, whereby the long suppressed ideo-
logical and other conflicts emerged with
unexpected and sometimes destructive
vigour.
It is necessary to remember Podgórecki’s
warnings about utopian sociotechnics. They
were rooted in the totalitarian experience of
twentieth century Europe. As history has
shown, the dangers of utopian designs
aiming at transforming social structures to fit
a ‘scientific’ blueprint are immense. Even
when the goals seem progressive and legiti-
mate, an imposed utopia represents a threat
to the vital interests and integrity of local
society. To exemplify this, Podgórecki
referred to a study conducted by Massell
(1974), which concerned the revolutionary
strategy to emancipate women in the Muslim
communities of the Soviet Central Asia in
1919–1929. The hidden goal was to penetrate
tightly-knit Muslim society and undermine it
from within. This intervention resulted in a
worsening situation for the local women. The
lessons derived from the totalitarian past
have to be kept in mind as a reminder of a
negative potential of grand designs and the
need for a realistic sociological understand-
ing of the context in which the intervention is
taking place.
The newsletter discussions in the first
decade of RC26 mirror a growing concern
about the dilemma faced by sociological
experts when confronted with conflicting
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SOCIOLOGICAL PRACTICE
values and social interests. Conflicts like
these might deter experts from participating
in public debates and lead them to suppress
critical comments on dominant values.
The dilemma demands strong academic
institutions and networks to counterbal-
ance these forms of repression (Benveniste,
1983).
At the end of the 1980s, we can see the
contours of the following conclusions about
the possibilities and obligations for sociolo-
gists working in the field of political recom-
mendations and social practice:
1 Definitions of problems and accessible strategic
solutions are defined by the societal context.
2 Sociological practitioners are obliged to address
certain ethical questions concerning the values of
accessible strategies before making recommen-
dations and interventions.
3 Guidelines for sociological interventions are mul-
tidimensional, and the theoretical approach must
be open to using different sociological theories to
shed light on different aspects of social realities.
4 It is an important task for a sociological practice
to address the issue of conflicts between differ-
ent definitions of the problems and their connec-
tion to different public epistemologies and social
interests.
SOCIOLOGICAL PRACTICE
In 1987, ISA approved the addition of the
term Sociological Practice to the name of
Research Committee RC26 at the RC’s
request. The change was seen as ‘a response
to the considerably increased number of
scholars and practitioners engaged in various
countries in developing and applying theo-
ries and methods of social policy research
and utilization’ (Schmidt, 1987: 5). At the
same time, the board of the Research
Committee established cooperation with
the three American organizations addressing
the utilization of social science, namely the
Sociological Practice Section of the American
Sociological Association, the Society for
Applied Sociology and the Clinical Sociology
45
Association.2 The merging process of these
different initiatives was not limited to a
broadened access to and interchanges among
members of these organizations. From an
epistemological perspective, the paradigm of
sociotechnics moved away from an aspira-
tion to establish a unique model for studying
social practice and to make recommendations
for socially sustainable solutions for questions
of influence, social problems, democracy and
management, to a more pragmatic position
where problems and possible solutions were
regarded as closely linked to the context in
which they were situated. This gave a new
impetus to a long-recognized need for bring-
ing into discussion the wide range of experi-
ences from the whole spectrum of sociological
intervention. This need was recognized by
Adam Podgórecki as a vital aspect of
Sociotechnics, as documented first in a series
of volumes edited by him in Poland and later
in his publications in English, including the
1996 volume edited by him with Jon
Alexander and Rob Shields. It might be inter-
ventions in family patterns as well as political
programmes. It might be the application of
macro-sociological theory as well as micro-
sociological theory.
Not only was the need of a multidimen-
sional sociology now introduced as a basic
approach to understanding sociotechnics, but
a multidimensional practice was institution-
alized as the empirical point of departure.
The ambition to have one outstanding matrix
for analysis and recommendation had receded
into the background, and the conviction
linked to early modernism, namely that it was
possible to define rational solutions to prob-
lems defined with consensus, had evaporated.
As Adam Podgórecki defines the problem
in 1978, the ‘unexploited potentialities’ of
sociology compared to disciplines such as eco-
nomics, legal sciences, demography and psy-
chology stem from four major characteristics:
1 Sociology is not associated with a practical non-
academic profession.
2 Sociology is much younger as an academic
discipline.
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46 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
3 Sociology has no institutionalized tradition for
offering advice and consultancy.
4 Sociological associations have no tradition of
generating diagnostics and guidelines for social
intervention.
A paradox of sociology is that, on the one
hand, most students have little ambition to
pursue careers in scientific research, while,
on the other hand, the applied branches of the
discipline were never firmly established.
Psychology, for example, did much better in
this respect.
Two explanations have been advanced
(Jacobs, 2004). One explanation is that the
association of the label ‘sociology’ with left
wing politics may have hindered the accept-
ance of the field of ‘applied sociology’. The
reality is, however, that concepts and meth-
ods that originate in sociology did see a wide
application. One example is the use of focus
groups in market research. The second expla-
nation is that members of academic sociology
departments were, for a long time, preoccupied
with establishing the scientific respectability
of their discipline, and were not very inter-
ested in applying sociological insights to,
for example, business or administrative prob-
lems. Instead, this tended to become the
province of applied disciplines such as busi-
ness studies and public administration.
Nevertheless, sociological practitioners
have a lot to offer. They bring a strong sensi-
tivity to social context. They are versed in
both quantitative and qualitative methods and
can use a variety of theoretical frameworks to
approach practical problems from different
angles. And, when drawing on the ethno-
graphic tradition, they have access to subtle,
often taken-for-granted, micro-processes that
are frequently overlooked but can have
macro-consequences (Jacobs, 2004).
By establishing a link between sociotech-
nics, clinical sociology and sociological prac-
tice, the Research Committee became the
host of intensive discussions linking practical
sociological interventions at micro, meso and
macro levels to the continued development of
sociological concepts and theories.
In 1991, Jan M. Fritz defined ‘clinical soci-
ology’ as:
the creation of new systems as well as the inter-
vention in existing systems for purposes of assess-
ment and/or change. Clinical sociologists are
humanistic scientists who are multidisciplinary
in approach. They engage in planned social
change efforts by focusing on one system level
(e.g., interpersonal, community, international) but
integrate levels of focus in their work and do so from
a sociological frame of reference (Fritz, 1991: 18).
The distinction between clinical sociology
and sociological practice was not that clear.
The term clinical sociology was first used in
the 1920s to label a kind of practical medical
sociology (Fritz, 1991: 18) and though the
concept was soon used outside the medical
domain, it still bears connotations linked to
the concept of social pathology. It is cur-
rently used as a label for sociological inter-
vention in social problems, conflicts and
interaction on a personal level. Examples of
such interventions are work with delinquent
youths (Bility, 1999), victims of sexual abuse
(Disch, 2001), self-help groups (Williams,
2000), as well as work related to family inter-
action and conflict mediation on an individ-
ual and even on a national level (Fritz, 2002).
The broader term ‘Sociological Practice’
is used for sociological support to social
development at an organizational, local and
national level.
GOVERNMENTALITY OF
SOCIOTECHNICS
Sociotechnics can be seen as part of a wider
conceptual field of social intervention. This
field can be captured by the term ‘govern-
mentality’. Foucault (1978) coined this term
to denote a new form of government, the
origin of which he dated in the eighteenth
century. This new form of government
involves ‘the continual definition and redefi-
nition of what is within the competence of
the state and what is not’ (Foucault, 1978:
103). In other words, governmentality means
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SOCIOLOGICAL PRACTICE
how people are governed, agree to be gov-
erned and govern themselves (Tsobanoglou,
1993). Authors such as Mitchel Dean distin-
guish different modes of governmentality,
and suggest that in a given era a certain mode
of governmentality may be broadly domi-
nant. A mode of governmentality consists of
a set of specific answers to the questions
‘what is it to govern’, ‘what are we going to
govern’, ‘how are we going to (be) govern(ed)’
and ‘why are we going to (be) govern(ed)’
(Dean, 1999). Thus, governmentality includes
answers to epistemological, technical and
ethical questions. These answers are cultural
products that are largely taken for granted by
members of society (Dean, 1999: 16). When
reasoning from the viewpoint of governmen-
tality theory, the increased emphasis apparent
in all kinds of policy towards interaction
among subjects should be seen as a switchover
to a different mode of governmentality.
Governmentality theorists have suggested
that the current mode of governmentality is
characterized by an emphasis on ‘responsible
and disciplined autonomy’ (Dean, 1999: 153),
a ‘will to empower’ and a focus on interaction
among subjects (Cruikshank, 1999).
A case that seems to demonstrate such
transformations in the modes of governmen-
tality is welfare policy. In 1980, the then
Minister of Social Affairs in Denmark
announced at the OECD assembly that the
time had come to reduce professional domi-
nance in the whole field of social services
and to try to mobilize social networks of
disabled individuals (Bjerregaard, 1980).
Though she belonged to the Social Democratic
Party, Ritt Bjerregaard thus became one of
the first politicians who challenged the social
engineering project that had dominated the
Nordic model of ‘welfare governmentality’
since 1960.
In 1982 the neo-Conservative/neo-Liberal
parties won the Danish election and replaced
the Social Democratic government. During the
following years the government focused on:
● decentralization of influence and decision-making,
● a rehabilitation of voluntary social work and
47
● social networks and community as explanatory
factors for understanding social problems.
In the USA the situation was very similar,
when the Reagan administration took over
and introduced a right-wing, voluntarist
agenda into the concept of the welfare system,
challenging the hegemony of the ‘Great
Society Programme’ of the 1960s. Though
the former Danish Social Democratic
Minister of Social Affairs, Ritt Bjerregaard,
would never identify herself with right-wing
American policy, her attack on the profes-
sionals of the social system was linked to the
same discourse.
Looking at the ‘the governmentality of the
welfare state’ discourses, we can follow a
transformation of the social engineering
discourse from focusing solely on structural
reasons for poverty to focusing on the
responsibility of the individual. Given that
this transformation was effected by political
parties that occupied opposite positions in
the political arena, it represented a deeper
change in the governmentality, or welfare
discourse, of the western welfare states. In
the process, the ‘post-Reagan’ USA gained a
leading global role in formulating the agenda
of the welfare system – clearly, a role that it
had never had before (Prince, 2001).
Already in the 1960s, neo-conservatives in
the USA combined economic liberalism with
an emphasis on morality, ethics and commu-
nity values (Gibson, 1997). Charles Murray
thought that the welfare system was actively
contributing to the creation of a permanent
underclass dependent on welfare benefits.
This ‘underclass’ was defined by its culture
and its self-destructive behaviour (Murray,
1994). In a more sophisticated way other
conservatives, such as Marvin Olasky,
argued that it was necessary to distinguish
between ‘those who need a hand’ and ‘those
who need a push’ (Olasky, 1992). This led to
the instrumentality of a ‘welfare to workfare’
policy introduced by President Clinton in
1996 in the USA (Tsobanoglou, 2002, 2004,
2006). Such policy spread to Europe as the
only possible way for the Social Democrats
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48 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
to regain the lost political leadership. Thus
the neo-conservative emphasis on personal
responsibility, morality, family values, com-
munities and national values has dominated
the welfare discourse unchallenged since the
beginning of the 1980s (Gibson, 1997). The
concept that a sector of the population is
defined by a kind of cultural inability to cope
with the challenges of modern society is
widely accepted today, not least among pro-
fessional helpers (Gibson, 1997: 175).
The liberal Democratic discourse in the
USA (like the Social Democratic discourse
in Denmark) had been caught by a paradigm
that understood ‘antisocial acts as simply the
result of structural factors’ (Gibson, 1997:
191). This made them incapable of relating
to issues of morally unacceptable behaviour.
They did not have an answer to the conserva-
tive focus on individual responsibility,
safe communities and a shared work
ethic (Gibson, 1997: 191). Furthermore, the
Liberal charity was running directly into a
critique of being chauvinistic when it
reduced poor people to helpless victims who
had to be saved by liberal experts (Gibson,
1997: 191). The dominant policy discourse
jumped from one-sidedly blaming everything
on structure to one-sidedly holding the
individual accountable for all problems. This
shows how political discourses can change
the specific definition of the problem and
the limits of accessible strategies, thus
redefining what can be perceived as rational
solutions.
Vivian Schmidt (2002) argues, in a com-
parative study of welfare systems in Britain,
New Zealand, Germany and France that it is
a mistake to think that political innovations
that are up against strong group interests are
doomed to suffer defeat. The study shows
that it is possible to succeed by changing fun-
damental discourses about social problems
and political obligations. In these instances,
sociologists have to be able to explain how
these changes in public discourses take place
(Schmidt, 2002). It must be admitted that
efforts to analyze these changes are rather
difficult because of the different levels of
social processes that have to be taken into
consideration (Hastings, 1998).
The specific constellation of values, issues
and governmentality in local settings widens
the variety of existing welfare models in the
world. Welfare systems are often understood
from an ethnocentric European point of view
as limited to a mixture of three or four
European models (Abrahamson, 1999;
Esping-Andersen, 1990; Titmus, 1974). In a
global sociological discourse these limited
possibilities seem to be contradicted by a
variety of East Asian models with different
characteristics (Abrahamson, 1999; Clammer,
1997; Hong, 2000) Specific studies in this
field, such as Clammer’s study of Singapore
(1997) and Joseph Tharamangalam’s study
of the Kerala Province in India (1998), are
examples of case studies that focus on the
genesis of a certain governmentality and a
specific welfare system linked to it.
The question now is whether trends in
governance are so pervasive that they perme-
ate sociology as well. In the 1980s, theoreti-
cal sociology seemed to move away from a
focus on structural determination, which had
been dominant in the 1970s, towards a stronger
focus on the individual subject acting in a
field of possibilities. Bourdieu (1980),
Habermas (1981) as well as Luhmann (1984)
produced works that exemplify this. All three
approaches share the same theoretical inter-
est in overcoming the gap between macro-
level sociological theory and micro-level
social psychology, and in re-installing the
individual as a responsible actor, not totally
dependent on the structure, but confronted
with the structure. The structure is not seen
as a determining structure in these approaches,
but more as a social field, as defined by
Sartre in his Critique de la Raison Dialectique
(1960/1982: 479–504, 549) and elaborated
by Bourdieu (1980). Understood as a social
field, the structure permits the social agent
certain possibilities for changing his or her
position in the field, and as an effect of
numerous individual movements, the field in
itself changes and opens up new possibilities
for other agents.
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SOCIOLOGICAL PRACTICE
This development in sociological theory
took place in the same period when liberals
in the USA and social democrats in Europe
were losing their grip on the dominant polit-
ical discourse. This new emphasis in socio-
logical theory corresponds to the increasing
role of the acting subject that Dean (1999)
and Cruikshank (1999) saw as the hallmark
of the current mode of governmentality.
McLain (2002: 268) suggested a two-way
relationship between sociological theory and
the wider society: ‘From a reflexive perspec-
tive, applying sociology is a redundancy:
sociological knowledge is always applied in
ways that have transformative consequences
for both sociology and society’. Sociological
thinking may have an impact through the
education of social workers or the general
public debate, and the public debate might
influence the content of new sociological
theory when academic sociologists try to
produce socially relevant and applicable
theories, or try to answer questions posed by
local authorities or the public debate.
The perspective of pervasive trends in gov-
ernance can help us understand the obstacles
that any attempt at establishing a context-
independent applied form of sociology will
face. Interventions that unleash the unique
qualities of sociology require insight into the
dominant discourse on governance. One has
to be able to decide whether to confront and
expose it, or simply adapt to it. This aspect
of the conditions for sociotechnics was not
acknowledged by Podgórecki and others in
the early discussions on sociotechnics. It
leaves sociological practice in a more pro-
found dilemma of, on the one hand, adapting
to a form of governance and, on the other
hand, maintaining a critical distance from
its goals, premises and epistemological
framework.
Historical experience shows that sociology
tends to be perceived as a threat by totalitarian
or authoritarian regimes. Sociology in China
was banned between 1950 and 1979. Though
the sociological tradition in China before 1950
aimed at practical innovations, the Communist
Party did not want any competing discourse of
49
society (Li, 1999). When liberal economic
activities were encouraged at the end of the
1970s, departments of sociology were re-
established as an answer to social problems
following the rapidly emerging social
changes (Li, 1999). Still, the government
‘discourages free discourse about political
ideas’ so mainstream Chinese sociology has
limited its attention to ‘social problems that
confronted economic development and social
stability, such as population growth, urban
poverty, unemployment and crime’ (Li, 1999:
275). This development is in many ways
comparable to the situation in the Soviet
Union (Nikitin, 2001) and several other com-
munist states, where sociology was also sus-
pended for considerable periods of time.
Similarly, parallels can be drawn with the
European South when dictatorial regimes in
Greece, Spain and Portugal were in control
of the political process. The Madrid ISA
Congress, in 1990 signalled the renaissance
in social studies in Iberia, but not in Greece
where to this day law, theology, philosophy,
architecture and journalism appear to play the
role of substitute social sciences (Tsobanoglou,
2000).
SOCIOLOGICAL INTERVENTION AT
THE MESO-LEVEL
In articles from the 1980s, James March lib-
erated himself from the ‘myth of rationality’
in social science when addressing issues of
organizations. He claimed that much of the
organizational reality might better be seen as
products of ongoing performance and institu-
tionalized ways of tackling problems and
pretending to be in charge (March, 1984;
1988). Engaging in intervention, for example
by providing training to managers, involves
entering into a discursive field that tends to
be populated by concepts that have been suc-
cessfully promoted by members of what has
been called the ‘guru industry’ rather than
having proved to be effective rational solutions
to well-defined problems (Collins, 2000).
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50 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
Standard procedure in the guru industry is:
identify some problem, formulate a model
solution, find some empirical material that to
some extent supports the model, find a
catchy label, and promote the model globally
as the way forward. The message is: Smart
players are starting to adopt the model; do as
I advise you to do and rich rewards will be
yours; ignore this message and you will find
yourself stranded.
Let us consider an example from the field
of the organization of work. A straightfor-
ward way to apply sociological knowledge
would be to offer training sessions on the
contrast between scientific management and
sociotechnical systems design. A problem,
however, is that many managers will not find
this interesting. In contrast, managers often
are much more attracted by the concept of
team work. Part of its popularity stems from
a global bestseller on the organization of pro-
duction (Womack et al., 1990) that took the
Toyota production model – relabelling it as
‘lean production’ – and tried to make it
socially acceptable by adding (unsubstanti-
ated) claims about dynamic teams in which
workers learn and creatively apply profes-
sional skills. The authors presented it as a
model that every company must implement.
A possible course of action for a practical
sociologist is to hop on the bandwagon of
team work, but then to open up the discourse
by presenting various dimensions of team
work and their complex ramifications for
the mode of supervision, decision-making,
power relations and the logistical and discipli-
nary context of work processes (Pruijt, 2003).
Thus, the occurrence of a pervasive trend
in governance does not imply that the sociol-
ogist has to choose between either joining the
fashionable rhetoric-reproducing flock or
retreating into post-modern theorizing. Within
concepts that conform to the dominant trend in
governance, there is space for widely divergent
opinions and practices. This is exemplified by
the concept of team work. While neatly
encapsulating all the characteristics of the
current mode of governmentality (responsi-
ble and disciplined autonomy, empowerment
and interaction among subjects), it can be
used to promote various models of organiza-
tion and management, ranging from a
modernized version of Taylorism, to a polar
opposite of Taylorism inspired by sociotech-
nical systems design theory. It seems to be
a general characteristic of popular guru
concepts that they are open to diverse inter-
pretations, are flexible, and rife with internal
contradictions (Pruijt, 1998). The seeming
convergence at the macro-level, which gov-
ernmentality theory suggests, does not imply
determinism at the meso-level.
GLOBALIZATION, GOVERNANCE AND
UTOPIA
In the early discussion on sociotechnics we
meet references to Mannheim (1936), and
though the concept of utopia is not explicitly
addressed and elaborated as is done in the
works of Gramsci (1971) and Bloch (1965)
and later on by Etzioni (2004), the existence
of utopian visions of more democratic orga-
nizational forms is vivid in the considera-
tions addressing questions of sociotechnics
that contribute to the mobilization of civil
society and support the influence of the
common citizen. As such, the discussions
about sociotechnics have not only addressed
the day-to-day questions of conflicts in fam-
ilies, organizations and social policy but also
raised the question of utopian ideals and
grappled with the quest for feasible forms of
social practices informed by these ideals.
Today these discussions are inevitably linked
to questions surrounding recent trends in the
globalization processes.
Globalization is one of the most frequently
used terms in modern scholarly and everyday
language. It has long joined the ranks of
such terms as ‘history’, ‘civilization’, ‘era’,
‘progress’, ‘modernity’, ‘post-modernity’,
and other conceptual terms that express the
style and character of the public mood and
consciousness of our times. The appearance
and proliferation of sentiments and move-
ments opposed to globalization, not just
in the West but in Russia and developing
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SOCIOLOGICAL PRACTICE
countries as well, have contributed to the
dramatization of the mass media’s coverage
of globalization, influencing concerns of the
general public.
Commonly accepted models of globaliza-
tion are based on ideas about a united and
integrated world civilization which encom-
passes the entire earth and near-earth space
and sweeps away all kinds of borders, be
they between cultures or states, in the domain
of social inequality, or between time-zones
and geographical regions. The world is por-
trayed as becoming compact, accessible,
transparent and visible, with its parts linked
by interdependency. This concerns econom-
ics, technology, politics, the environment,
moral values, and all the other areas of inter-
est to contemporary humankind, including
such negative phenomena as organized
crime, the narcotics business, terrorism and
other destructive forms of activity. The state-
ment ‘the world is so small’ is the epitome
of this mindset. The world really is becoming
small, in both the best and the most threaten-
ing sense of the word. It is becoming pervaded
by anomie, which makes governance very
difficult and expands the scope of risk as an
unavoidable element in the everyday life of
concerned citizens (Beck, 1986). The percep-
tion of risk factors is further differentiated by
the particular context in which different
agents operate (Benveniste, 1983):
● To the expert, the risk might be that people do
not understand the consequences of CO2 before
it is too late.
● To the politicians, the risk might be to lose the
support of the citizens.
● To different groups of citizens, the risk might be
that experts and politicians might be wrong.
Globalization processes are not evolving
arbitrarily or at the whim of impersonal
forces, but, to a large extent, through rational
human efforts. These processes permeate all
social groups and institutions, transforming
them both from within and from without.
NGOs as the important caretakers of civil
concerns turn into INGOs (International
Non-Governmental Organizations) and these
INGOs strive to put on the agenda the issue
51
of how to distribute scarce resources fairly at
a global level. Globalization is also having a
direct impact on the primary ‘cells’ of human
societies, small social groups of people pos-
sessing closely related values, similar social
experience, and corresponding perceptions
of the world. With their inner beings shaped
by the same historical events, members of
each group have experienced these events in
approximately the same fashion. In the most
general terms, it can be said that the social
and biological stages of an individual’s
development are superimposed on a series of
historical events and this results in the unique
social characteristics of the ‘cells’.
Therefore, as expressed in Pokrovsky’s
concept of ‘cellular globalization’ (Pokrovsky,
2001), the ultimate meaning of globalization
goes beyond processes of integration of those
parts of the world community that used to be
isolated and alienated from each other.
According to this conceptualization, global-
ization permeates every cell, every small
community, at times radically changing the
nature of basic relations between people
and organizations and creating new sets of
values and reference points in our everyday
lives. In other words, globalization not only
implies ‘a small world’, but also a world
which is essentially new in all of its modali-
ties. And this pervasive change is often
resisted as unacceptable, and sometimes
gives rise to direct protest by those who are
not ready to embrace the birth of a new system
with all its unpredictable and unstudied char-
acteristics. This is the way it has always been
in the past whenever a civilization crossed a
threshold in its development, passing from
one moment of history to another.
The concept of cellular globalization helps
to grasp a number of important develop-
ments, such as:
● a tendency towards material consumerism,
● a constant narrowing of social interest,
● the requirements of flexibility, expressed in the
ability to adapt to unpredictable social changes,
● a tendency towards virtualization, understood as
often unconscious entry into the world of ‘simu-
lacres’ (artificial mythological structures) that do
not have any direct bearing on the objective reality,
9781412934633-Chap-04 1/10/09 8:41 AM Page 52
52 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
● the dislocation of moral issues, compartmentaliza-
tion of traditional functions of moral consciousness,
and the spread of anomie, understood as the dis-
integration of basic values, and increased vague-
ness with respect to what is considered right and
wrong and
● the prevalence of superficiality, the disappear-
ance of cultural demands, the departure from the
classical cultural heritage and national traditions,
as well as the willingness to make use of and
disseminate cultural ersatz.
The world system is moving towards a sit-
uation often described as ‘glocalization’.
Both individuals and local communities are
influenced by international discourses and
they are active in the implementation of these
discourses in local cultural contexts. With the
help of negotiation, global governance acts in
an organizational field of local actors. At its
most effective, it acts through reflexive,
responsive processes, forming an institu-
tional milieu of relative consensus and
collaboration on the basis of local values
(OECD, 2001). This can be done with
respect to international contracts and proj-
ects. In this situation, governance often aims
at increasing the competitiveness of the given
region in the international arena.
An unusual symbiosis between global and
traditional trends at a cellular level is occur-
ring in many countries, which gives every
national situation its own special flavour and
meaning. Some crisis-stricken societies, such
as Russia, actually find a relative stabiliza-
tion through integration into world processes.
In this sense, societies of the Commonwealth
of Independent States (CIS) are influenced
by these trends to a greater extent than the
relatively stable western societies, and are
acting as a kind of proving ground for trends
that will fully manifest themselves globally
only in the future.
While globalization opens new opportuni-
ties, it also generates new threats. It has
resulted in an anomic world, making gover-
nance very difficult. This situation calls for
new forms of sociotechnics. There are some
instances of brand new procedures geared
towards civil involvement at a global level.
One of these new approaches is ‘Die
Plannungzelle’ (in English ‘The Planning
Cell’), after Peter Dienel who initiated this
reform movement in 1997. It is also known,
worldwide, as ‘Citizens’ Juries’ after the
American participatory democracy institu-
tion that was initiated at the same time in the
USA (1972) and influenced by ideas of
Thomas Jefferson.
The ‘Planning Cell’ is a group of randomly
selected citizens released (with remuneration)
from their daily duties for a limited period in
order to work out solutions to problems.
Process moderators assist them. In this
method, the citizens act as lay assessors or lay
planners. In order to avoid all forms of selec-
tive distortion, a systematic random procedure
of selection from a clearly demarcated basic
population is necessary. In this way a micro-
cosm of society is formed, in which all social
strata and age groups and both sexes have the
chance of being represented. It is possible to
include as many social values as possible in the
decision-making process. As well as possess-
ing ‘common sense’ and everyday experience,
participants are provided with the necessary
factual information. The input of this informa-
tion takes place mainly in the form of
pre-prepared informative material, hearings
with affected interest groups, interviews with
experts, on-the-spot visits, etc. (Dienel 1997;
Steward et al., 1994).
The Planning Cell illustrates a type of
‘pragmatic utopian construction’ set up to
address the conflicts and problems of modern
globalization. The influence of these con-
structions is not linked to institutional control
over nation-states, but to a ‘moral authority’
of their ordinary members and recommenda-
tions worked out by them. Rather than focusing
on legal balances between powerful actors on
the international political scene, this scheme
offers a possibility for an alternative choice
in the formation of global discourses.
Furthermore, this approach represents
an example of sociotechnics with a slightly
utopian bent. While it builds on the early
aspirations to activate civil society, it does not,
however, link them to the trust in a consensus
9781412934633-Chap-04 1/10/09 8:41 AM Page 53
SOCIOLOGICAL PRACTICE
based on rational choice, but to a possibility of
facilitating a novel political discourse to
widen the field of participatory strategies.
The Planning Cell is but one example of the
global tendency to focus on citizens’ rights
and participation.
The Blair government introduced ‘Citizens’
Juries’ into the exercise of local social policy
in order to advance inclusion policies
(Steward et al., 1994). There are numerous
forms of social action and social develop-
ment programs all over the world undertaken
as social experiments in the hope of finding
ways of involving common citizens in the
search for solutions to local problems. The
political aim of such initiatives is to trigger a
process in which local volunteer resources
are mobilized and the relation between
public institutions and citizens is brought
into debate (Capece and Schanz, 2000;
Chappell and Lanza-Kaduce, 2004; Hegland,
1994; Hogsbro et al., 1991; Rusmore, 1999;
Stoecker, 1999; Williams, 2000). They
involve a multiplicity of evaluation designs
from summative to formative evaluation,
empowerment evaluation, participant evalua-
tion and ‘responsive constructivist’ evalua-
tions (Fettermann et al., 1996; Guba and
Lincoln, 1989; Patton, 1997). The reports
following from these different kinds of eval-
uations have a triple aim:
● For the politicians, the function of the reports is
to identify the profound elements in the legisla-
tion needed to push the societal development in
the preferred direction.
● For the professional practitioners and grass-roots
activists, the function of the reports is to identify
barriers and possibilities for future practice in
local projects.
● For the sociologists involved, the reports
contribute to the theoretical understanding of
community relations and processes.
The legislation that might follow these
new types of developmental programme is
supposed to encourage and support further
developments in the field, where local mobi-
lization has already engendered a local practice
ready to benefit from the new legislation.
53
These developmental programmes repre-
sent an innovative political form of mediating
between top-down and bottom-up gover-
nance. At the same time, they constitute an
almost utopian form of new reflexive gover-
nance, a sociotechnics of a decentralized
welfare state. The method aims at mobilizing
local people (civil society) around self-
defined issues and goals, and, as such, it
remains sensitive to local context and local
differences throughout the world (Bility,
1999). There is nothing fixed about such
approaches to sociotechnics. They might be
transient. They are not inseparably linked to
a certain level of governmental development.
But they are part of a valuable practice that
needs to be both documented for future
recognition and added to the accumulated
cultural capital enlarging the field of optional
strategic choices.
Clifford Geertz used the concept ‘the uni-
verse of human discourses’ to underscore the
point that we are dealing with multiple possi-
bilities of ways people can organize them-
selves in meaningful societal relations
(Geertz, 1973: 14). The limits of these possi-
bilities we will never be able to anticipate.
Geertz makes a statement that is relevant to
the discussion on sociotechnics when he con-
cludes: ‘The essential vocation of interpretive
anthropology is not to answer our deepest
questions, but to make available to us answers
that others, guarding other sheep in other val-
leys, have given, and thus to include them in
the consultable record of what man has said’
(Geertz, 1973: 30). Sociological practice
must realize that by contributing to the disclo-
sure of the ‘universe of human discourses’
and reporting about sociotechnics practiced in
different places and different times, we con-
tribute to human development.
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ROLE OF
SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
From the recent and past discussions about
sociotechnics, its methodology, goals and
9781412934633-Chap-04 1/10/09 8:41 AM Page 54
54 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
interdependency with governmentality, we can
outline the following conclusions related to
the current processes of globalization and the
prospects for sociology to make a difference
in the field of international discourses:
1 In a glocalized world, the primary function of
sociology may involve expansion of the discur-
sive field of governmentality by offering opportu-
nities for people to develop or access different
discourses, thereby enhancing their ability to
engage with the processes of globalization and
concomitant transformations of organizations,
local communities and everyday life.
2 Sociological practice presupposes a sociological
theory that is not exclusively oriented towards
either macro – or micro – level phenomena.
Sociological theory has to mediate between
these two levels, as even the smallest social unit
will be an actor on a global scene.
3 Under glocalization, local actors are increasingly
liberated from national bonds and become more
open to international networks and discourses.
Relations between organizations are subject to
continuous construction and reconstruction.
Theories of discursive fields and inter-organiza-
tional networks become of vital importance.
4 The nature of current trends of globalization both
requires and introduces profound transforma-
tions of social relations. Both at micro- and
macro- level, in theory and practice, we need to
address issues of innovation, social security and
social integrity.
5 Sociology must combine the empirical study of
social phenomena, and the critical analysis of
social forms and processes with the production of
policy guidelines directed to both governments
and social movements. These guidelines should
aim at guarding fundamental civil rights, while
facilitating negotiated change and the accommo-
dation of aspirations of diverse communities and
groups.
6 Sociotechnics has to encompass different levels
of (global) society respecting their specific cul-
tural/institutional characteristics. Thus the practi-
cal sociologist must master a multiplicity of
sociological approaches to gain a more realistic
understanding of the complexity of the changing
social world.
During its conferences the Research
Committee on Sociotechnics/Sociological
Practice has emphasized the different aspects
of modern sociology and presented innovative
ways by which sociological interventions can
enhance local democratic participation in
various parts of the globe. Given the absence
of structures and institutions capable of guar-
anteeing that the basic human problems and
issues of the global society are addressed
through democratic political processes, soci-
ologists should play a role in making admin-
istrative processes more transparent and
opening up channels for citizen participation
spanning all levels of global society. Both
governance and social movements are under
the influence of global discourses that must
be critically examined for their arguments,
their social function and their consequences
with respect to the distribution of influence
and resources.
NOTES
1 We would like to thank Prof. M. Los, University
of Ottawa, for her invaluable help in the preparation
of this chapter.
2 John Glass and Jan-Marie Fritz were among the
co-founders of the Clinical Sociological Association in
1978. In 1986 its name was changed to The
Sociological Practice Association (Fritz, 1991).
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Law Through Sociology’s
Looking Glass: Conflict and
Competition in Sociological
Studies of Law
Law and its countless legal, academic,
professional and institutional manifestations,
all being intrinsically social, fall within the
scope of sociological inquiry. It is, therefore,
not surprising if some sociologists and jurists
have tried to bring the benefits of sociologi-
cal ideas to legal thought and practice.
Introducing sociological insights into law, a
feasible and useful project in theory, has
however been only marginally accomplished
in practice. Despite the social make-up of
law and the kinship between legal theory and
social theory, the former being a branch of
the latter, and despite the efforts of socio-
legal scholars over the past hundred years to
integrate legal and sociological ideas, law
and sociology remain apart.
This chapter explores the roots of this
separation by describing some of the con-
flicts and competitions which arise out of,
and impede, attempts to integrate legal and
sociological understandings of law. It starts
5
Reza Banakar
by juxtaposing sociological and legal epis-
temes, i.e., by comparing the collections of
beliefs, concerns and assumptions which are
used to organize worldviews and practices of
lawyers and legal scholars, on the one hand,
and those of sociologists, on the other.1 It
then moves on to present the various research
approaches, such as Law and Society and
Socio-Legal Studies, which make use of
social scientific methods and concepts to
study law. Although it is often impossible
to distinguish between certain branches of
socio-legal research, I shall nonetheless dis-
cuss similarities and commonalities between
various approaches to the study of law,
focusing specifically on the (inter)disciplinary
conflicts and competitions between them, as
a method for highlighting the discourses
which constitute the sociological studies of
law. The chapter concludes by reflecting on
the potential of law and sociology to learn
from one another.
9781412934633-Chap-05 1/10/09 10:21 AM Page 59
LAW THROUGH SOCIOLOGY’S LOOKING GLASS
Although the study of law played a signif-
icant role in the formation of classical sociol-
ogy, law has become conspicuous only by its
absence from recent mainstream sociological
research and teaching. Beyond its immediate
concern, this chapter hopes to draw attention
to law’s normative role in guiding action and
shaping relationships, a role which increases
in sociological significance as societies
become ethno-culturally more diverse and
socio-politically more complex. This chapter
may also be read as an attempt to show that
mainstream sociology has more to learn from
studying law in contemporary society, than
when Durkheim famously described law as
the ‘visible symbol’ of social solidarity
(Durkheim, 1984: 24).
The discussions which will follow are lim-
ited in a number of ways. Their sources are
restricted to social scientific and legal produc-
tion in English and its institutional references
and observations reflect above all the general
academic conditions in Britain.
PART ONE: LAW AND SOCIOLOGY
Jurisprudence, legal studies and
legal practice
Law manifests itself in different forms and at
different levels of social reality simultane-
ously. It is a formal instrument of regulation
(i.e., a tool in the hands of policy-makers), a
body of rules, doctrines and decisions (i.e., a
normative system with a distinctive social
form and identity), a field constituted by the
actions of lawyers, the judiciary and other
practitioners of law (i.e., an institutionalized
form of practice), an occupational setting
(i.e., a profession with a well-established iden-
tity and interest), an academic discipline (i.e.,
scientia iuris, legal studies and jurisprudence),
and a form of learning, teaching and training
(i.e., legal education) at the same time.
Focusing on any aspect of law, we discover
further layers of meaning and diversity of
legal forms. For example, looking at law as a
59
system of rules we find that some rules are
substantive while others are procedural,
some regulate private transactions while
others confer powers or impose duties, and
so on (Galligan, 2006: 6). A similar diversity
can be found in respect to the legal profes-
sion, which consists of many groups and
individuals with different working conditions,
tasks and aims. The working conditions and
daily tasks of lawyers who work at large
international law firms are, for example, a
world apart from those of the sole-practition-
ers who provide legal services for local com-
munities (Cotterrell, 1992: 184 –7).
In addition, law is often seen and experi-
enced differently by different groups in society.
Some see it as a source of justice, while
others experience it as a form of oppression.
Some regard it as an arena where marginal-
ized groups can struggle for their rights
(Banakar, 2004), while others perceive it as
an ideology implicated in perpetuating racial,
gender and class violence (Tuitt, 2005). Still
another group sees the law as an expression
and a form of social organization aimed at
facilitating interpersonal and inter-institutional
interactions and exchanges (Stjernquist,
2001). The list of the ways law is seen,
depicted and/or experienced by various
people can be made much longer. None of
these images of law are entirely untrue, but
none of them by itself captures the totality of
law. Fragmented as the reality of law might
be, it still presents itself as a unified corpus
capable of interacting with other normative
orders, such as custom and morality, without
apparently compromising its distinctive nor-
mative force or identity.
The problems associated with the multi-
faceted character of law that makes it socio-
logically impossible to generalize about its
nature is hardly alien to jurisprudence (I use
the term to refer to both legal theory and
legal philosophy). Jurisprudence is concerned
with clarifying the general framework of
legal ideas and formulating general and
abstract descriptions of legal systems (for a
discussion see Galligan, 2006: 7–12). Within
jurisprudence we find many orientations and
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60 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
schools of thought that implicitly or explic-
itly recognize the social and institutional
character of law (Raz, 1979: 41). Yet, the
image of law as a highly rationalized rule-
based activity, i.e., as a system of rules,
norms, decisions, doctrines and principles
designed to direct action, guide legal analysis
and justify decisions in an ‘objective’
manner, pervades juristic discourses and
creates the cornerstone of legal education.
Rule-based thinking can be regarded as part of
the method through which law distinguishes
the legal from extra-legal events, at the same
time as it appears to be deciding cases on an
all-or-nothing basis, which in principle
leaves little or no space for general moral or
sociological considerations (Luhmann,
1985). Rule-based thinking might appear to
be a mechanical method of decision-making,
but in practice it is an open-ended and reflec-
tive process of interpretation, where the same
rule can be interpreted by different lawyers in
different ways, reflecting their specific legal
standpoint, interest and the social context in
which they find themselves. Rules are thus
standards for action, or one among many
resources used to negotiate the boundaries of
law. The interpretive and contextual nature of
legal rules indicates that law does not consist
of rules alone, but also of communicative
processes through which the interpretation
and application of rules are realised in vari-
ous social contexts. Sociologically, these
communicative processes, rather than legal
rules, are the units of analysis. Also, from a
sociological point of view, the rule-based
approach reflects law’s attempt to rationalize
and confine complex social processes to the
conceptual boundaries of legal rules and
standards.
The significance of the rule-based under-
standing of law can be observed in theories
which subscribe to ‘legal positivism’ and see
law as consisting in rules (Hart, 1998;
Kelsen, 2001; Raz, 1979). The tradition of
‘legal positivism’, which continues to pro-
vide the most influential modern account of
law, has its roots in the Enlightenment and
emerged, in part, as a reaction to natural law
theories, which sought a permanent and
universally valid basis for law in nature
and/or divine reason.2 Various schools of
legal positivism share three fundamental
assumptions: firstly, law is a system of rules,
norms or principles; secondly, law is a matter
of ‘social fact’ and its sources of authority
and validity are empirically verifiable; and,
thirdly, there is no necessary link between
law and morality. This means that the valid-
ity of a legal rule is not derived from its
content but from its source, which is in turn
conceptualized in terms of a social agency or
institution such as the ‘sovereign’. Despite
recognizing the social nature of the sources
of law, legal positivism pays little, if any,
attention to the social constitution of this
agency. As a result, we find H. L. A. Hart
(1907–92), who is one of the influential legal
philosophers of the twentieth century, recog-
nizing the importance of ‘officials’ of law,
but neglecting to consider how the social
constitution of these ‘officials’ can influence
the way law is formulated, promulgated,
interpreted and enforced (Cotterrell, 2003:
210–11). Hart also argues that law consists in
various rules which are essentially social, but
again stops short of analyzing whom law
speaks for and ‘whose voices and expres-
sions are excluded from legal expressions’
(Cotterrell, 2003: 210–11). Legal posi-
tivism’s unwillingness to discuss the consti-
tution of the ‘social’ is a reflection of what
much of jurisprudence – obvious exceptions
being legal realism, critical legal studies and
schools of legal feminism – has set out to
achieve. Legal positivism tries to provide an
adequate account of law as it is in contrast to
how law ought to be, but it wishes to achieve
this analytically and at the level of general
theory, i.e., by clarifying the basic concepts
and frameworks through which we observe,
describe and understand law rather than
through empirical investigation of the mun-
dane practices and experiences of men and
women who produce and reproduce the law
and its institutions.
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LAW THROUGH SOCIOLOGY’S LOOKING GLASS
If we describe jurisprudence as the theo-
retical wing of law, then doctrinal studies of
law, or ‘black letter scholarship’, becomes its
pragmatic academic wing. The ‘conventional
legal approach to the law is all about
doctrine’ which represents the standards or
principles which ‘can generate outcomes in
conventional disputes independent of the
political or economic ideology of judges’
(Tiller and Cross, 2006: 518).3 A basis for a
doctrine is laid when a court outlines a spe-
cific framework, set of rules, procedures and
other legal techniques to decide a case. The
doctrine becomes established once other
courts follow the same procedure and form
of reasoning to decide similar cases. This
type of reasoning requires an understanding
of substantive rules, their origins (legal
sources), how they have developed over time,
their scope and underlying policy. It can also
require an analysis of the relationship
between the rules within the same substan-
tive category of law and how these overlap
with other legal categories. The role of the
doctrinal researcher is to examine ‘the con-
tent of legal opinion to evaluate whether it
was effectively reasoned or to explore its
implications for future cases’ (Tiller and
Cross, 2006: 518).
In contrast to their counterparts in other
disciplines such as sociology, doctrinal
scholars ‘do not usually “produce” new
knowledge’ and what they produce is often
parasitical upon the work which has already
been done by others (Vick, 2004: 177).
Doctrinal studies use jurisprudence, legal
history and comparative law as auxiliary
sources of knowledge or tools of analysis.
Although a large part of such studies remain
descriptive, black letter lawyers can, and do,
engage in prescriptive work which aims
to influence the developmental direction
of the law. Yet, they often shy away from
social theorizing or addressing the broader
societal issues which arise out of legal prac-
tice, legal doctrine or legal developments.
This is in part because they treat the law ‘as
a sealed system which can be studied through
61
methods which are unique to the “science of
law”’, and believe that ‘legal developments
can be interpreted, critiqued, and validated by
reference to the internal logic of this sealed
system’ (Vick, 2004: 178–9). In short, doctri-
nal studies use their own method of reasoning
and analysis to collect the specific rules
and decisions of the existing legal system,
reduce them to their essential statements of
rules and exceptions, systematize them and,
at times might even evaluate them. Sources
from which they collect their raw material are
limited to ‘a finite and relatively fixed
universe of authoritative texts’ such as
statutes, legal opinions and legal cases (Vick,
2004: 178).
Legal knowledge produced through the
exegesis of legal texts is, admittedly, of a
special kind, but its esoteric character should
not conceal its social nature. Forms of
knowledge and ‘truth’ that law produces are
dependent on communicative processes
which are inherently social and fall within
the scope of social theory. As pointed out by
Cotterrell, law has no ‘truth’ of its own and
sociology is in principle capable of grasping
the essence of legal doctrine and providing it
with a form of insight which is ‘not only
useful but necessary for legal studies’
(Cotterrell, 2006: 45). Why sociological
ideas are not adopted to enrich doctrinal
analysis is another matter which will be
addressed in Part Three.
Legal doctrine sets the normative context
in which lawyers acquire their ‘juridical
gaze’, i.e., it sets the backdrop against which
they learn to identify relevant questions and
to read and criticize legal texts by paying
close attention to textual contexts, while
avoiding the broader social and political
contexts of legal arguments.4 ‘A question
which cannot be legitimately answered by
reference to a statute or judgment lies outside
the doctrinal gaze’ (Bradney, 1998:76).
However, knowledge of legal rules and doc-
trine does not by itself provide a sufficient
basis for legal practice. Much of lawyers’
day-to-day work concerns dealing with
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62 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
clients, interviewing witnesses or drafting
documents which require the use of non-
legal knowledge and social skills. Also, prac-
ticing lawyers have a pragmatic understanding
of law, which is aimed at settling cases to
their advantage. Legal rules and doctrine are
only two among a number of devices (or
‘resources’) that the practicing lawyer
employs if, and in so far as, they serve to
negotiate the boundaries of the law in his or
her favour. Legal doctrine is abandoned in
favour of other measures (for example delay
tactics) when it no longer serves to bring
about the desired end (Banakar and Travers,
2005: 9).
Most scholars agree that doctrinal studies
are of the law, i.e., they are born out of the
practical needs of the law and serve certain
normative needs of legal practice. However,
we find little agreement on how jurispru-
dence, which appears to be about the law, is
related to legal practice. Some theorists
see much of jurisprudence as ‘theory-talk’
which at best conveys a better understanding
of the context in which law is practised
without helping to shape those practices
(cf. Haplin, 2001: 12). Others see jurispru-
dence as a practical inquiry, which is
interpretive, normative and ultimately action-
guiding (Coyle and Pavlakos, 2005: 6). In
this latter sense, there is a dialectical rela-
tionship between theory and practice which
brings together conceptual, normative and
empirical descriptions and understandings of
law. However, there is little doubt that
jurisprudence observes and learns from legal
practice while influencing it indirectly. In
that sense, the boundary between ‘what is of
the law’ and ‘what is about the law’ becomes
blurred. Various assumptions about the
nature of law which are elaborated by
jurisprudence can, for example, exert a nor-
mative force over legal education and doctri-
nal studies. Also, legal philosophical
discussions can engage more directly with
legal issues by clarifying certain legal
concepts, ideas or relationships – for an
example see Hoefeld’s typology of rights
(Hoefeld, 1923).
Mainstream sociology and law
Sociology does not consist of rules if by a
‘rule’ we mean a binary method of making
decisions or a set of standards for guiding
action. Instead, it consists of assumptions,
concepts, ideas and methods, none of which
is treated in a formalistic manner or as an
element of a normatively sealed system.
Sociology’s constitutive concepts and meth-
ods are understood and applied reflexively
and in accordance with the general criteria of
social scientific enquiry. That is also why, in
contrast to doctrinal studies, sociology
allows many competing sets of theoretical
and methodological approaches.
Sociology is ultimately driven by sociolo-
gists’ curiosity about social life as reflected
in their attempts to explain and understand
social reality. The most valuable asset of a
sociologist is, to use Erving Goffman’s
words, ‘the bent to sustain in regard to all
elements of social life a spirit of unfettered,
unsponsored inquiry and the wisdom not to
look elsewhere but to ourselves and our dis-
cipline for this mandate’ (Goffman, 1983: 5).
It does not mean that sociologists do not have
civic commitments or that sociology is free
from all forms of pragmatism and instrumen-
talism. Neither is it implied that all sociologi-
cal studies are driven by the desire to
enlighten. Sociology has become increasingly
pragmatic in recent years and a growing
number of sociologists tend to see their role
as providers of scientific knowledge to the
decision-makers (Halliday and Janowitz,
1992). Still what bestows on sociology a
unique understanding of social phenomena
and transforms it into ‘a form of life’ will
remain the curiosity about social life and the
urge to reveal the hidden social structures.
This means that a sociologist is often not
satisfied with the self-descriptions of law,
behind which he or she searches for layers
of meaning, social functions and power
structures.
In contrast to the lawyer, who thinks
pragmatically – sees law as an instrument to do
things with – and tends to reason in terms of
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LAW THROUGH SOCIOLOGY’S LOOKING GLASS
individual or exceptional cases, the sociologist
is often interested in the general characteris-
tics of social phenomena and looks for
repeated patterns of social behaviour. This is
in turn directed towards producing a general
knowledge of society, i.e., social theories.
Individual cases in themselves and for them-
selves are often of little value to the sociolo-
gist. It means that when sociologists and
other social scientists conduct case studies,
they try to go beyond the specific properties
of that particular case by connecting it to
some broader social concern. Thus, sociol-
ogy and law are founded on two different
approaches or epistemes. This can also be
said about the relationship between sociol-
ogy and medicine. Yet, there is less tension
between the sociology of medicine and the
medical profession than there is between law
and sociology. Sociologists of medicine have
much to say about the social roots of health
and illness, but they do not suggest that med-
ical doctors use sociological theories and
concepts in their diagnosis and treatment of
physical disorders and disease. In contrast,
the sociology of law can appear to be claim-
ing that it understands law better than law
understands itself and to be telling lawyers
how they should understand, conceptualize,
apply and practice law (Banakar, 2000;
Nelken, 1998).
The sociology of law is thus a meeting
place for two different standpoints on the
role of law in society. These two standpoints
can be described at the level of social action
by focusing on how an ideal typical lawyer
and sociologist would perceive the relation-
ship between law and society. At this level
the question becomes if, and how, a legal
image derived through processing individual
cases and shaped by a pragmatically oriented
practice of law can be integrated with a soci-
ological image aspiring towards generalizable
knowledge of society and formed through
social scientific curiosity. Alternatively, we
can compare the two standpoints at an insti-
tutional level by exploring the discourses
of law and sociology. In its extreme form,
the legal standpoint regards the State as the
63
primary source of law, and the law as a
sealed system consisting in successive layers
of rationally interconnected rules, decisions
and principles, which can and should be
studied in reference to law’s internal logic
(Kelsen, 2001). In contrast, the sociological
standpoint views legal rules as a sub-category
of social norms and the legal system as a set
of socially constructed institutional practices,
which, like knowledge, permeates all walks
of social life and, directly or indirectly, forms
all collective social action. In its radical
form, the sociological standpoint rejects the
primacy of the State as a source of law and
argues that the centre of gravity of law has
always been in social relations and processes
(Ehrlich, 1936; Griffiths, 1986; Gurvitch,
1947). Irrespective of how we compare
the epistemes of law and sociology, the
socio-legal field appears as being constituted
by tension between a legal and a sociological
image of society. The epistemic tension
causes disputes between sociology, legal
studies and jurisprudence on how to view and
study law, but also forms the debates within
the socio-legal field on, for example, how to
understand, conceptualize and study law
sociologically. As we shall see in Part Two,
some sociological studies adopt a ‘legal cen-
tralist’ view and conceptualize law in terms
of positive or State law, other research
approaches adopt a broader perspective, or a
legal pluralist view, by treating law as a spe-
cial form of social organization.
The recognition of the diversity of forms
of law has always been the cornerstone of the
sociology of law and marks the place where
it diverges from, and challenges, traditional
legal scholarship and much of jurisprudence.
However, even those socio-legal schools
which adopt a pluralistic concept of law con-
tinue to interact with, and be influenced by,
positive (official) law through their rejection
of the State as the main source of law
(Griffiths, 1986). This concern with official
forms of law, admittedly, links the sociology
of law with jurisprudence and legal studies,
on the one hand, and with legal practice, on
the other, but it does not bring them together.
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64 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
This is in part because socio-legal approaches,
jurisprudence and legal studies articulate
their concerns differently. What is captured
by these different understandings of law is
the tension between a ‘juridical gaze’, which
is gained through legal training devoted to
reading of cases, law reports and searching
for, interpreting and applying legal rules,
and an inquiring approach which uses sociol-
ogy’s looking glass to see beyond the self-
descriptions of law and the legal profession.
How this tension has been utilized and to
what extent these two images are brought
together is discussed in the next section
where various orientations within the socio-
logical studies of law are discussed.
PART TWO: SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES
OF LAW
The sociological study of law is similar to the
sociologies of medicine and religion in one
respect: it accommodates two ideal typical
approaches to its subject matter, one which is
informed in the first place by the theoretical
concerns and objectives of mainstream soci-
ology and one which reflects the concerns of
its subject matter, which consists of forms
of law and legal behaviour (Banakar, 2000).
For lack of better names, we call the former
‘pure’ and the latter ‘applied’ socio-legal
research. Each of the ‘pure’ and ‘applied’
approaches can in turn be divided into differ-
ent orientations depending on the extent to
which they are influenced by the concerns of
sociology, other social sciences, law or policy.
Figure. 5.1 helps to visualize the relationship
between these socio-legal orientations.
This diagram is, admittedly, misleading in
a number of ways. For example, it fails to
capture the overlap between the four major
research orientations named above and
suggests that it is possible to distinguish
between the interests of various socio-legal
researchers with roots in different disci-
plines. In reality, it is often impossible to find
distinctions between the concerns of some
legal historians, political scientists, legal
sociologists and social anthropologists who
study legal issues empirically. These socio-
legal scholars ‘form a clear and cohesive
interdisciplinary community’ (Sutton, 2001:
21) called the Law and Society Association in
the United States and the Socio-Legal Studies
Association in the UK. This diagram is also
misleading in that it fails to demonstrate the
impact of policy oriented research, which is
more easily funded by government agencies
than pure research, on the field (Sarat and
Silbey, 1988). In addition, it does not do jus-
tice to the important role played by legal
anthropology and political science in the
development of the field as a whole. Finally,
it is based on a British view of the sociology
of law in the sense that it sharply distin-
guishes between Socio-Legal Studies and the
sociology of law (Banakar and Travers,
2005; Campbell and Wiles, 1976).5 Such a
division would not apply, for example, to the
Scandinavian situation where there has not
been a socio-legal movement within the law
schools. The diagram shows whether an ori-
entation is influenced by various social
sciences, but fails to demonstrate that the
concerns of sociology, law and policy influ-
ence all these orientations, albeit in different
ways and to different degrees. While the
Sociology of Law and Sociological
Jurisprudence are primarily influenced by
mainstream sociology, Law and Society
Studies and Socio-Legal Studies are influ-
enced by both sociology and other social
science disciplines. In the remaining part of
this section I shall briefly describe these
research orientations against the backdrop of
various debates on law and socio-legal
research.
The sociology of law
The sociology of law distinguishes itself
from, for example, philosophy of law or legal
history, by fulfilling three interrelated and
broadly defined criteria. Firstly, it borrows its
concepts and theoretical frameworks from
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LAW THROUGH SOCIOLOGY’S LOOKING GLASS 65

Sociology

“Pure” Socio-Legal Research “Applied” Socio-Legal Research

(Reflecting the Concerns of Sociology) (Reflecting the Concerns of Law and Policy-makers)

The Sociology Law and Sociological Socio-Legal Studies

of Law Society Studies Jurisprudence (Law in Context and Policy Research)

Other Social Sciences

(Social Anthropology, Political Science, Psychology and Economics)

Figure 5.1 Relationship between socio-legal approaches.

sociology; secondly, it treats law either as a
socially dependent or independent ‘variable’;
and, finally, it adopts an empirical approach
to collecting the data it needs in order to
conduct its analysis (Ferrari, 1989: 9). The
notion of ‘empirical’, as it is used here,
should be understood broadly. Some research
orientations adopt a strict positivistic inter-
pretation of what empirical data means,
i.e., they understand it in terms of data collected
systematically through surveys, interviews,
etc., while other orientations use more inter-
pretive methods, such as discourse analysis
of legal texts. John Sutton, for example,
describes law as ‘a group activity’ and the
sociology of law as the study of ‘the legal
behavior of human groups’ (Sutton, 2001: 8).
On the other hand, M. P. Baumgartner, who
is influenced by Donald Black’s positivistic
approach (Black, 1976), defines the sociol-
ogy of law as ‘the scientific study of legal
behaviour’, a study which deals only with
what is ‘observable and measurable’ while
aiming to ‘predict and explain legal varia-
tions of every kind’ (Baumgartner, 2000:
406). Sutton’s definition appears to be the
broadest in terms of the theoretical and
methodological constraints that it subscribes
to. Not only does Sutton avoid specifying
how sociological studies of law should pro-
ceed methodologically, he also avoids sub-
scribing to any concept of law. At least in
principle, Sutton allows the possibility of a
form of ‘legal behaviour’ which exists inde-
pendently of positive law and thus, of the
State. Baumgartner, on the other hand,
adopts a strictly positivistic approach to the
study of law. His approach is positivistic in
the methodological sense of recognizing
only what is ‘observable and measurable’ as
its proper subject matter, and it is positivistic
in a legal philosophical sense of equating law
with positive law. These two definitions show
that the sociologists of law can, and often
do, differ on how law is to be conceptualized
and studied. These disagreements should
be viewed against the background of
the multifaceted nature of the law and the
epistemic tension we discussed in the
previous section.
The sociology of law studies legal behav-
iour, institutions and systems in the tradition
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66 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
of Durkheim and Weber, who used the study
of law as a means to investigate the underly-
ing social mechanisms of modernity. Law
provides the sociologists with a standpoint
from which they may view and study a range
of theoretical and substantive issues such as
social differentiation, social integration,
forms of authority, the role of rationality or
the process of inclusion, exclusion and crim-
inalization of groups, equality of wealth and
resources, or the significance of gender or
race in social organization. As Roger
Cotterrell explains, Durkheim seemed ‘to
approach legal materials mainly for their
capacity to provide, in the documentary
form of ancient and modern codes, “visible
symbols” of social solidarity, an “index” or
measure of this elusive phenomenon’
(Cotterrell, 2005: 504). Durkheim’s analysis
of law is, thus, ‘a methodological device for
examining something that is, apparently, of
greater sociological significance than law
itself’ (Cotterrell, 2005: 504). To give a con-
crete example, if a sociologist of law decides
to study unlawful gender or ethnic discrimi-
nation, it is most probably not because he or
she wishes to explore how courts use doc-
trine in the process of legal reasoning to
decide discrimination cases. It is, instead,
more likely that he or she seeks to understand
how the interpretation and application of
anti-discrimination laws help to constitute
race and gender-related social inequalities in
society (Banakar, 2004). Expressed differ-
ently, how law views and treats unlawful
discrimination provides the sociologist with
a vantage point from which to study how
social inequalities in society are constructed
and how society copes with conflicts of
values, interests and worldviews using
formal methods of dispute resolution.
Most sociological studies of law focus on
the external manifestations of law. They
focus, for example, on the rate of litigation in
a specific jurisdiction, asking why one group
is more likely to litigate than another; or
examine the attitude of ordinary citizens
to new legislation, asking how the introduc-
tion of a new law has influenced behaviour.
Such studies ignore concepts and ideas
which are internal to law and legal reasoning
and through which law constructs its images
of society and impacts on social relations.
Looking at the sociologist’s neglect of legal
ideas in a positive light, we could argue that
it frees him or her from the internal culture of
the legal system and assumptions about the
sources of law and the nature of legal reason-
ing. It enables the sociologists to identify the
sources of law in social formations and asso-
ciations which have come about and exist
independently of the State. It also makes it
possible to ask questions which fall outside
the paradigm of legal studies regarding, for
example, the objectivity of legal reasoning.
That is partly why many sociologists and
social anthropologists adopt a bottom-up
perspective on law, regarding social interac-
tions and relations as the primary focus of
their study while treating the law as a ‘resid-
ual category’ (Sarat, 2000: 195). This can
lead them to emphasize the interests and
experiences of ordinary men and women in
general, and marginalized groups, in particu-
lar. Jurisprudence, legal studies and policy
research, on the other hand, adopt a top-
down view of the law, viewing the law from
above, treating the State as the source of law
and addressing the concerns of policy-
makers. As a result, much of socio-legal
research appears to foster a ‘critical’, rather
than ‘neutral’, understanding of the ideology
of law, highlighting issues related to social
justice, ‘marginalized groups, peripheral
institutions, deviant behavior’ (Abel, 1987:
827) and generally depicting law in a nega-
tive light.
However, freedom from the constraints of
law’s internal culture can mislead the sociol-
ogist into assuming that the legal system’s
modus operandi is of no importance to the
studies conducted from a vantage point
external to the legal system. As a result, the
sociologist can be misled into treating one
manifestation of the legal system, such as the
rate of litigation in one jurisdiction or the
attitude of certain groups to a particular law,
as representing the totality of law in action.
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LAW THROUGH SOCIOLOGY’S LOOKING GLASS
A more complete picture of the relationship
between law and society emerges once the
sociologist recognizes that law’s internal
operations and processes are in constant
interaction with, and inseparable from, the
extra-legal factors which constitute its social
environment.
Law and Society studies
Law and Society, as I am using the term here,
is primarily an American movement, which
was established after the Second World War
through the initiative mainly of sociologists
who had a vested interest in the study of law
(Friedman, 1986). The only difference
between the sociology of law and Law and
Society is that the latter does not limit itself
theoretically or methodologically to sociol-
ogy and tries instead to accommodate
insights from all social science disciplines.
Not only does it provide a home for sociolo-
gists and social anthropologists and political
scientists with an interest in law, but it also
tries to incorporate psychologists and econo-
mists who study law.
Although Law and Society has in principle
relied on and used all social sciences, it has
nonetheless received more input from main-
stream sociology, social anthropology and
political science than from other social sci-
ence disciplines. Psychology or economics,
in particular, have had only a marginal
impact on the development of the movement,
partly due to the fact that they early
on formed their own Law and Psychology
and Law and Economics associations
and journals. An excellent example of
research in the Law and Society tradition is
to be found in Order Without Law, where
Robert C. Ellickson (1991) uses different
social scientific ideas, including economic
theories, to study how residents of Shasta
County, a rural area in California, resolve a
variety of disputes that arise from trespassing
by cattle and fence-tending.
Law and Society has, according to
Jonathan Simon, brought about ‘change in
67
legal education, judicial administration, and
political discussion of law. It helped com-
plete the realist shift of law school textbooks
from cases to material and notes. It achieved
recognition in the law through the creation of
the significant social science functions
within the court system’ (Simon, 1999: 144).
Having said that, Simon admits that the
Law and Society project still ‘finds itself not
only incomplete but also increasingly uncer-
tain about its identity or future’ (Simon,
1999: 144).
Sociological jurisprudence
Sociological jurisprudence is also closely
linked with the sociology of law and Law and
Society studies. It is, however, of much ear-
lier date than the Law and Society movement
and more interested in legal theory and legal
education (see Ehrlich, 1936; Gurvitch,
1947; Petrazycki 1955; Pound, 1943). It is
often associated with Roscoe Pound
(1870–1964), who is also known as a promi-
nent philosopher of law, and through him
with the American legal realist movement.
However, there are historical and theoretical
reasons for including a number of European
scholars such as the Polish-Russian jurist
Leon Petrazycki (1867–1931) and the
Austrian jurist Eugen Ehrlich (1862–1922)
under this rubric. These scholars were critical
of analytical jurisprudence for its conceptual
formalism and neglect of empirical facts
such as the role of social forces in creating
the legal order and shaping legal behaviour.
They also argued that legal research, legal
education and judicial decision-making
should adopt the methods and insights of
social sciences in order to counterbalance
this shortcoming.
The founders of sociological jurispru-
dence distinguished themselves from main-
stream sociologists, such as Emile Durkheim
and Max Weber, in one important way. While
mainstream sociologists have used law to
study social developments and issues arising
out of the rise of modernity, Petrazycki,
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68 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
Ehrlich and Pound (and a generation later
Georges Gurvitch) employed social sciences
to transform legal education and practice and
to devise a scientific concept of law. At the
centre of this transformative legal project, we
find theories and concepts of law which are
empirically tuned and broader in scope than
what most jurists recognize as the law proper.
Pound criticized and challenged the legal
formalism (which used strict conceptual
logic) that dominated the American legal
thought of his day for being mechanical,
artificial and out of touch with the needs of
society. He argued instead for a jurispru-
dence which placed the human factor and
condition, rather than logic, at the heart of
its analysis. He borrowed insights from the
philosophy of pragmatism and the new disci-
pline of sociology to develop a new approach
to law, legal research and legal education.
This led Pound to argue that it was ‘law in
action’ and not ‘law in the books’ which con-
stituted the basis of law and legal institutions.
He criticized the individualist theories and
standards of ‘legal justice’ to which lawyers
adhered, and instead urged both legal schol-
ars and practitioners to work towards a con-
cept of ‘social justice’ which was informed
by the standards of sociologists.
The European scholars went further than
Pound by directly challenging the underlying
ideology of legal positivism. They urged
jurists to recognize the vital role played by
the informal and unofficial mechanisms of
social control in creating legal institutions
and moulding legal behaviour. In this way
they confronted the jurisprudence of their
time by presenting the social forms of law,
rather than the rules posited by the State, as
the basis of legal order. For them the State
could not be the primary source of law for
the simple reason that its existence presup-
posed a form of law. Petrazycki and Ehrlich
argued, each in his own way, for an empiri-
cally based concept of law which was broader
than the State law and existed independently
of any outside authority.
Using our example of unlawful discrimina-
tion, a sociologist working within this tradition
would begin his or her study by anlyzing the
anti-discrimination laws. He or she would
recognize and take into consideration the
internal point of view of lawyers by studying
legal cases and court decisions to settle dis-
putes which are based on gender or ethnic
discrimination. However, he or she would not
limit the sphere of inquiry to positive law and
its application by the courts but would also
pay attention to how these disputes are set-
tled by extra-legal means, sometimes outside
the courts and in the shadow of law. If the
sociology of law tends to view law from the
outside by emphasizing how it interacts with
other social factors and institutions, socio-
logical jurisprudence tries to view how the
law is seen from both inside, i.e., how it is
experienced by legal practitioners and others
who participate in law’s processes and from
the outside. The dialectical interaction between
the internally and externally produced con-
cepts, ideas and images of law lies at the
heart of many studies which fall within this
tradition (Banakar, 2003).6
To sum up, the sociology of law, Law and
Society and sociological jurisprudence began
somewhat differently, in different times and
places and with different aims in mind. Yet,
there is more which unites than separates
them. As a result, many of the individual stud-
ies couched within these three orientations are
hardly distinguishable from each other. These
three orientations demonstrate the diversity of
aims, theory and methods within the sociolog-
ically inspired studies of law.
Socio-Legal Studies and legal policy
research
‘Socio-Legal Studies’ in the UK has grown
mainly out of the interest of law schools in
promoting interdisciplinary studies of law.
Whether regarded as an emerging discipline,
sub-discipline or a methodological approach,
it is often viewed in light of its relation-
ship to, and oppositional role within, law
(Thomas, 1997: 3). It should not, therefore,
be confused with the legal sociology of many
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LAW THROUGH SOCIOLOGY’S LOOKING GLASS
West European countries or the Law and
Society scholarship in the US, which foster
much stronger disciplinary ties with the
social sciences. In the past, it has been pre-
sented as the applied branch of the sociology
of law and criticized for being empiricist and
atheoretical (Campbell and Wiles, 1976;
Travers, 2001). Max Travers, for example,
regards Socio-Legal Studies as a subfield
of social policy, ‘mainly concerned with
influencing or serving government policy in
the provision of legal services’ (Travers,
2001: 27) and adds that it ‘has given up any
aspirations it once had to develop general
theories about the policy process’ (Travers,
2001: 26).
Looking more closely at the work which
has been produced by the socio-legal com-
munity in more recent years,7 we detect two
(again ideal typical) general approaches. The
first approach, which I call the studies of
Law in Context, uses social theory and a
broadly conceived notion of what empirical
research amounts to in order to study issues
which are internal to the processes and oper-
ations of law.8 Studies of Law in Context are
neither empiricist nor sociological, yet are
conducted against the backdrop of social
theory. According to this approach, the
‘socio’ in Socio-Legal Studies does not refer
to sociological theory or to an empirical
understanding of the broader context of
social development, but represents ‘an inter-
face with a context within which law exists’
(Wheeler and Thomas, 2002: 271). The
second approach is what Travers calls Policy
Research, and is concerned with social
policy, regulation, enforcement and imple-
mentation issues, i.e., how law affects social
behaviour or social conditions. These studies
often draw attention to the gap between the
intentions of legislatures and the reality of
law once it is interpreted and enforced by
officials. Policy Research is not committed to
theory development either, but is more
empirically oriented than the studies of Law
in Context.
Again, using gender or ethnic discrimination
as an example, a study of Law in Context
69
could focus on the discrepancy between anti-
discrimination legislation and the empirically
verifiable reality of unlawful discrimination
through a closer scrutiny of the legal instru-
ments themselves, asking questions concern-
ing the goals and intentions of the legislation,
the substantive provisions constituting that
legislation, or its remedial structures
(Fredman, 2002: 1–2). According to this
standpoint, whenever a law fails to bring
about the intended effects, one should start
re-evaluating its goals, substantive provisions
and remedial structures. In other words, if a
law is ineffective and does not deliver the
policy goods, it must be technically flawed.
Thus, a closer examination of, for example,
who bears, or should bear, the burden of
proof in discrimination cases or how the law
distinguishes between direct and indirect
discrimination, becomes of paramount
importance. From the sociologist’s point of
view, the difference between studies of Law
in Context and mainstream legal studies is
insignificant, for they seek no generalizable
knowledge about social conditions or rela-
tions underpinning discrimination or about
how law sees and relates to racial violence or
gender discrimination. We find, however, a
significant difference between Law in
Context and the approach adopted by black
letter scholars who focus on legal doctrine, in
that the former does not treat the law as a
sealed system of rules and doctrines to
be studied on its own terms alone. Unlike
doctrinal studies, Law in Context recognizes
the important role played by, and can seek
causal analysis of, extra-legal factors and
relations. More importantly, the studies of
Law in Context seek and produce new
knowledge of law, its limits and potentials.
Policy Research can share many of the
assumptions held by the sociologist about
law and still take a more pragmatic view
of the impact of law on social conditions
without engaging with the broader social the-
oretical issues surrounding such impact.
Furthermore, it sees law more in terms of
legislation, i.e., as a measure aimed at realiz-
ing policy objectives, than as technical or
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70 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
doctrinal legal issues which might preoccupy
some lawyers. Policy researchers will be more
interested in asking questions about the effi-
cacy of the enforcement of anti-discrimination
provisions. The enforcement here is not nec-
essarily defined in terms of how the law is
interpreted by the courts, but how legal insti-
tutions facilitate, or alternatively discourage,
the examination of race or gender related dis-
crimination. Policy researchers would, for
example, use surveys to assess the knowl-
edge of a piece of anti-discrimination legis-
lation among employers and employees,
and to form an idea about the attitude
of employers to the law and to what extent
various groups experience that they are the
victims of unlawful discrimination. Policy
researchers could also try to establish what
sort of legal aid is available to those who
seek compensation for unlawful discrimina-
tion (for references to various studies see
Banakar and Travers, 2005).
The two applied socio-legal approaches
discussed here treat the social sciences
largely as a tool for gathering empirical data
on the role of law in society. Admittedly,
regarding social sciences as an auxiliary
method for collecting legal data makes them
somewhat acceptable to some academic
lawyers, but it also impairs their reflexive
properties which enable researchers to iden-
tify and explore the taken-for-granted social
and cultural values of the law. Why socio-
legal research stops short of adopting reflexive
approaches of the social sciences, in general,
and of sociology in particular, is a question
which takes us back to the epistemic conflicts
and institutional competitions that define the
relationship between legal practice, jurispru-
dence and sociology.
PART THREE: CAN LAW AND
SOCIOLOGY LEARN FROM EACH
OTHER?
As we argued earlier, legal practice is
dependent not only on knowledge of legal
rules and doctrine, but also on tacit know-how
about the social relationships and processes
which produce and reproduce legal institu-
tions. Jurisprudence is, admittedly, not inter-
ested in the day-to-day mundane practices
of lawyers and officials, and instead seeks to
elucidate the general characteristics of legal
thought, clarify legal concepts and produce
general descriptions of legal systems. But it
still requires data on how law operates and
interacts with its social environment to pro-
duce such general descriptions. It also needs
methods for verifying the empirical validity
of these general descriptions. Therefore, both
legal practice and jurisprudence should in
principle be open to the types of insight that
sociology and other social sciences can pro-
vide. Sociological accounts of how law
works as an institution can provide legal
practice with insight into law’s social
processes, while methods of the social sci-
ences can help jurisprudence to examine if its
concepts and frameworks are grounded in the
reality of law or need to be modified or disre-
garded (Galligan, 2006: 18).
Sociology can, in return, gain from the
study of how sets of formal norms, principles
and ideas are dialectically linked to patterns
of institutional practices, which in turn repro-
duce the normative backbone of modern
society. Sociology can also learn from
jurisprudence about the internal mechanisms
of the law, about how those who participate
in legal processes understand and define their
participation, and about the ‘softer’ interpre-
tive expressions of law, which are found in
legal doctrine and legal reasoning, and which
are not readily available to those who view
the law from the outside. In short, sociology
is equipped and strategically placed to
observe and analyze law’s interaction with its
social environment, whereas jurisprudence is
best equipped to explore its internal opera-
tion and realities. This can also mean that
neither jurisprudence nor sociology is suffi-
ciently equipped to provide an adequate
description and analysis of the role of law in
society. As pointed out by Gurvitch (1947:
241), the sociology of law and philosophy of
law, without mutual contact, are doomed to
‘sterility, dogmatism, and impotence’
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LAW THROUGH SOCIOLOGY’S LOOKING GLASS
(Gurvitch, 1947: 241; for a similar conclu-
sion see Habermas, 1996: 66).
If sociology and jurisprudence can com-
plement each other, why do they not join
forces to establish the science of law?
Possible answers to this question can be
found by examining, as we did in Part One,
sociological and legal epistemes and demon-
strating that law and sociology make sense
of, and orient themselves towards, the social
world using different sets of concepts and
ideas. Irreconcilable as these sociological
and legal ideas might appear on the surface,
they all represent forms of knowledge
acquired by observing and examining the
social (rather than physical or supernatural)
conditions. Why is it then that the epistemic
tensions nonetheless appear to pose insur-
mountable obstacles to bringing law and
sociology together? To answer this question,
we need to consider the politics of academia
in addition to the epistemic differences. For
example, why could H. L. A. Hart not admit
that he had read Max Weber on Law in
Economy and Society and was indebted to
Weber for his internal account of legal rules
(Lacey, 2004)? Also, why do some promi-
nent philosophers of law, such as Dworkin,
regard sociological and historical studies of
law which view the law from without as ‘per-
verse’, while failing to recognize that internal
studies of the law which ignore questions
about the social properties of the law and the
external manifestations of the law are also
‘impoverished and defective’ (Dworkin,
1986: 14)? I suggest here that the answers to
these questions reveal as much about the con-
struction and distribution of ‘scientific
stakes’ in academia (Bourdieu, 1975) as
about the theoretical make-up of sociology,
legal studies and jurisprudence. The tension
between law and sociology is, thus, as much
about academic competition between disci-
plines and fields of research as about epis-
temic conflicts.
Academic competition should be viewed
in the context of power relations in academia
and as a means of obtaining or maintaining
access to financial resources, such as fund-
ing, grants, posts, contracts, etc. This type of
71
professional interest is a powerful incentive
for individual researchers in academic fields
such as law and sociology, but leads to disci-
plinary isolation once each discipline has
developed its own ‘stakes’ and internal
‘structure of the distribution of the specific
capital’ (Bourdieu, 2004: 59). Law and
sociology have long established their own
academic forms of capital that exist inde-
pendently of the ‘stakes’ in other fields of
research, and this relieves them of the need to
compete with each other. The preoccupation
of academic lawyers and mainstream sociolo-
gists with their own ‘scientific stakes’ has
been at the expense of paying sufficient
attention to epistemological debates and
exchanges, which form the interdisciplinary
lifeline of socio-legal research.
Socio-legal research appears to have no
alternative but to create and establish its own
forms of capital, which will potentially trans-
form it into a discrete discipline independent
of law and sociology. However, the most
valuable asset of socio-legal research lies in
its ability to offer an added value to both law
and sociology by highlighting issues that nei-
ther law nor sociology can articulate or study
alone. Also, it can provide this added value as
long as it remains an interdisciplinary space
which offers relief from the methodological
constraints of other disciplines (Banakar and
Travers, 2005). Thus, socio-legal research
finds itself in a paradoxical situation. It needs
to create its own ‘scientific stakes’ in order to
become independent of both law and sociol-
ogy, which are no longer interested in episte-
mological confrontations. At the same time,
it needs to safeguard its interdisciplinary
character in order to continue the epistemo-
logical debates which law and sociology no
longer pursue. This paradoxical situation
brings uncertainty to socio-legal research,
discouraging those who seek the academic
security and identity of established disci-
plines, but posing an exciting challenge to
those who wish to explore the socio-legal
issues which lie beyond the disciplinary
boundaries of law and sociology. Socio-legal
research is still in the initial stages of its
development. The realization of this paradox
9781412934633-Chap-05 1/10/09 10:21 AM Page 72
72 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
signals its move to a new stage when the
socio-legal field has to reconsider its rela-
tionship with both law and sociology.
NOTES
1 In the following pages, I shall distinguish
between ‘socio-legal research’ and ‘Socio-Legal
Studies’. The former refers to all social scientific stud-
ies of law, while the latter refers to the Socio-Legal
Studies movement in UK.
2 For lack of space I limit my discussion of
jurisprudence and legal positivism to the English ana-
lytical tradition of Austin and Hart.
3 This understanding of law is questioned by crit-
ical legal scholars and various schools of feminism as
a smoke screen for concealing the class, racialized
and gendered nature of the law and legal reasoning.
Even assuming that the judge can and does apply the
law objectively, he or she applies a law which is tilted
in favour of a specific group’s interests and values.
4 The notion of ‘gaze’ is borrowed from Foucault
(1997) and refers to an impersonal way of observing
which does not belong to any individual person, and
can operate as a general principle of surveillance
(even monitoring one’s own activities), while unifying
diverse practices.
5 Let me reiterate that I distinguish between
‘Socio-Legal’, which refers to the British movement
within law schools which is influenced by social
theory and ‘socio-legal’ which refers to all social sci-
entific studies of law including sociology of law.
6 Distinguishing between the legal system’s inter-
nal and external points of view, or ‘inside’ and ‘out-
side’ of law, is problematic and misleading. For a
discussion see Banakar (2003).
7 Papers published in such journals as Journal of
Law and Society, Modern Law Review and Social &
Legal Studies provide fairly reliable indicators of the
type of work produced by the socio-legal community
in Britain.
8 This can also mean that the rise of legal feminist
scholarship and postmodern legal research has
brought Socio-Legal Studies (SLS) closer to Critical
Legal Studies (CLS). While the SLS has gone from
strength to strength, the CLS has somewhat shrunk
in size and lost its ideological momentum.
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GlasHouse Press.
Vick, D. W. (2004) ‘Interdisciplinarity and the
Discipline of Law’, Journal of Law and Society,
31: 163–93.
Wheeler, S. and Thomas, P. (2002) ‘Socio-Legal
Studies’, in David J. Hayton (ed.) Law’s Future(s).
Oxford: Hart Publishing. pp. 267–80.
9781412934633-Chap-06 1/10/09 8:46 AM Page 74
New Ways of Relating
Authority and Solidarity:
Theoretical and Empirical
Explorations1
INTRODUCTION
The profound changes the world has experi-
enced in the last three or four decades pose
great intellectual and political challenges to
us sociologists. No doubt, the world has
always faced crises and undergone changes.
Of course, social sciences usually view such
events as challenges. However, it is also true
that, at some particular moments, society
experiences turning points, ones at which
conventional frameworks of understanding
seem inadequate, and they make room for
feelings of rupture or discontinuity. To con-
ceive of the economy as a distinctive dimen-
sion of life, for example, is something that
took place only after there emerged a notion
that the public and private spheres of social
life were not the same. In a sense, the very
process of fragmentation of the social
6
Elisa P. Reis
sciences into specialized disciplines can be
connected to historical-cultural challenges
that made the old theoretical concepts sound
wrong or too limited (Elias, 1984).
In the present context, I will focus on a
specific contemporary challenge, one that
concerns many of us trained in the old tradi-
tion of historical sociology with regard to the
standard ways of looking at society and at its
basic forms of organization. As I see it, there
are recent conceptual changes in sociology
that respond to actual transformations in both
objective and subjective social processes. At
the same time, I agree with Sommers and
Gibson (1994: 45) when they observe, ‘Social
theory is as much history and narrative as it
is metatheory. In its very construction,
all theory presumes a prior question the
theory is designed to answer – hence the
theory itself is already an intervening
9781412934633-Chap-06 1/10/09 8:46 AM Page 75
RELATING AUTHORITY AND SOLIDARITY
moment in a narrative process of knowledge
construction’.
In the following, I proceed first to a theo-
retical discussion, and then to a brief empiri-
cal analysis in an attempt to deal with
ongoing changes in contemporary theory
and practice. Taking ideas and actions as
interwoven components of social processes,
I discuss a broad intellectual change and an
empirical institutional innovation as phe-
nomena that mirror each other. At the theo-
retical level, I look at the tendency to
approach society in ways that differ from old
established canons. I contend that the resur-
gence of civil society in the public discourse,
the rise of new social movements, the emer-
gence of cosmopolitan ideals are some of the
indications of transformations that have
demanded new theoretical lenses for social
scientists. At the same time, I do not ignore
the fact that, while responding to social
change, sociologists also contribute to shap-
ing a new understanding of social life.
At the empirical level, I focus on the world
of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)
as a phenomenon that somehow illustrates the
new image of society. I suggest that the ele-
vation of such organizations to the condition
of either partners or alternatives to authority
mechanisms points to a new way of framing
the relationships between state and society.
While voluntary organizations, philanthropic
initiatives, and other solidarity movements
are no novelty, there is something new when
social organizations are perceived as societal
manifestations vis-à-vis the state and/or the
market. It is not my purpose to prove that
NGOs, or other civil society entities, are
expanding the amount of social solidarity
one finds in society. My objective while com-
bining theoretical reflections and empirical
investigation in the following text is not to
test hypotheses. Rather, I want to study
NGOs because from the perspective
of a sociology of knowledge, I take it for
granted that societal solidarity has become
a proper focus of analysis, in the same sense
that state authority and market interests have
long been legitimate analytical perspectives.
75
Using information from an empirical research
project in Brazil, I look at some basic charac-
teristics of a sample of NGOs in order to
suggest research questions that I believe
could help map out the new terms of interac-
tion between state, market, and society.
The newly emerging image of the social
world constitutes a significant cultural trans-
formation. It has an impact on the constitu-
tion of new social actors, and, at the same
time, the latter affect the way society is
portrayed. It is not my purpose to suggest
that one or the other influence takes prece-
dence. On the contrary, I want to stress the
mutual impact at play between these two
dimensions of analysis. I also want to draw
attention to the fact that concepts are cultural
products, and, therefore, contextual factors
deeply affect them. This means that the con-
stant human attempts at redefining concepts
express our historicity: while accounting for
the changes that society experiences, we are
at the same time shaping the future, or acting
upon the reconstruction of society. In this
sense, sociological theory responds to cogni-
tive as well as to moral concerns.
THE CHANGED SOCIETAL MIRROR
The noticeable acceleration of global
processes and the stunning revival of liberal-
ism have had among their multiple conse-
quences a deconstructing impact on the ways
we used to conceive of society; they there-
fore pose new challenges to the social
sciences. Under the general label of global-
ization, the world is experiencing economic,
political, social, and cultural transformations
so rapid and encompassing that we still lack
clear concepts and definitions of what is
taking place. Caught in the midst of such
empirical and intellectual changes, we social
scientists experience at times an almost
anomic situation, given that our basic tools or
concepts for organizing ideas, formulating
hypotheses, and elaborating theoretical
propositions appear to be inadequate.
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76 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
The discomfort is common to sociologists
from the global North and the global South,
in both wealthy and poor countries. The gen-
eral terms of the new sociological puzzles are
the same everywhere. Yet, there are also
obvious differences among them, pointing to
the conclusion that no matter how global the
world is, nor how fluid modernity is, nation-
states still matter, still confer meaning to the
way problems and their solutions are con-
ceived in both hemispheres (Axtmann, 2004;
Reis, 2004). In other words, the way people
perceive the changes in course are deeply
influenced by their historical experiences, by
what they once trusted to be their society and
its prospects. Yet, to the extent that we all
have to take into account our respective con-
texts, this condition makes us fellow cosmo-
politan explorers, observers bound to one
another, and perhaps comparativists.
The conceptual change I want to address is
certainly not directly relevant to some
branches of sociology. Yet, it is general
enough to affect several subfields of the dis-
cipline. I want to call attention to the changed
theoretical status of social solidarity that
implicitly or explicitly has taken place in
both lay and sociological discourses. Until
recently, we used to think of authority and
interest mechanisms as ways of organizing
society and ensuring solidarity. In recent
times though, solidarity or society itself is
increasingly taken as one more instance,
another logical dimension, and an analytical
component equivalent to state authority and
market interests. Whose Keeper?, the sugges-
tive title of the book by Wolfe (1989) sum-
marized well the growing feeling that
authority and market interests are not suffi-
cient resources to solve problems of societal
organization.
With the classics of historical sociology,
we had learned that contemporary society
relied mainly on two basic instruments to
organize itself: authority resources and inter-
est-based exchange mechanisms. In other
words, we became used to thinking of society
as organized into structures of authority,
chief among them the state, and structures of
exchange, the market being the most obvious
one in modern society. Along the same lines,
we became used to thinking of structures of
solidarity as derived from common interests,
be these material or ideal ones. In this
tradition of sociological analysis, we learned
to think of society as clusters of material
and ideal interests that count on authority
and market mechanisms to organize
themselves and to attain distinctive goals
(Bendix, 1964).
As Weber (1978, II: 927) put it, a market
situation is not a community, but it is a pos-
sible basis for community action. Even
taking into account structural antagonisms,
solidarity can emerge to the extent that labor
and capital, buyers and sellers, producers and
consumers share a common interest in the
smooth operation of exchange. Interests not
only generate competition, but also interde-
pendence. In the same sense, legitimate
authority binds together the ruler and the ruled,
lords and peasants, government and citizens.
In short, as outlined above, state and
market resources were thought to constitute
the basic instruments that contemporary
society counts on to organize itself. They
were thought of as the instruments that pro-
vide social order, albeit an order that entails
oppression and exploitation, as strongly
stressed in the Marxist tradition. Taking soci-
ety as a substantive ground, this perspective
views the repertoire of means available to
governments, on the one hand, and firms on
the other, as instrumental mechanisms to be
used to organize solidarity, to enforce order,
and to advance interests. In this perspective,
the national state appears as a successful
historical amalgamation of authority and sol-
idarity. Thanks to a cultural process that
led to a sort of naturalization of the nation-
state, society became equivalent to nation,
and nation the source of state legitimacy
(Reis, 1998a).
In other words, the formation and consoli-
dation of the nation-state entailed a peculiar
fusion: obedience to the state authority on the
one hand, and spontaneous compliance with
it on the other, the latter derived from the
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RELATING AUTHORITY AND SOLIDARITY
feeling of belonging that nationhood con-
ferred upon individuals. In this political-
cultural framework, the national state came to
be perceived not only as the European histor-
ical path, but also as the natural development
of modern society. People got used to think-
ing of societies and nations as equivalents,
and of both as circumscribed by the territory
of nation-states. In that context, national
citizenship became the ideal type of modern
collective identity. The successful nation-
state should be able to convert citizenship
into the prime identifier of a collectivity or a
‘society’ as nations became synonymous
with societies.
The impact of the nation-state as an ideol-
ogy was overwhelming in the Developing
World. To begin with, the idea of a basic right
to self-determination that inspired decolo-
nization did not refer to communities of any
other nature, but to people as members of
nation-states. Other clusters of solidarity
were underestimated, if not openly equated
with obstacles to progress. The hopes for
economic growth, development and modern-
ization were interlaced with ideas that mixed
in variable combinations of authority and
market resources. In the perspective of polit-
ical activists, reforms and revolutions consti-
tuted means to make possible efficient use of
market and/or authority. Among scholars and
policy makers, we observe a similar outlook.
Looking at the classic development literature
of the 1950s and 1960s, a clear pattern
emerges: prescriptions for growth were
essentially plans for the efficient use of
market and/or authority initiatives. Solidarity
did not constitute an instrumental resource in
those plans, but rather the ‘natural’ stuff
sociability is made of.
The specialized literature did recognize
that solidarity feelings might even be restric-
tive, pulling apart tribes, clans, ethnic or reli-
gious groups. Yet, in the authors’ accounts,
such feelings were always there, as a sort of
residual ground binding people together
while often preventing them from taking
rationally planned decisions. It was only in
recent decades that images of social life and
77
plans to affect it replaced the conventional
model with a new one that includes commu-
nity and solidarity as elements amenable to
rationalizing initiatives, whether one calls
them social capital, trust, associativeness, or
other related notions. The idea that, like
authority and market mechanisms, societal
resources can be rationally planned to attain
goals, finds a parallel in the revival of civil
society in public discourse.
Rescued from the past, after a long period
of oblivion, if not open deprecation
(Alexander, 1998; Cohen and Arato, 1992;
Keane, 1988a; b; Pérez-Diáz, 1993), nowa-
days civil society has come to stand for the
bright side of the world, one of the virtuous
components of collective life. The return of
‘civil society’ to daily discourse reveals an
interesting fact. While the expression
assumed quite distinct overtones, depending
on the context, everywhere it conveys the
idea of healthy social forces to curb excesses
of either authority or market influences (Van
Rooy, 1998). As Hall (1995: 2) observed,
civil society became ‘at one and the same
time a social value and a set of social institu-
tions’. That it was meant to convey the notion
of a reaction to political and/or economic
malaise in very different contexts is quite
clear, if we observe that civil society became
an epitome of democracy in former commu-
nist countries as well as in former state-led
capitalist dictatorships in Latin America. In
both contexts, together with the concept of
citizenship, civil society replaced old slogans
in the democratic discourse. While previ-
ously, even in some academic circles, the
notion of citizenship was considered a
‘bourgeois mystification’, in the post bi-polar
era, it has become a redeeming idea, a cher-
ished value. One could say that now any pos-
itive image of social life stresses the role of
active citizens to revitalize civil society so as
to compensate for the shortcomings of both
state and market.
At the same time that the call for an active
society becomes increasingly strong, one
also observes clear signs that the image and
role of both market and state actors experience
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78 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
significant changes. The idea of corporate
social responsibility, which has become so
important within the entrepreneurial world,
is a good indication that a new moral code is
gaining currency (Carroll, 1999; Garriga and
Melé, 2004; Hemingway and Maclagan,
2004; Zadek, 2004). The new market moral-
ity has been interpreted in various ways. For
some, it is mainly a marketing strategy, that
is, it creates a false solidarity between the
suppliers and the consumer market, manipu-
lated by the former. For others, the new man-
agerial welfare is a sort of natural return to
voluntary action given the state’s retreat from
welfare initiatives under the pressure of neo-
liberal forces. For my purposes here, it is not
relevant to test if these or other hypotheses
for the rise of corporate social responsibility
prove true. I want simply to draw attention to
the fact that the conventional solutions that
modern society had reached for providing
social goods have been brought into ques-
tion. In my view, the fact that the state shares
welfare provision with other models that
ensure solidarity has not received the atten-
tion it deserves among sociologists.
At the same time that corporate social
responsibility gains salience, the adoption of
market principles within structures of author-
ity, the vivid claims for new government
management we hear in different corners of
the world, suggest that elements typical of
the market have permeated the state. That
government should behave like lean firms
and that firms should fulfill welfare functions
have become as much current values as the
idea that civil society has to compensate for
the deficiencies of both state and market
resources.
To decipher the deep meaning of this sort
of cultural revolution that puts into question
the conventional meanings of authority,
market, and solidarity, sociology’s agendas
must tackle the changes in progress from
multiple angles. What I intend next is to
explore, in a preliminary way, one of the
issues that I consider relevant to such an
agenda. I will focus my attention on one
of the new social actors in civil society,
namely the so-called Non-Governmental
Organizations. My purpose here will be just
to search for a general picture of such an
actor, and, in the process, reflect on questions
that its presence raises. More precisely, look-
ing at NGOs in Brazil, I seek to draw their
profile and, more important, formulate
new research questions that might help us to
shed light on their structures and the roles
they play.
NEW ACTORS ON STAGE
The rediscovery of civil society in recent
decades finds an echo in a new wave of vol-
untary associations, social movements,
strategies to build up social capital, investiga-
tions into the sources of social trust, and sim-
ilar phenomena (Anheier and Themudo,
2002; Della Porta and Tarrow, 2005;
Fernandes, 1994; Keck and Sikkink, 1999;
Khagram et al., 2002). I take these develop-
ments as manifestations of the deep transfor-
mations in the way society perceives itself
and its basic resources of organization, as
discussed above. Common to all of them is
the emphasis on solidarity resources as dis-
tinct from state authority or market-based
interests. The new labels that describe civil
society actors – non-governmental organiza-
tions, third sector, solidary sector, etc. – point
clearly to alternative means to state and
market. Civil society actors are supposed to
provide crucial ingredients to social life,
things that are either absent or badly supplied
by the traditional authority and market-
interest mechanisms.
One has to bear these developments in
mind in order to understand the significance
that the so-called NGOs have come to
acquire all over the world (Clarke, 1998;
Clayton, 1996; Fowler, 1997; Landim, 1988;
OECD, 1988; Salamon and Anheier, 1996;
Wapner, 1995). For some, they are the natu-
ral consequence of the weakening of national
states challenged by globalization. For
others, they express rather the impatience of
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RELATING AUTHORITY AND SOLIDARITY
society with traditional forms of participa-
tion. Some view these new actors as virtuous,
as a positive sign of societal strengthening.
Instead, others see them as the perverse face
of neo-liberalism that releases the state from
social obligations, calls for philanthropy, and
converts legitimate rights into charitable gifts.
No matter what the explanations are for
the origins of NGOs, and in spite of their
ambiguous implications, they have prolifer-
ated to become a truly global reality. In my
view, more important than identifying the
motivation behind the propagation of NGOs
is to explore to what extent they may be seen
as responses to an altered social perception
of the basic mechanisms of societal organiza-
tion. Also crucial is to map out the actual
consequences of such developments for
social organization and their possible long-
term consequences. Thus, I am, not siding
with the vast literature dedicated to celebrat-
ing the virtues or the vices of the Third
Sector, philanthropic initiatives, and NGOs.
Nor will I, for the moment, pay attention to
the ideological representation these organiza-
tions make for themselves. My aim will be
rather limited: to indicate some systematic
information on the structure and function of
NGOs in Brazil so as to lay the ground for
further inquiry into changes in the ways soci-
ety and state interact. By choosing NGOs as
an illustration of both cultural and institu-
tional changes in progress, I am, to some
extent, taking them as proxies for civil soci-
ety, although well aware that NGOs do not
exhaust the universe of civil society.
It is important to take into account that, in
the context of Latin American countries, the
proliferation of NGOs is quite a detour from
the state-centered view that prevailed for
most of the twentieth century. In fact, both
the development literature, and the actual
policy strategies adopted in the so-called
Third World, had as an assumption that
national states had the responsibility to
champion economic growth, to stimulate
social modernization, and to promote social
inclusion. Regardless of their socialist or
capitalist inspiration, development models
79
conferred upon the state the responsibility for
enforcing economic rationality. In countries
where state capitalism was the recipe, the
governmental sector not only acted as a
strategic investor to create the proper condi-
tions for private capital, but was also itself an
actor in the market game (Stepan, 1978).
Moreover, authority resources were credited
with the responsibility to provide social wel-
fare. Even if social welfare was understood
as subordinate to the discretion of the pater-
nal authority rather than the recognition of a
legitimate right, it was to the government that
the prevailing ideology credited the responsi-
bility for social protection. True enough,
faith-inspired charity has always been very
salient. However, in the Latin American con-
text, religious modernizers were part of the
active leadership demanding state-led social
development.
In the case of Brazil, starting from the
1930s, the state played the key role in the
adopted growth model. Both under demo-
cratic and dictatorial regimes, national state
firms constituted the backbone of develop-
mental processes and state capitalism was
perceived as the most legitimate model to
overcome underdevelopment and to promote
social inclusion (Martins, 1976; Reis,
1998b). Under the modernizing military dic-
tatorship (1964–1985), the number of state
firms soared (Evans, 1979; Trebat, 1983). At
the same time, the process of state-building
proceeded with significant government pene-
tration into hinterland areas and belated
extension of social benefits to rural dwellers.
The picture changed quickly in the 1980s,
as much in Brazil as elsewhere. Pledges
for a lean state, and renewed praise for
new government management, typical of
Thatcherism and Reaganomics, quickly
echoed in the Third World. Actually, be it
within the advanced capitalist world, the
former communist bloc, or the former Third
World, less state and more society became
the prevailing ideology. In Latin America,
from Mexico to Brazil and Argentina, fast
economic privatization reversed the previous
pro-statist orthodoxy in just a few years.
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80 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
Large state firms, which had been the uncon-
tested market pillars and a source of national
pride for so many Third World countries,
became, almost from one day to the next, the
scapegoats for economic backwardness.
Opposition protests notwithstanding, the
vanishing developmental state, both as an
economic model and as the official ideology,
was surprisingly fast.
In the Brazilian case, there are occasional
nostalgic claims for rescuing national devel-
opment projects under the aegis of the state,
particularly among old elites, be they repre-
sentatives of the business sector or union
leaders. It is also true that in appealing to the
masses, party leaders still resort to a dis-
course that puts emphasis on state develop-
mentalism. However, the actual economic
recipes enforced are far from the formulas of
state-based capitalism prevailing in the past.
It is not that the state has ceased to be a rele-
vant actor for the market to operate.
However, it is impossible to deny that the
role of authority has changed significantly
and that the ideological justifications for
state protectionism are no longer part of the
official discourse. Even if it is true that in the
last few years we observe a clear resurgence
of state-centered discourses in several Latin
America countries, we are not back to the old
days of uncontested state-championed capi-
talism. Now, state authorities appeal to the
new civil society associations to legitimize
themselves. The official discourse is full of
exhortations to public/private partnership,
and appeals to civic solidarity.
To the demise of state capitalism corre-
sponds the ascension of an ideology of slim
government, an exhortation of the Third
Sector, and pleas for devolution of compe-
tence to civil society. Furthermore, in Brazil
and elsewhere, governments have discovered
that partnership with NGOs can be an attrac-
tive alternative to gain flexibility and/or to
avoid bureaucratic controls. In the Brazilian
case, there have been frequent press reports
on the use of NGOs for state patronage and
nepotism. Although critics like to use this in
order to condemn NGOs as such, there are
also NGOs aimed precisely at fighting
corruption and the lack of transparency
while calling for the accountability of public
agencies.
Other important changes in the official dis-
course have taken place, suggesting that the
interaction between state and society requires
new ideological justifications. Conventional
ways to perform authority roles came under
critical scrutiny, and everywhere patterns of
behavior typical of the market became the
benchmark of government officers. Under the
‘new public management’ ideology, bureau-
crats are expected to orient their behavior to
market efficiency criteria (Barzelay, 2001;
Lane, 2000; McLaughlin et al., 2002; Pollitt
and Bouckaert, 2000). To solve fiscal prob-
lems, the public sector is expected to seek
inspiration in the market. Welfare reforms
everywhere recast the protective function of
governments in new moulds, so as to bring it
closer to sound contractual practices. In such
a context, civil society actors enter the scene
as alternatives either to collaborate with the
state or to become its surrogate for carrying
out social functions.
While deeply aware that there have always
been multiple forms of civil society organiza-
tions in action, I focus here on Non-
Governmental Organizations as expressive of
new formulas for social organization. While
the definition of NGOs is the subject of con-
troversy, some consensus exists that they are
non-profit oriented, have a formal structure,
are autonomous in relation to governments,
and are non-representative (Baccaro, 2002;
Landim, 2002; Salamon, 1999).
The evidence I use in the following text
comes from a research entitled ‘Market,
State and Society in the Implementation of
Social Policies’ that I am conducting in col-
laboration with Brazilian colleagues. My
comments are based upon preliminary results
of a survey, aimed at identifying basic char-
acteristics of NGOs active in Brazil. As
emphasized above, I am convinced that there
have been significant changes in the way
we conceive of societal arrangements today,
changes that need clarification, and that call
for research into areas thus far not suffi-
ciently covered. Along these lines, I take
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RELATING AUTHORITY AND SOLIDARITY
NGOs as part of new forms of organization
that are widely mentioned, whether these be
good or bad, about which we still need to
learn much more.
At this stage, my main purpose is to inves-
tigate how these new organizations, labeled
NGOs, structure themselves, how they inter-
act with the state, how they operate. There
are innumerable case studies of particular
NGOs, but there is little systematic analysis
of the collective phenomena of their creation
and consolidation. Thus, I set myself the task
of obtaining not a close-up picture, but rather
some sort of panorama photograph of a class
of Brazilian NGOs.
I am well aware that the risks of simplifi-
cation in such a broad approach are
immense. Moreover, there are specific diffi-
culties in mapping out NGOs in Brazil that
make generalization even more problematic.
How to select a reliable sample? It was not an
easy task to consolidate a list of NGOs active
in Brazil. There were many problems to sort
out before confronting the decision between
the too inclusive or too exclusive definition
criteria one encounters. The data bases con-
sulted varied from around 600 listed in the
neatly organized archives of the Brazilian
Association of Non-Governmental Agencies
(ABONG) to the over 200,000 registered by
the official Brazilian Institute of Geography
and Statistics (IBGE).
Seeking to consolidate the database to
extract a sample, it became evident that the
very disputes over the definition of what a
NGO is should constitute an investigation
issue. Debates about the ‘right’ definition
already express a relevant political competi-
tion between distinctive interests. From the
vast range of definitions for NGOs, we have
chosen the one based on three characteristics:
non-profit orientation, no representative
basis, and independence from government.
However, doubts persisted: Should the term
be applied to describe any non-profit organi-
zation? Should it include traditional religious
and sports associations? Should it apply to
professional organizations that seek to
advance particular social causes? Should it
be restricted to associations that embody the
81
aims of specific social movements? These
are vivid theoretical and practical disputes
that the effort to map out the NGO universe
clearly revealed.
Given such huge disparities in current def-
initions, plus the practical difficulties in
operating a survey, we made crucial choices:
first, we selected just Brazil-based non-gov-
ernmental organizations that are explicitly
involved with activities in the following
areas: health, education, gender, minority
rights, human rights, children and youth, and
environment. Therefore, we excluded sports,
leisure, and other activity areas that tradition-
ally counted on voluntary organizations,
often religion-based ones, and that signifi-
cantly differ from the typical discourse of
NGOs. Our choice here was to concentrate
on NGOs that supply services traditionally
provided by the state (authority) and/or by
the market sector. The decision to include
just Brazil-based NGOs was coherent with
the idea of focusing mainly on the changing
interaction of the nation-state with its nation-
als, though the importance of international
and global actors for domestic NGOs is
explicitly contemplated in the survey.2
Second, we limited our study to organiza-
tions active in six urban centers: Sao Paulo,
Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Belo Horizonte,
Porto Alegre, and Salvador. Three of the cities
were selected to account for the largest
absolute concentration of NGOs in the coun-
try (Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Brasilia);
two others have the largest relative concen-
tration of civic organizations in the country
according to official statistics (Porto Alegre
and Belo Horizonte). Finally, we decided to
include Salvador, the capital city of Bahia
State, because it is the urban center that has
the largest number of NGOs acting in the
Northeast region, where poverty and social
exclusion are particularly acute.
I contend that, even if not explicitly random,
the sample, comprising 301 cases, is somehow
representative of the universe of Brazilian non-
governmental organizations. In addition, I main-
tain that, discounting spatial and functional bias,
the survey results do provide relevant informa-
tion on the struc-ture and functioning of NGOs
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82 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
in Brazil. Furthermore, I believe that the infor-
mation in question is likely to be useful and will
inspire new investigations to illuminate the sig-
nificant changes that are taking place in the
forms of interaction between society and state in
Brazil, and elsewhere.
The first point to be observed is that
NGOs, as defined here, are indeed a recent
development in the country. The large major-
ity of the NGOs in our sample (84%) came
into being in the last twenty years, as illus-
trated in Figure 6.1. Actually, the growth of
NGOs was even more intense in the 1990s
than in the 1980s, as is suggested by a more
comprehensive study of the governmental
agency of Brazilian statistics (IBGE, 2004).
Taking into account the recency of the non-
governmental organizations in the sample, I
wondered if one could find the first signs of
institutionalization in this universe. Were they
moving toward established patterns of struc-
turing and action, or were they still undefined
as to their way of acting, or even to their
chances of survival? The answers to such
questions must certainly be taken as very ten-
tative. With this word of caution, I looked at
indicators, such as: (1) the ‘generation’ of the
50.0%
40.0%
30.0%
Percent
20.0%
10.0%
0.0%
Up to 1984
Figure 6.1. Distribution of NGOs according to year of establishment.
Source: As Fundações Privadas e As Associações sem Fins Lucrativos no Brasil, 2nd ed., Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, 2004, Sample
Survey 2004/2005.
organization; (2) its adaptability as measured
by the organization’s capacity to redefine its
objectives so as to adjust to changes in its
environment; (3) its degree of autonomy as
suggested by financial dependency on a single
or more sources of support; and (4) its profes-
sionalization as suggested by the number of
people on their payroll. Taking all of these
indicators into account, one could expect that
the older the NGO, the better the chances that
it will become more adaptable, less dependent
upon a single source of financial support, and
more professional in its structure.
Looking at the data, one observes that NGOs
display significant flexibility as measured by
changes in their objectives and/or publics. Thus,
Table 6.1 shows that around one-third of the total
sample (32.3%) indicates that they have experi-
enced changes in their goals and/or clientele.
The data also suggest that age seems to affect the
NGOs’ capacity of adaptation: the proportion of
organizations that changed objectives is higher
the earlier the period they started to operate.
Next, I asked if the propensity to adapt to
contextual demands varies across the sector
in which the NGOs act. Are there variations
in adaptability according to the kind of activity
1985-1994 1995-2004
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RELATING AUTHORITY AND SOLIDARITY 83

Table 6.1 Changes in objectives and/or publics of NGOs according to date established
Changes in objectives and/or
publics of NGOs
Yes No Total
Date established Up to 1984 Count 21 27 48
Row % 43.8% 56.3% 100.0%
1995–1994 Count 40 80 120
Row % 33.3% 66.7% 100.0%
1995–2004 Count 36 96 132
Row % 27.3% 72.7% 100.0%

Total Count 97 203 300

Row % 32.3% 67.7% 100.0%
Source: Sample survey 2004/2005.

NGOs develop? Table 6.2 indicates that the
organizations primarily dedicated to health-
related activities are the ones with the lowest
propensity to change (21.1%), followed by
organizations dedicated to rural communities
and native groups (22.2%), while the most
flexible are the NGOs that have poverty and
unemployment as their major target, and
those dedicated to poverty and unemploy-
ment among youths (25%). The substantial
differences we observe between NGOs active
in distinct areas might indeed reflect the
conditions peculiar to each sector. Thus, for
example, we could suppose that the organiza-
tions dedicated to health activities are less
adaptable, given the fixed investments they
make in equipment and specialized personnel.
Table 6.3 shows the major sources of
financial support of NGOs, according to their
age. We observe that dependence upon
foreign funds is higher among the older ones,
decreasing dramatically in the group of
newer NGOs. The ones established in
the recent decade count most on domestic

Table 6.2 Changes in objectives and/or publics according to main area of activity
Changes in objectives and/or
publics of NGOs
Yes No Total
Major area Health (HIV, physical Count 42 15 57
of activity deficiencies, cancer) Row % 21.1% 78.9% 100.0%
Poverty, unemployement Count 9 8 17
Row % 52.9% 47.1% 100.0%
Youth groups in risk situation Count 32 68 100
Row % 32.0% 68.0% 100.0%
Excluded urban communities Count 12 21 33
Row % 36.4% 63.6% 100.0%
Women, blacks and other Count 11 23 34
minorities Row % 32.4% 67.6% 100.0%
Native and rural communities Count 4 14 18
Row % 22.2% 77.8% 100.0%
Organization of the third sector Count 14 28 42
and civil society Row % 33.3% 66.7% 100.0%
Others Count 11 17 28
Row % 39.3% 60.70% 100.0%

Total Count 97 194 291

Row % 33.3% 66.7% 100.0%
Source: Sample survey 2004/2005.
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84 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

Table 6.3 Major source support of NGOs according to date established

Major source of financial support
Various
Domestic sources
Government non-gov Foreign (no single
sources sources sources Self support dependency) Total
Date established Up to 1984 Count 4 9 12 10 7 42
Row % 9.5% 21.4% 28.6% 23.8% 16.7% 100.0%
1985–1994 Count 24 19 36 12 16 107
Row % 22.4% 17.8% 33.6% 11.2% 15.0% 100.0%
1995–2004 Count 26 39 14 26 18 123
Row % 21.1% 31.7% 11.4% 21.1% 14.6% 100.0%

Total Count 54 67 62 48 41 272

Row % 19.9% 24.6% 22.8% 17.6% 15.1% 100.0%
Source: Sample survey 2004/2005.

non-governmental sources of support. The
flow of foreign funds is particularly salient
for those organizations established between
1985 and 1994. Age, however, does not seem
to affect the propensity to diversify fund
sources. The proportion of those that manage
to diversify their supporters, thus avoiding
single dependency, is more or less the same
among older and newer NGOs. We also
observe that the proportion of NGOs that
count on government sources as their major
supporters has remained about the same for
those organizations established within the
last two decades.
In order to check if NGOs have experienced
change in their patterns of financial depend-
ency, we enquired what their major sources of
support were ten years ago. Table 6.4 summa-
rizes the answers we obtained. Comparing
the information in this table with the data
for the total of NGOs in Table 6.3, we observe
Table 6.4 Major sources of financial
support of NGOs ten years ago
Frequency
Government sources 43
Domestic non-governmental
sources 57
Foreign sources 61
Self support 33
Various sources (no single
dependency) 28
Total 222
Source: Sample survey 2004/2005.
that the biggest change refers to the decline
of almost five percentage points in the pro-
portion of organizations that, ten years ago,
depended mainly upon foreign sources for
financial support. We also observe that the
proportion of NGOs that either rely mainly
on self-support or diversify their sources of
support, grew slightly in comparison to ten
years ago (2.7 and 2.5 respectively). The two
tables also show that the proportion of NGOs
depending on domestic funds from both gov-
ernment and non-governmental sources
remained almost unchanged.
Further research will be necessary to
investigate what are the possible implications
of the observed changes in funding patterns.
It is premature to anticipate changes in the
performance of the NGO sector as a result of
a lesser proportion of organizations depend-
ent upon foreign funds. Nor can we foresee
that the larger number of NGOs relying on
self-support and/or on diversified financial
sources will bring new patterns of interaction
with authority structures, which is a shift
Percent away from the traditional political mecha-
19.4 nisms, such as patron–client networks. The
generalized beliefs about the growing capac-
25.7 ity of civil society organizations to be inde-
27.5 pendent and to share public responsibilities
14.9
will have to be demonstrated.
12.6 Still focusing on the issue of institutional-
100.0 ization, I enquire if NGOs reveal a tendency
toward a more professionalized structure as
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RELATING AUTHORITY AND SOLIDARITY 85

Table 6.5 Number of paid workers of the NGOs according to year of establishment
Number of stable paid workers of the NGOs
No paid
workers 1 to 9 10 to 49 50 or more Total
Date established Up to1984 Count 3 15 19 11 48
Row % 6.3% 31.3% 39.6% 22.9% 100.0%
1985–1994 Count 16 40 48 15 119
Row % 13.4% 33.6% 40.3% 12.6% 100.0%
1995–2004 Count 30 48 48 6 132
Row % 22.7% 36.4% 36.4% 4.5% 100.0%

Total Count 49 103 115 32 299

Row % 16.4% 34.4% 38.5% 10.7% 100.0%
Source: Sample survey 2004/2005.

they get older. To look into this, I asked what
the proportion of paid workers was across
different generations of NGOs. The findings,
as shown in Table 6.5, indicate that the share
of unpaid workers increases substantially as
we move toward the new generations of
NGOs. Also noticeable is the fact that the
older the generation of the NGO, the larger
the number of workers on their payroll.
Could we then suggest that, as with regular
bureaucracies, NGOs tend to expand as they
get older? We can take this as a hypothesis to
be explored, in the same sense that we should
investigate further in order to examine if the
strong presence of voluntary work among
younger NGOs reveals the presence of inno-
vative structures or just the recency and lack
of institutionalization of some NGOs.
My next set of questions focuses on the
internal process of decision-making. Do
NGOs active in Brazil rely on participatory
mechanisms? Are there indications that
NGOs have innovative, non-bureaucratic
ways of operation as they tend to be por-
trayed by their defenders? The answers
shown in Table 6.6 suggest that NGOs are
sensitive to legitimacy issues: more than
three quarters of them say that they consult
their constituencies ‘always’ or ‘sometimes’.
Nevertheless, as to the actual decision-
making process, 69% say that their top man-
agers are the only ones in charge, and 18%
say that this is often the case. Judging from
such information, we have no elements to
suggest that NGOs are significantly different
from conventional bureaucratic organizations
in their decision-making process.
Taking into account the emphasis in the
literature on the importance of fast communi-
cation for the proliferation of NGOs, the
survey also enquired into the degree of com-
puterization among these organizations.
Indeed, all of the organizations sampled use
electronic mailing lists, and 70% of them
have broadband access to the Internet – a
very high proportion if one takes into
account the low ratio of computers per capita
in the country and the even lower index of
fast Internet access. Moreover, 81% of them
have a web page. Of this total, nearly two-
thirds update the page once a month or more,
as shown in Table 6.7. However, Table 6.8
shows that most of them (86.9%) use the
page primarily to inform about their own ini-
tiatives, while 7.4% say their basic purpose is
to provide information of public utility, and
5.7% only seek first to network people.
Our data do confirm the idea that NGOs
are highly computerized. We are used to
hearing that fast connectivity is as much part
of the global world as NGOs themselves
Table 6.6 Leaders consult their
constituencies
Frequency Valid percent
Never 43 14.4
Almost never 26 8.7
Sometimes 100 33.4
Always 130 43.5
Total 299 100.0
Source: Sample survey 2004/2005.
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86 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

Table 6.7 How often is the webpage fill out an income tax declaration do so
updated through the Internet. But, these are only
Frequency Valid percent 16.5 million or around 9% of the population.
Daily 32 13.5 So the chance that NGOs will reach only
Twice a week 14 5.9 those who are already part of the political
Weekly 47 19.8
Monthly 54 22.8
community seems high. Certainly, the quality
Less than once a month 90 38.0 of citizenship may increase considerably, but
the consequences for the worse-off may not
Total 237 100.0
be so spectacular as the imagery of new
Source: Sample survey 2004/2005.
participatory channels suggests.
(Matthews, 1997). We are also used to hear- Naturally, since NGOs have largely tar-
ing that minorities and excluded groups can geted e-publics, they can be more effective in
now bypass their isolation and move directly communicating and mobilizing support. But
from the local to the global level, thanks to as such, they should be compared to interest
the Internet. Notwithstanding the many anec- groups, unions, lobbies, etc., not to the
dotal success stories about natives who public sector.
quickly mobilize international support for To further enquire into the nature of the
their cause, can we say that NGOs are in gen- relationships between NGOs and the state,
eral more apt to communicate with civil soci- we then asked how the former see them-
ety than state agencies? I would argue that it selves: would they say that they are primarily
is premature to jump to this conclusion. To a social or a communitarian organization that
begin with, taking into account that less than works mainly through voluntary participa-
20% of the Brazilian population has access to tion? Or are they better described as an
home computers, one must conclude that organization of specialists and technical
generalized communication is a problematic advisers dedicated to collective goals? The
feature of e-practices in Brazil, no matter if answers we received reveal a quite balanced
such practices are originated by the state or by division between ‘communitarian’ and ‘advi-
civil society organizations. Second, it is impor- sory’ NGOs. But among the latter, the
tant to bear in mind that unequal access to elec- proportion of those who say they act in part-
tronic communication may indeed accentuate nership with the federal government is
oligopolies of participation and representation. higher. In turn, at the local level, the pro-
Furthermore, one has to observe that, like portions are reversed with more ‘communi-
NGOs, the governmental sector in Brazil tarian’ than ‘advisory’ NGOs acting in part-
presents, in relative terms, a very high degree nership with the government.
of computerization, despite the fact that citi- Last but not least, we enquired into the
zenship remains restricted to a minority. propensity of NGOs to take over functions
Access to government has become in many traditionally performed by state agencies.
ways much easier and comfortable for those Though this part of the study has hardly
who already had less difficult access. For started, it is possible to say that NGOs of a
example, today, 95% of the Brazilians who more advisory and/or technical profile are
more likely to develop partnership with the
Table 6.8 Major purpose of the webpage federal administration than those that define
Frequency Percent themselves as ‘communitarian’. The latter
To advertise its actions 212 86.9 show a slightly higher rate of partnership
To provide information with local administrations than do the advo-
of general interest 18 7.4 cacy type. As to partnership with regional
Networking 14 5.7 states, there are no big differences between
Total 244 100.0 the two models of NGOs. These results are
Source: Sample survey 2004/2005. reproduced in Tables 6.9, 6.10, and 6.11.
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RELATING AUTHORITY AND SOLIDARITY 87

Table 6.9 Partnership with the federal government according to characteristics of the NGO
Works with the federal
government
Yes No Total
Characteristics Communitarian Count 73 79 152
of the NGO Row % 48.0% 52.0% 100.0%
Professional/technical Count 88 58 146
Row % 60.3% 39.7% 100%

Total Count 161 137 298

Row % 54.0% 46.0% 100.0%
Source: Sample survey 2004/2005.

What can we conclude from the evidence
examined? Certainly, the data do not allow us
to say much about the changed patterns of
interaction between society and the state. Yet,
the very fact that we are looking at civil soci-
ety organizations whose explicit mission is to
deliver services and goods formerly per-
ceived as the responsibility of public author-
ity signals a deep cultural change. More
important though, the data reveal the extent
of our ignorance about key questions related
to our society. We do not know, for example,
how NGOs can be made more accountable,
more responsive.
We also do not know if they actually
enhance social participation or else signal
new forms of monopoly power. By defini-
tion, they are not representative, yet to the
extent that they take over roles and functions,
they might be forming loci of power and
privilege. Do NGOs provide more efficient
and less corrupt distribution of social serv-
ices than do governmental bureaucracies?
While this is nowadays the assumption of
international agencies, we have no clear
evidence that this is indeed a feature of
NGOs.
To conclude this preliminary study,
I would say that as crude as the analysis is, it
suggests the relevance of proceeding to an
examination of the survey data already avail-
able. It also shows the need for new sources
of information on the new forms of organiza-
tion that are taking over tasks traditionally
restricted to governmental agencies, with
just marginal collaboration of old philan-
thropic initiatives. The study also suggests
that one should perhaps question to what
extent new actors, like NGOs, are actually
innovative in the way they organize them-
selves, their forms of action, their sources
of finance, etc. Are they really making a
difference? In what sense? Who are the
major beneficiaries? Are they actually more
participatory than other civil society organi-
zations? To whom are they accountable?
To their donors? To their beneficiaries?
These and other crucial questions are
not framed as a form of criticism, but
rather as a matter of fact, as highly needed

Table 6.10 Partnership with local government according to characteristics of the NGO
Works with the local
government
Yes No Total
Characteristics Communitarian Count 84 68 152
of the NGO Row % 55.3% 44.7% 100.0%
Professional/technical Count 73 73 146
Row % 50.0% 50.0% 100.0%
Total Count 157 141 298
Row % 52.7% 47.3% 100.0%
Source: Sample survey 2004/2005.
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88 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

Table 6.11 Partnership with the regional government according to characteristics of the NGO
Works with the local
government
Yes No Total
Characteristics Communitarian Count 66 86 152
of the NGO Row % 43.4% 56.6% 100.0%
Professional/technical Count 68 78 146
Row % 46.6% 53.4% 100.0%

Total Count 134 164 298

Row % 45.0% 55.0% 100.0%
Source: Sample survey 2004/2005.

knowledge for questions of efficiency and help us better tie together the many corners
justice alike. of the contemporary social world. To face
this challenge, we must move from abstract
theorizing to empirical research and vice-
versa in the high-speed mood typical of the
CONCLUDING REMARKS globalized world.

To conclude this chapter I insist that the

conceptual realignment of state, market, and
societal forces is, at the same time, the result
of the historical transformations which are
occurring, and an intellectual attempt to
confer meaning on the changes in question.
Thus, the agenda of sociology has to contem-
plate the empirical processes at play and,
at the same time, account for the changing
ways of conceiving society. As nation-states
experience local and global pressures, the
quickly changing patterns of interaction
among state, market, and civil society remain
under-theorized. Although some draw atten-
tion to a decline in associational forces
(Putnam, 2000), there is plenty of evidence
that new participatory forces are at play,
forces that defy our old schemes of interpre-
tation. On the global scale, the explosion of
the so-called Third Sector, the growing
salience of the idea of corporate social
responsibility, or the move from governabil-
ity to governance in the lexicon of interna-
tional agencies are some of the indications
of the changes at play. While distinctive,
these processes converge as expressions of a
new way to conceive of social life. Each of
such manifestations has received consider-
able attention within sociology. However, we
lack a broad theoretical framework that can
NOTES
1 Research for this work was possible thanks to a
joint grant from CNPQ and FAPERJ, respectively the
federal and the Rio de Janeiro state agencies for sci-
entific research.
2 A forthcoming (2009) paper, in collaboration
with Mariane Koslinski, explores the possible impact
of transnational connections on NGOs. Contrary to
the usual assertion that foreign ties tend to make
NGOs in less-developed countries less domestically
rooted, we show that external ties are closely associ-
ated with more dense domestic networks. See M. C.
Koslinski and E. P. Reis, Transnational and Domestic
Relations of NGOs in Brazil’.
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New Collaborative Forms of
Doing Research1
INTRODUCTION
As we enter the twenty-first century, it
becomes apparent that the economic advance-
ment of nations in both the first and the third
worlds is based on the way they apply knowl-
edge. It is clear that in terms of the globalized
economy, those countries with advanced
technology have a competitive advantage
over those less developed. Although the
cheap labor factor still constitutes an element
of relative importance in the geographical
location of ‘maquila’ plants, this factor will
gradually become less relevant in light of the
technological developments that require
firms to move to second and third generation
‘maquilas,’ involving a more skilled labor
force (Gerber and Carrillo, 2006).
Since the end of the twentieth century, the
idea that society as a whole was nearing a
new era, the ‘era of knowledge’ (Albrow and
King, 1990; Crook et al., 1992; David, 1992)
became fashionable. It was a novelty to asso-
ciate the birth of a new century with the
beginning of a new era. But, what is behind
the recognition of a new global paradigm?
7
Jaime Jiménez
Globalization of the economy: This trend,
which began at the end of World War II with
the establishment of the General Agreement
on Trade and Tariffs in 1947 (General
Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, 2006),
gained momentum in the decade of the
1990s, with the creation of the World Trade
Organization in 1995 (World Trade
Organization, 2006) and the establishment of
diverse free trade agreements geared to pro-
mote, regulate, and standardize free trade
throughout most parts of the world. As of
1997, these covered 90% of all international
trade, encompassing most countries except
China, some former communist countries,
and a few other small countries (Anderson
and Cavanagh, 1997).
Competition for world markets: The large
global economic blocs are engaged in a battle
to conquer world markets, where products
and services with greater technological
content and lower cost flood the markets of
the entire globe without being noticed by the
population at large. It is clear to the large cor-
porations that the investment in research
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92 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
oriented to applications and frontier technology
results in economic benefits in the mid- and
long-term, and at times in a reasonably
short-term.
Vertiginous technological development: The
scientific and technological research that
took place during World War II was the basis
for the impressive technological advance
observed in the second half of the twentieth
century. Developments in micro- and nano-
technology, bio-medicine, genetics, and
other disciplines and trans-disciplines have
set the pace for the constitution of a society
that cannot be understood without examining
contributions of the scientific and technolog-
ical knowledge attained in recent decades.
Advancement in communications: The speed
at which any type of information is dissemi-
nated today surpasses the most fertile imagi-
nation of the past. The new information and
communication technologies (ICT) allow
both the information related to current
research, and that related to international
trade, markets, and the state of global finances,
to be disseminated almost in real time.
‘Reification’ of science and technology: The
fact is that science and technology are
increasingly treated as a commodity, thought
of in terms of markets, competitiveness,
and commercial product development
(Elzinga, 2004).
The common belief that ‘knowledge is power’:
This assertion assigns to scientific knowl-
edge the capacity to dominate the economic,
political, and social spheres, as knowledge
itself is held to be the most important factor
of production.
The world’s arrival in the era of knowl-
edge (Albrow and King, 1990; Crook et al.,
1992; David, 1992) is changing the percep-
tion of the role of science and technology in
society. In part, scientific production appears
to be linked to the needs of the global market.
However, in the past several years, alterna-
tive forms of ‘doing science’ have emerged
throughout the globe, which really are more
socially accountable than existing models.
These new alternative forms respond to the
need to make scientific research more partic-
ipative, including social sectors that have a
stake in the application of scientific findings.
In the following, two alternative forms of
doing research in Latin America are
reviewed, and a comparison is made with the
main features of the model (‘Mode 2’)
defined by Gibbons et al. (1994) and
Nowotny et al. (2001, 2003, 2005), which to
our mind is mostly limited to research related
to the satisfaction of the global economic
market needs and therefore does not go far
enough in terms of change. The conclusion is
that some segments of society are concerned
with the consequences of scientific research
and are putting in practice new decision-
making models that confront current trends.
These new forms of doing research are two
samples of cooperation among segments of
society in search of innovative ways to
approach regional development to improve
the quality of collective life.
A NEW PARADIGM PROPOSED FOR
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
At the end of the twentieth century, some
authors observed that in previous years, the
way of ‘producing knowledge’ had changed,
and proposed a new model (Gibbons et al.,
1994). Concurrently, other authors observed
that research in universities was undergoing
some significant changes in the forms of
knowledge it produces (Fuller, 2000, 2003).
The importance of the work of Gibbons and
his associates resides in the fact that they
have continued research on this topic
(Nowotny et al., 2001, 2003, 2005), attempt-
ing to reply, not always successfully, to the
observations of their critics. According to
Gibbons and his associates, this new way
co-exists with the traditional form, and it
includes not only science and technology but
also the social sciences and the humanities,
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NEW COLLABORATIVE FORMS OF DOING RESEARCH
to the extent that these areas of knowledge
approach the modes of operation of the
‘hard’ sciences. It affects:
● what knowledge is produced,
● how it is produced,
● the context in which it is pursued,
● the way in which production is organized,
● the systems of reward it activates, and
● the mechanisms that control the quality of what
is produced (Gibbons et al., 1994: 7).
These characteristics are firmly articulated in
the case of the ‘hard’ sciences: physics,
chemistry, and biology. Inasmuch as the
social sciences and humanities have tried to
follow the ‘hard’ sciences in rigor, similar
social systems have been implemented to
govern production of knowledge in these
areas (Gibbons et al., 1994: 7). To distinguish
them from the traditional form, these authors
call the new mode of knowledge production
‘Mode 2,’ and name the classical way, ‘Mode
1.’
What follows are some characteristics of
Mode 2 in the context of application:
● Problems are not restricted to a discipline or a
group of disciplines (multi-disciplinary); they are
trans-disciplinary.
● The work is carried out in non-hierarchical, het-
erogeneous, and transitory organizational forms.
● No preference is allocated to university
institutionalization.
● The work involves the close interaction of many
actors.
● In light of the above, the production of knowl-
edge becomes more socially accountable.
● This type of research utilizes an ample range of
criteria to apply quality controls.
Table 7.1 Comparison of the characteristics of Mode 1 and Mode 2 of knowledge production
Mode 1
Problems proposed and resolved by a
specific community
Disciplinary
Homogeneity of research teams
Hierarchical organization
Permanent
Peer quality control
Less socially accountable
Source: Derived from Gibbons et al. (1994: 3).
93
● Mode 2 becomes more flexible and deeply affects
what counts as ‘good science’ (Gibbons et al.,
1994: 3–8).
In contrast, the term ‘Mode 1’ refers to a
form of production of knowledge – a com-
plex of ideas, methods, values, and norms –
that has been developed to disseminate
the Newtonian model to more and more
fields of inquiry and ensure that what is
considered ‘established scientific (formal)
practice’ is observed. Table 7.1 compares the
main characteristics of the two modes of
producing knowledge, as set out by the
authors.
Mode 2 research includes a larger group of
‘practitioners,’ who are temporary and het-
erogeneous, collaborating on a problem
defined in a specific, localized context.
According to this orientation, there is a
potential imbalance between the volatility
and the permanence of institutions that culti-
vate Mode 2 knowledge production. This is a
new situation that appears to be intermediate
between stable and flexible organizational
forms. The production of knowledge is less
and less a self-contained activity. It is neither
the ‘science’ of the universities nor the ‘tech-
nology’ of industry (Gibbons et al., 1994:
156). The authors assert that a fundamental
change that is effected by Mode 2 research is
that the production of knowledge is a more
‘socially distributed’ process (Gibbons et al.,
1994: 156), meaning that this type of knowl-
edge is both supplied by and distributed to
individuals and groups across the social
spectrum. This assertion is based on the
following attributes of Mode 2:
Mode 2
Problems proposed and resolved in the context of application
Trans-disciplinary
Heterogeneity of research teams
Heterarchical organization
Transitory
Quality control by diverse actors
More socially accountable and reflexive
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94 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
● It is highly contextualized.
● It produces ‘marketable knowledge.’
● There is a porosity of disciplinary and institu-
tional boundaries.
● Scientific careers are interchangeable: a person
may interchangeably be an administrator, head a
laboratory, be a scientific entrepreneur, etc.
● It introduces trans-disciplinarity in other than
‘hot’ topics.
● It signals a growing importance of hybrid fora in
the configuration of knowledge.
● The fora are constituted by experts and
non-experts as social actors (Gibbons et al.,
1994: 156).
Policy of technological innovation
The explanation that the proponents give for
the emergence of this new model of doing
science is that the economic decline of the
1980s and increased competition on a world
scale forced policymakers to narrow their
perspective on the role of science in
the achievement of national objectives,
and to ‘straddle’ the scientific activity of
industrial innovation and competitiveness.
Science policy moved toward technology as
a more effective way of supporting national
industry.
In part this change is a response to the
reduced competitiveness of the United States
vis-à-vis Japan. To some extent, decision-
makers reached the conclusion that the tech-
nological base of the world economy had
come to an end.
Impact of this change on the
university
The vision of the university in Mode 2
changes from having a monopoly of knowl-
edge production, ‘a social technology for the
production of universal knowledge’ (Fuller,
2003: 217), to being a ‘partner’ in the
national and international contexts. This
role change will imply a redefinition of
excellence among academics (professional
aspirations, contributions to the discipline,
institutional loyalties). Since competition
will be more open, the university will need to
identify ‘niches’ of specialization where it
can become more competitive (Gibbons et al.,
1994: 157).
According to Nowotny et al. (2005), Mode
2 was espoused most warmly by politicians
and civil servants struggling to create better
mechanisms to link science with innovation.
This linkage does not necessarily corre-
spond to increased social accountability.
Moreover, the research examples given in
Gibbons et al. refer to applications benefit-
ing a reduced number of stakeholders, with-
out any reference to general societal needs.
The Boeing 700 series and the Phillips cas-
sette are examples given by Gibbons et al.
(1994: 60) of Mode 2 projects primarily
favoring Boeing and Phillips, not society at
large.
A NEW ‘SOCIAL CONTRACT’
Toward the end of the 1990s, the role that
science plays concerning society and devel-
opment came under serious scrutiny. In the
past, science policy was based mainly on acts
of faith. It was propelled by faith that
research activity would naturally lead to
technological innovation, which in turn
would guarantee economic growth, and
thus social cohesion and peace. It was
believed with a certain naïveté that ‘what
is good for science is good for humanity,’
leaving science policy decisions in the hands
of scientists.
Currently, such acts of faith are severely
challenged in light of the fact that scientific
and technological advances that have
contributed to economic development have
also brought about irreversible ecological
deterioration, technological disasters, and the
development of low-cost weaponry of mass
destruction which is difficult to dismantle.
All the above are unfortunately associated
with the exacerbation of social inequality,
exclusion, and the increase in asymmetries
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NEW COLLABORATIVE FORMS OF DOING RESEARCH
between nations, in terms of wealth and
power.
The above challenges motivated UNESCO
to organize the World Conference on Science:
‘Science for the 21st Century’ (1999a, b), in
Budapest in 1999. The objective of the
Conference was the formulation of a new
relationship between science and society.
They advocated a relationship that would
replace the excessive confidence society
placed in the good judgment of scientists,
that is, a new ‘social contract’ (Mayor, 1999),
based on the assumption that science is to be
subjected to public scrutiny. At this confer-
ence, the debate on the need for a democratic
discussion of scientific priorities, the size of
its budget, its institutional structure, and the
use that is given to the results of scientific
labor was renewed. It was asserted that such
decisions cannot be left simply in the hands
of scientists and government officials.
At the Budapest Conference, emphasis
was also placed on the point that scientists
must not orient their research solely toward
topics that appear attractive in terms of the
availability of grants, such as military
research and research that responds to market
requirements. They must also orient their
work to topics related to general social inter-
est. Furthermore, scientific research must not
be developed as isolated disciplines, but must
be based on inter- and trans-disciplinary
approaches that will bring about a conver-
gence between the natural and the social
sciences. This was heralded as a means to
understand reality fully, and to transform it.
What is sought here is to confront the chal-
lenges that the twenty-first century presents
with greater possibilities of success in advanc-
ing toward a society with greater liberty and
equality among men throughout the world.
From the Budapest Conference it is
acknowledged that we must create the frame-
work for a new social contract with science,
one that is based on the participation of large
sectors of society, and not only on those who
currently have a stake in the decision-making
of science. In the new contract, decisions
should be made on the basis of the interests
95
of large social networks. This is not to say
that organizational forms for decision-
making that have been perfected in the past
and which, in general, have produced good
results for the advancement of science must
be dismissed.
The objective is to obtain a wise balance
between academic autonomy and social
responsibility, access to results and benefits
produced by science and the legitimate indi-
vidual interests of those who promote it,
a redistribution of knowledge and copyrights,
economic growth and ecological equilibrium,
demands that originate in the market and those
that do not, long-term and short-term projects,
and collective and individual interests.
The agenda for a new social contract with
science appears complicated. On the one
hand, it is not clear whether ‘hard’ scientists
are willing to yield the privileges they have
traditionally enjoyed, in order to share their
decisions with society at large. On the other
hand, it is not clear how social groups can
involve themselves in an informed manner.
The ideal situation is to identify ways that
allow the points discussed in Budapest to be
understood as legitimate topics of public
interest, subject to new decision-making
mechanisms that go beyond those that utilize
experts in relevant sectors. This set of ideas
constitutes the ‘Spirit of Budapest.’
NEW WAYS OF GENERATING
KNOWLEDGE
The scientific community, decision-makers,
and society in general have responded to the
challenges that globalization and the emphasis
placed on the use of knowledge in all societal
activities impose on the motivations and on
the ways and means of generating knowledge.
In the past few years, new forms of produc-
ing knowledge have been observed which,
although they do not correspond to Mode 2 as
described above, present several of its charac-
teristics, and distance themselves from the
traditional way of doing science (Mode 1).
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96 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
These forms are an attempt to incorporate
beneficiaries of scientific and technological
research in the plethora of decisions involved
in scientific work, from decisions on what to
research to judgments on how to apply results
for the benefit of society as a whole. They are
a response to the globalization of science, and
constitute interesting alternatives to the ‘reifi-
cation’ of scientific research. They constitute
a ‘third’ way which puts emphasis on social
responsibility. I am calling them ‘Mode 3,’ as
opposed to Mode 1 and Mode 2.
Venezuela’s ‘Research Agendas’
For the past forty years, Venezuela has
attempted to put into practice some form of
scientific policy through its guiding body,
the National Council for Scientific and
Technological Research (‘Consejo Nacional
de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas,
CONICIT’), now called the National Fund for
Science, Technology and Innovation (‘Fondo
Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación,
FONACIT’).
Like other countries in Latin America,
through the creation of the CONICIT,
Venezuela sought to be able to rely on a
steering organ for science and technology
which would be responsible for the growth of
the country’s scientific and technological
apparatus according to a policy that privi-
leges development (Jiménez and Escalante,
1995: 89). Despite a periodic formulation of
national science and technology plans, drawn
up by four different governments, that estab-
lished priorities with respect to the type of
science the country required, the conduct of
science has been in the hands of the scientific
community, which has long enjoyed full
permanent ownership of policy (Vessuri,
1992: 29).
Attempts have been made to associate the
growth of the scientific infrastructure with
the production of social benefits, according
to what is commonly known as the ‘linear
innovation model.’ The allocation of resources,
however, was perceived more as an expense
than as an investment, more as an
‘ideological luxury’ than as a program asso-
ciated with a socio-economic development
plan (Vessuri, 1984: 14).
In practice, scientific activity was managed
autonomously, on the assumption, in line
with the linear model of scientific develop-
ment, that applications are an automatic and
inexorable sub-product. The role assumed by
CONICIT was that of a supplier of resources
for science, for those scientists who carried
out their work according to this conception.
Thus, the contract between science and soci-
ety was limited to a ‘sponsorship’ by society
of mode 1 type of research, which was not
appropriate for the local needs (González
et al., 1992: 359).
With that perspective, the possible social
use of knowledge was not considered an issue
of concern for scientists. Thus, scientific
research in Venezuela was an activity carried
out by researchers, following their own
objectives, even in the case of ‘applied’
research (Vessuri, 1992: 31).
In consequence, ‘peer review’ was crucial
to decide what it is that is allowed, and what
is not. Moreover, peer review was the basic
method of evaluation, of recognition, and
compensation for notable performance and
the generation of results, all of it almost
exclusively evidenced by scientific publica-
tions (González et al., 1996: 89; Escalante
and Jiménez, 1998: 68; Escalante and
Jiménez, 2003: 338). Peer review thus
becomes a sort of ‘accountability among col-
leagues’ that does not leave room for the
participation of external judges or the opin-
ion of ‘non-peers,’ that is, people who
could contribute with a social evaluation of
what should be done (Ávalos and Rengifo,
2003: 186).
Research Agendas In 1996, in contrast with
the framework presented, CONICIT, subse-
quently continued by FONACIT, began the
program ‘Research Agendas’ (Ávalos and
Rengifo, 2003), as a new approximation to
the formulation of techno-scientific policy in
Venezuela. The program was designed as
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NEW COLLABORATIVE FORMS OF DOING RESEARCH
a process for building bridges between
research, knowledge, and technology, on the
one hand, with the needs and opportunities of
society, on the other, in an effort by officials
from non-scientific spheres, to find ways for
scientists to return part of the investment
made in them by the Venezuelan society at
large. It is an interactive public policy based
on the coordination of diverse social agents
around common problems, supported by the
legitimacy and autonomy of several partici-
pating interests, and oriented toward the
happy culmination of diverse negotiations.
As expected, participation plays a very
important role in the process, and replaces
bureaucratic or technocratic decision-making
concerning the orientation of research and
the use of its results. Decisions cannot be
imposed as pre-established and final, rather,
they are the result of interaction by partici-
pating institutions, and it is possible to
submit them to revision at any stage of the
process (Ávalos and Rengifo, 2003: 188).
Agendas are stipulated in a process where
interactive actor networks define problem
networks that should be assumed by knowl-
edge networks, not exclusively of scientific
research. A dynamic of interaction is gener-
ated, defined by the nature of the problem
networks: the social origin of the problem
situation, the projects negotiated by coopera-
tion, the means of evaluation – which go
beyond considerations of purely scientific or
technological merit – for the selection of proj-
ects. This negotiation is based on trust, cooper-
ation, and co-financing, on transparent rules
with shared benefits and risks, on the decentral-
ization of decision-making and participation,
and on the social orientation and evaluation of
results (Ávalos and Rengifo, 2003: 188).
According to this orientation, scientific
research should be financed not as a response
to a proposal for sponsorship from some
specialized scientific group, but as a response
to a larger agenda of interests, that includes
social concerns. The process implies the
delimitation of a social space in which differ-
ent actors identify and demand responses/
solutions/support of socially produced
97
knowledge by inter- and trans-disciplinary
networks of institutions and individuals,
beginning with the confluence of resources
and capacities from inter-institutional
sources, and incorporating considerations of
the context for applications of the findings by
the final users/beneficiaries/clients.
Therefore the values that go hand in hand
with the process are cooperation, commitment
to multiple legitimate interests, and links to
national objectives of modernization, equity,
productivity, democratization, and environ-
mental sustainability, among others. The orga-
nizational climate associated with the process
is of learning and creative problem-solving,
easing the complex process of negotiations
that the creation of an agenda necessarily
implies (Ávalos and Rengifo, 2003: 189).
Some agendas have had an impact in terms
of ‘tangible’ results. For example the Cocoa
Agenda, financed by the State and private
producers, achieved an increase in the aver-
age cocoa production per hectare from 200 to
650 kilograms in some areas of the country,
trained over 5,000 farmers, created a germo-
plasm bank with the best plague resistant,
quality seeds, and mapped potentially
productive areas. The Rice Agenda, funded
by Fundarroa, an important production asso-
ciation, and public resources, produced four
improved varieties of rice, increased produc-
tivity by 70% in some areas of the country,
and improved yield from 3.2 to 7 tons
per hectare. Other agendas of a different
nature, such as the Oil Agenda, produced
very important knowledge in the field of
mathematical modeling for the oil industry
(Genatios and La Fuente, 2004).
The Research Agendas program has con-
tributed significantly to experimenting with
new approaches and practices in the field of
public policy on research and development in
Venezuela. This experiment has facilitated
the emergence of similar initiatives that have
been welcomed more favorably.2 The major
contributions of the Agendas are:
● the adoption, in a limited way, of a knowledge pro-
duction model (different from the conventional one)
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98 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
emphasizing trans-disciplinary work, new project
evaluation criteria involving peers and non-peers,
and a research orientation developed according
to specific needs;
● the emergence of an innovative concept of
research on public policies;
● the possibility of new forms of work based on
alliances with other organizations, public or pri-
vate, in the network modality, assuming new
values associated with cooperative work;
● the beginning of a new institutionality, including
some official regulations for more adequate poli-
cies in this area;
● the opening of new dialogue spaces related to
the subject of research, making reference to
problems of social concern, allowing the inclu-
sion of new sectors, actors, and agents; and
● the enhancement of financial support from both
the private sector and some international agen-
cies (Ávalos, 2006).
This way of working suggests the emergence
of a new way of doing research directly and
unquestionably linked to societal needs, in
line with the ‘Spirit of Budapest,’ baptized in
this text as ‘Mode 3.’
Regional scientific communities in
Mexico
In Mexico, a group of established researchers
in the fields of the life sciences, working
mostly in public institutions, aware of the
need to break with traditional models of
higher and graduate education and to create
new regional research centers that truly
respond to regional needs, have taken it upon
themselves to innovate in these areas of
human livelihood (CIDE, 2003).
The idea was born of the recognition that
the demand for higher education and scien-
tific research for the first 20 years of the
twenty-first century will not be satisfied via
the traditional educational systems. The
researchers have taken advantage of this real-
ity to initiate innovative education systems
based on learning and on the identification
and solution of problems. Concretely this
means that once a problem is identified, the
student searches and finds the knowledge
that is pertinent and will lead to a solution.
The researchers assert that:
The rise of these systems is based on advances in
cognitive sciences, which demonstrate that learn-
ing is accomplished – especially when referring to
higher abilities and levels of cognitive performance
– when the emphasis is changed from teaching to
learning, based on personal and group study
carried out by the students (CIDE, 2003: 1. Free
translation by the author, italics added).
These systems consider the heterogeneity of
the students’ conditions, academic and other-
wise, and this makes it necessary for the pro-
grams to be non-uniform. They are adapted
to the circumstances of each student, thus
liberating the education process from the
dogmas of traditional pedagogy. Orienting
and carrying out their own learning process,
the students reach intellectual independence
through the permanent exercise of critical
judgment.
The idea of regional scientific communities
began to crystallize when the ‘La Laguna’3
College of Veterinarians brought this up as a
demand to a group of scientists. The veteri-
narians were looking for a way to satisfy the
needs of local professionals in the agriculture
and livestock sciences, and to continue their
academic training without having to abandon
their daily work activities. In light of this sce-
nario, the academics’ concept of teaching and
research is developed as an answer to a het-
erogeneous set of individuals with different
social, professional, and economic back-
grounds. The innovative conceptualization of
teaching and research was formalized many
years after the start of activities, through the
creation, in 1999, of an umbrella establish-
ment named the Center for Innovation and
Educational Development (CIDE), for ‘La
Laguna’ and its surrounding area (CIDE,
2003: 1).
CIDE recognizes that Mexican society
needs scientists, and that the independent
development of societies in the world cannot
come about without the formation of a criti-
cal mass, capable of approaching scientific
and technical problems that will allow them
to grow, based on the acknowledgement and
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NEW COLLABORATIVE FORMS OF DOING RESEARCH
protection of their natural resources and their
rational and sustainable exploitation. It mod-
ifies the way in which learning takes place to
reach the levels of quality that are sought,
and accommodate a greater number of appli-
cants, without affecting or increasing
requirements for physical infrastructure.
CIDE has constituted itself as a learning
community whose basis is scientific activity
and methodology, as well as the appropria-
tion of a scientific and technological plat-
form, made possible by the use of up-to-date
information technologies. It is composed of a
group of professor-researchers of the highest
academic credentials from different educa-
tional institutions of the country, each one
with more than 20 years experience in the
design and operation of innovative under-
graduate and graduate programs. They
accommodate a student body that is hetero-
geneous in academic background, work
experience, ideology, age, and economic
condition, who share a democratic ideal, a
humanistic vocation, and an objective vision
of the world, based on scientific thought
(CIDE, 2003: 4).
Keeping information current: In science, the
information explosion has created a desper-
ate need for constant updating and perfect-
ing. Demand for information has never been
as high, and this increase in demand makes it
necessary to guarantee the supply of reliable
information of the highest quality. To ensure
that its proposals and actions are solidly
based on facts reported in the updated, high
quality literature, CIDE assumes that the
search and use of up-to-date relevant infor-
mation published in the scientific main-
stream is a fundamental premise for the
fulfillment of its objectives.
The aforementioned principle implies
keeping up-to-date on the acquisition and
control of the latest available versions of infor-
mation resources which makes the exchange
of information and communication among
academic peers possible, regardless of their
place of residence. Currently, science is man’s
most dynamic and important productive force
99
(Chomsky and Dietrich, 1996), and like any
other social activity, it is a product of a per-
severing and collective effort. However, it is
constantly in a process of development, with
advances, regressions, and limitations
(CIDE, 2003: 3).
Therefore, the members of CIDE are com-
mitted to permanent updating in the areas of
computing, science, pedagogy, and commu-
nications in the foreign languages that are
dominant in the dissemination of advances,
and go beyond the thinking of Bronowski
(1976), when asserting that science seeks
consciously to adapt to the future, by consid-
ering that the most effective way of predict-
ing the future does not consist in imagining
it, but in producing it (CIDE, 2003: 3).
The learning-research model: For CIDE,
learning and research are two sides of the
same coin. The student learns to research as
part of a general learning process. He/she
develops a great ability to use information
tools in order to obtain the scientific informa-
tion he/she needs to bring him/her closer to
the solution of the problem which is the
object of his/her research. At the same time,
CIDE identifies and incorporates in a sys-
tematic way the new tools and technologies
for independent and continuous learning,
sustained in a flexible academic organization
that stimulates group and personal study
activities concurrently. It encourages a new
model of interaction, both between teacher
and student, as well as among students at
diverse levels and degrees of advancement.
CIDE personnel place special emphasis on
learning activities of students and tutors,
study habits, logical and mathematical capa-
bilities, the use of information systems, and
the development of rhetorical and linguistic
logic abilities to improve their capacity to
communicate research results as well as facts
and scientific explanations.
Because of the nature of its student body,
the CIDE incorporates substantial curricular
modifications that allow students to adjust
their study activities to the time they have
available. Not counting on infrastructure to
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100 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
carry out teaching activities, facilities are
negotiated in the area where the regional sci-
entific communities are located: the use of
libraries from other institutions, laboratories,
computers with access to global communica-
tion systems such as the Internet, sites for the
recovery of empirical data, among others.
Group work emerges in the ‘socialization’4
of results among teachers and students, and
it takes place in any physical space that
provides the facilities to gather all of its
members: mentors, students, collaborators,
and observers.
CIDE’s collegial body and group of advis-
ers know the time required for learning in
each one of the different phases of the grad-
uate training process, at both the Master’s
and the Doctoral level. In consequence, they
have the ability to evaluate the progress of
the students in each phase, in line with the
time that has been invested individually in
the student’s educational process and accord-
ing to his/her particular situation. The indi-
vidual does not compare him/herself to
peers, since neither previous attributes nor
the disposition of time will ever be the same.
The arrangements described above imply
that effective work time is what determines
the presence and stability of attributes that
characterize a scientific worker, and that the
pace of learning will be a function of the time
invested in processes of academic work,
rather than of any rigid schedule marked by
the school calendar.
Evaluation: CIDE defines student academic
evaluation as the development of individual
attributes, measured as the fulfillment of spe-
cific activities common to any graduate pro-
gram of quality. Among other standard
graduate requirements, these activities may
include the number of pages read, the
number of filing cards formulated, the qual-
ity of the information analysis, the formula-
tion of bibliographic retrieval lists, the
logical organization of the facts identified
in the files consulted, the interpretation
demanded by the identified facts, and the
formulation of a glossary of new terms.
In addition, due to the unusual nature of
this program, the student also has to learn
to identify and negotiate with the relevant
individuals, firms, agencies, or institutions
where he/she can carry out field work that
may include observations, experimentation,
and measurements of the object of study.
Likewise, students have to develop the ability
to assess the time, monetary resources, and
instrumentation necessary for their experi-
mental work. Emphasis is put on the stu-
dent’s capacity for self-expression both
orally and in writing, including the ability to
correspond with scholars by e-mail. This
capacity is necessary in order to succeed in a
program demanding additional initiative and
creativity from the student.
The individualized curricular design and
the educational practices in CIDE acknowl-
edge the diversity of individualities, tempera-
ments, aspirations, and vocations needed to
assure equal opportunities to each and every
one of the students by offering a method, a
pace, and a way of learning that suits both the
specific needs of the student and the object of
study.
Institutional planning Institutional policy
includes elements that tend to democratize
learning in a context of deep economic and
social differences. These elements include
the promotion of financial support for
students of lesser economic capacity, in an
effort to achieve equality of access to graduate
education.
CIDE’s policy favors activities for the
training of teacher-advisers and students,
through projects that emphasize the use of
information of excellence, the study of prob-
lems located at the frontier of knowledge, the
socialization of knowledge, periodic evalua-
tion (by peers) of the academic activity,
and the establishment of links with individu-
als and institutions dedicated to scientific
research.
CIDE recognizes the importance of having
a presence in mainstream science, but
maintaining academic work within the
bounds of research relevant to regional and
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NEW COLLABORATIVE FORMS OF DOING RESEARCH
national needs. Therefore, CIDE’s objectives
in the production of knowledge include the
development of an innovative model of
research where projects are linked to social
needs; reach an internationally competitive
level in research results through scientific
production in visible publications; and pro-
duce reliable, precise, and replicable research
results with scientific relevance, within the
limits set by standards of measurement.
CIDE promotes inter-institutional agree-
ments that will make the achievement of
institutional educational objectives possible,
and produces scientific knowledge that will
aid national development by searching for
solutions to problems related to the biological
environment.
To make the promotion of human
resources a reality, CIDE’s objectives also
include maintaining a link between teaching
and research, to promote academic collabo-
ration with national and international
research centers, to identify and promote new
paradigms of learning, to establish training in
alternative teaching practices, to modernize
cybernetic learning units, to maintain
constant updating of study plans in accor-
dance with society’s structural changes, the
advancement of scientific knowledge, and
the organic knowledge of learning processes.
Financing: How is this project financed?
According to several inquiries made by
the author, it is mostly self-financed, and,
compared to any other alternative, public or
private, is not expensive. In an interview with
Dr. Rafael Rodríguez (2007), CIDE’s
Coordinator in Torreón, Coahuila, he
explained that students do not pay either reg-
istration or periodic fees. The transportation
expense of external advisors is covered with
funds raised by the students themselves.
External advisors stay in the homes of either
local advisors or the students themselves.
Laboratory facilities are negotiated individu-
ally by the students, according to their needs.
For example, the seat of CIDE in Torreón is
the ‘La Laguna’ branch of the Antonio Narro
University. Since the Torreón advisors are
101
full-time academics of ‘La Laguna,’ they
allow the students to carry out the experi-
mental work in the University laboratories,
with the consent of University authorities.
Another instance of individual negotiation is
the case of Rocío González, a microbiologist
working on her PhD. She works in the
Microbiology Laboratory of the Mexican
Social Security Institute (IMSS), the national
social security agency that covers workers in
the private sector. González carries out her
experimental work in her laboratory, with per-
mission of the authorities. Students purchase
their own disposable laboratory materials.
CIDE’s coordinators and advisors do their
job as a social contribution to regional devel-
opment, as a way of returning to society
some of what they have got from it; hence
they do not expect a regular economic
compensation. Since CIDE does not have a
physical infrastructure or faculty salaries, it
is capable of keeping expenses at a low level.
Regional scientific communities: The objec-
tive of CIDE is to form regional scientific
communities (López-Pérez, 2004). The com-
munity is formed based on a group of
‘brains’ who have in common an interest in
scientific development, and invest everything
they have at hand to reach that objective.
Generally this is an individual decision,
where people from educational institutions,
research centers, and firms participate. In the
words of one of its founders: ‘we are above
all interested in forming brains that will
develop professional activity in the real
world (firm, farm, etc.).’ It is clear that these
communities are not produced in the univer-
sities, even when they carry out research,
since they have different characteristics and
objectives.
These communities have developed
research centers, in some cases. Such is the
case of the first community established,
working out of Colima, the capital of the
State of the same name, where there is a
biotechnology laboratory, producing scien-
tific data and results that are published in
prestigious international journals. CIDE has
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102 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
established regional scientific communities
in Colima (1982), Torreón (1999), Sinaloa
(2001), Puebla (2001) and one is in the process
of creation (in 2005) in Nayarit (2005).
Recently, a new scientific community
(CEJUS, 2004) was initiated in the Justo
Sierra Study Center (‘Centro de Estudios
Justo Sierra, CEJUS’) in Surutato, an isolated
village located in the mountains of the north-
western state of Sinaloa (Jiménez and
Ramón, 1989; Jiménez, 1992; Jiménez and
Escalante, 1999). CEJUS is a unique educa-
tional experience based on the same educa-
tional and humanistic principles advocated by
CIDE. It was created in 1978 by the family
heads of Surutato to improve the quality of
education their children were receiving from
the government, and to prepare them with
working skills appropriate to the labor needs
of the region. After a long period of struggle
and confrontation, the Surutato community
was able to mold the official education insti-
tutions according to their needs. Parents par-
ticipate by donating labor and materials for
the creation and maintenance of their educa-
tional center. The federal government con-
tributes with salaries for the teachers and
scholarships for the students (for more details
see Jiménez and Escalante, 1999).
The scientific community initially offers
undergraduate studies in various professional
careers related to the sustainable exploitation
of the region’s natural resources, namely, the
water, the land, the forest, and the weather.
CEJUS is the meeting point for ‘socializa-
tion’ of results of CIDE’s students spread in
the northwestern region of the country, in the
states of Sinaloa, Nayarit, Sonora, and
Durango. With time, CEJUS will become a
research center similar to the CIDE centers
already in existence.
MODE 3: A NEW WAY OF DOING
SCIENCE
Both the Venezuelan ‘Research Agendas’ and
Mexico’s ‘Regional Scientific Communities’
respond to the need to do socially relevant
science. Both are innovating ways of creating
knowledge. Research Agendas are born
within the bounds of official science, as an
initiative of CONICIT, whereas Regional
Scientific Communities are a ‘grass-roots’
initiative, arising as a private concern of
established academics coming mostly from
public universities, as a response to felt needs
of individuals and groups in rural communi-
ties. Both could serve as examples of Mode 2
research, however the property of ‘social
accountability’ whose presence is a debatable
aspect in Mode 2, is of the foremost impor-
tance in these new forms of doing science in
Venezuela and Mexico. Indeed, we are in the
presence of a different mode of doing sci-
ence, ‘Mode 3,’ whose salient property is the
genuine response to social needs, missing in
Mode 2.
The research agendas of Venezuela and the
regional scientific communities of Mexico
are only two Latin American examples of
new forms of doing research with emphasis
in social responsibility. Vessuri (2003: 270)
reports two additional Latin American exam-
ples: one in Brazil involving a number of
scientists as well as producers who have
managed to produce soil fertility in the
Brazilian cerrados to achieve an efficient and
productive agriculture. The other one, in
Costa Rica on specific poisons of Central
American snakes, is benefiting the whole
region with antidotes, developing ‘under-
graduate and graduate education, and a broad
social intervention to establish training
programs for prevention and handling of
ophidian accidents’ (Vessuri, 2003: 270). In
France, new ways of interacting between sci-
ence, technology, and society have been
developed, in which lay people work along
with scientists to produce and diffuse knowl-
edge. The term ‘research in the wild’ has
been coined to refer to this new phenomenon
(Callon and Rabeharisoa, 2003). An example
is the organization of families of patients
with muscular dystrophy to collect informa-
tion about the generation and development
of this terrible illness. They discuss it with
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NEW COLLABORATIVE FORMS OF DOING RESEARCH
specialists, engaging in a new type of interac-
tion in which lay citizens contribute to the
knowledge of an illness so that they impart to
specialists the capacity at least to have a
better understanding of its complexities. In
this case, interested groups show how
research must be conducted, even demanding
that specialists explore particular lines of
research that they have uncovered.
These examples of ‘research at the service
of mankind’ are in consonance with an alter-
native definition of development, not neces-
sarily associated with ‘growth.’ Development
is not a matter of what one has, but of what
one does with what one has. Development
‘is the desire and ability to use what is avail-
able to continuously improve the quality of
life. This ability cannot be given to others
even by those who have it. It must be devel-
oped in and for oneself’ (Ackoff, 1974: 221-2).
This definition is suitable for social contexts
enduring rejection and scarcities to engage
in research projects relevant to some seg-
ments of society, with a clearly defined felt
need. Projects like those described in
this section give a sense of progress in
the right direction, that is, toward genuine
development.
In conclusion, at the dawn of the twenty-
first century, a renovated and perhaps idealis-
tic concern of putting science at the service
of humanity’s immediate needs is gradually
emerging, materializing in concrete research
projects. We are before new forms of doing
science, different from Mode 1 and Mode 2.
The major feature of this new mode is a gen-
uine concern for solving problems endured
by specific segments of society. We call it
‘Mode 3’ to differentiate it from the modes
defined by Gibbons et al. Indeed, the
research agendas and the regional scientific
communities are congruent with the ‘spirit of
Budapest,’ and seek to develop a science that
is at the service of those who sustain it, serv-
ing the interests of many, and leading to a
better quality of collective life. Both are vivid
examples of innovative forms of cooperation
taking place in the early years of a new cen-
tury, a matter of great concern for the
103
International Sociology Association Research
Committee Conference held in Ottawa in the
summer of 2004.
NOTES
1 I wish to acknowledge the contribution of Juan
Carlos Escalante and Carlos Rodríguez in compiling
and revising the bibliography.
2 The official Science and Technology Plan 2005–
2030 points to the need for a revolutionary change
that leads to a ‘new scientific culture.’ It implies
going from a scientific culture of ‘fragmented,
individualized, parceled, disciplinary, and linear’
knowledge to a ‘participative, dialogic, collectively
organized, transdisciplinary, and integral’ knowledge
(Ávalos, personal communication, 2006).
3 ‘La Laguna’ or ‘Comarca Lagunera’ is a region
in the north of Mexico embodying part of the
Coahuila and Durango states.
4 ‘Socialization’ is used here in its current sense in
Spanish. This entails the sharing of knowledge one
has and the enriching of such knowledge through
the participation in exchanges among community
members.
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9781412934633-Chap-08 1/10/09 10:52 AM Page 107

PART TWO

Trends in Conceptualizing
Conflict, Competition, and
Cooperation in Subfields of
Sociology
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9781412934633-Chap-08 1/10/09 10:52 AM Page 109
Conflict, Competition,
Cooperation in the Sociology
of Development and Social
Transformations
In this chapter, we present the scientific
meaning of the notions of conflict, competi-
tion, and cooperation in our particular
research field. These three notions are impor-
tant for the analysis of social change in socie-
ties of the geographic, or better, the
economic North and South. The notion
of conflict was of interest mainly in the
1970s and was used by scholars such as
Dahrendorf, Coser, Rex and Collins. In
recent years, with the end of the Cold War
and the consequent decline of states in
Eastern European and African countries,
there has been a renewed interest in the topic.
Scholars have asked why, in these countries,
social transformations have resulted in diffi-
cult social situations and why social
conflicts, often based on ethnic identities,
have been widespread. The notion of co-
operation is another important term of our
research field because of the fact that the
whole development project is based on
8
Ulrike Schuerkens
processes of cooperation linking northern
and southern countries in common endeav-
ours. This chapter surveys the history of
development cooperation since the 1950s
when large groups of countries have been
included in an ever-growing world-system.
Since the end of the global competition char-
acteristic of the era of the Cold War, processes
of competition play a lesser role in our field
insofar as democratic institutions in the
South are often weakly developed and elites
tend to confront each other on ethnic
grounds, and that often occasions violent
conflicts. Insofar as globalization is linked to
economic competition, we request which cul-
tural characteristics competition asks for in
the different world regions. The three notions
are important at the macro, meso and micro
levels depending on socio-historical situa-
tions. In this chapter, principally because of
constraints on length, we focus on the macro
level. In the last 50 years, the international
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110 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
political situation has influenced local
groups, nation-states, and transnational rela-
tions in different ways. The changing impor-
tance and meaning of the three notions in our
research field can redraw this situation. To
summarize, drawing on societies from several
regions of the world, this article addresses the
problematics of these notions, the types of
explanations proposed, and outlines some of
the main recent empirical findings.
THE NOTION OF COOPERATION1
After the declaration of USA President
Truman in 1947, cooperation emerged as an
international task that had to include the non-
European world in the twentieth (European)
century by increasing the standards of living
of all societies. The relation of subordination
of colonized people to colonizers changed
insofar as former colonies were gradually
integrated into a world system, organized as
an economic hierarchy. In fact, the United
States was interested in gaining access to the
markets in the colonial empires of European
colonial powers (cf. Rist, 1996: 126). The
‘development project’, as McMichael (2004)
defined it, lent legitimation to political
actions aimed at developing ‘underdevel-
oped’ nations. The increase of economic pro-
duction was considered the element that
could transform the situation of developing
countries. The Bandoung Conference (1955)
where nations of the South met, declared that
cooperation was necessary in order to inte-
grate ‘underdeveloped’ nations into the
global economy. In 1962, the Secretary-
General of the United Nations, U Thant,
wrote a report in which he asserted that
development was considered an economic
change accompanied by social transforma-
tions. The influential economist W. W. Rostow
(1960) thought that cooperation with the
West would mean economic growth and the
possibility of democratic development
in the South. Rostow’s idea was that a univer-
sal ‘modernity’ would replace ‘traditions’.
The French economist F. Perroux (1961)
analyzed the ‘colonial situation’ (Balandier,
1985) that he condemned, and asked for
transformations of the unequal social, politi-
cal and economic structures after countries
achieved formal independence.
During this period, the theory of modern-
ization was shown to be applicable, insofar
as the political strategies of cooperation
implemented by the countries of the North
privileged internal growth in and international
assistance to the South. Latin-American intel-
lectuals counter-attacked with the idea that
international cooperation would not improve
the situation in the South but that instead
external dependence had increased. The
arguments of these intellectuals were pro-
gressively adopted by political opponents to
the USA and by groups in the South that tried
to criticize modernization theories. Yet the
adoption of the dependencia theory was not
followed by concrete political measures.
For Rostow, internal inequality was consid-
ered positive because, as he saw it, competi-
tion would lead to development. By contrast,
Latin-American scholars underlined that
inequality was problematic and required state
intervention. The former declared that an
increasing integration of ‘young nations’ in
the global market would automatically result
in development; the latter declared that sepa-
ration from the unequal world economy
would be necessary to improve the situation
of these countries. Studies of the ECLA
(Economic Commission for Latin America,
cf. Frank, 1967) had shown that free exchange
brought advantages to the North and disad-
vantages to the South, which would result in
the ‘core-periphery’ scheme of the global
world. These scholars asked for regional eco-
nomic integration, industrialization that would
substitute for imports, and the intervention of
the state in order to avoid inequality. The Third
World movements that appeared during this
period tried to correct the disparities of the
colonial division of labour (primary goods
exchanged for manufactured products).
The result of this discussion was that
‘development’ and ‘underdevelopment’ were
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SOCIOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
considered to be linked globally (Azoulay,
2002). Cooperation was situated in the
longue durée that insisted on structural con-
ditions of internal (local elites) and external
(world economy) domination. Numerous
scholars from the South and the North con-
tributed to this discussion by analyzing dif-
ferent factors (for example, Cardoso and
Faletto, 1979; Frank, 1967) and insisting on
evidence of unequal relations, characterized
more by conflict than by cooperation.
In 1973, the movement around the New
International Economic World Order asked
for a redistribution of the advantages of
economic growth. The idea was to improve
the integration of the countries of the South
in the global system. But financial crises, the
beginning of the debt regime and structural
adjustments changed the focus of this move-
ment. The new regulation system had less
consideration for the protection of labourers
than it did for the protection of financial
credits. The imposition of austerity measures
by indebted governments worsened social
inequalities even more. During these years,
the importance of the ‘basic needs’ approach
began to emerge, even if its theoretical foun-
dations (a common ‘human nature’) were
rather limited.
Finally, theoretical approaches began to
lose their importance in the face of actions
taken by international cooperation actors,
such as the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund and other organizations of
the United Nations. The ‘laws’ of the market
were increasingly opposed to humanitarian
actions of UN agencies and NGOs. Political
actions placed the westernization of the
world by economic, political and social lead-
ers in question. Indigenous groups were
defended to a greater extent. The breakdown
of the Iron Curtain resulted in the disappear-
ance in Eastern Bloc countries of a model of
development that had been favoured by parts
of the South. In 1987, the World Commission
on Environment and Development (WCED)
published a report entitled Our Common
Future. The document came to be known as
the Brundtland Report after the Commission’s
111
chairwoman, Gro Harlem Brundtland. It
focused on the necessity of supporting envi-
ronmental measures and international devel-
opment. The Earth Summit organized by the
United Nations Conference on Environment
and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992
popularized the idea of irreversible sustain-
able development: 172 governments partici-
pated in the conference; 108 at the level of
heads of States or governments.
Since the final years of the twenti-
eth century, the UNDP (United Nations
Development Programme) favoured a develop-
ment approach that added a human dimension
to economic growth. Development had
become conditional on cooperation in a global
world. International organizations, together
with national political and economic elites,
favoured increasingly international cooperation
while numerous counter-movements appeared
that criticized the globalization process, such
as ATTAC (Association pour la taxation des
transactions pour l’aide aux citoyens) or the
Chiapas movement in Mexico.
It is interesting to analyze feminist
critiques of development that are concerned
with the negative impact of mainstream
development on the lives of women. In some
cases, development projects, introduced to
improve welfare of certain groups, have led
to a decline in women’s well-being. Since the
1970, the women’s movement and women’s
activists have contributed to research
programmes in both the North and the South.
In the 1970s, women were brought ‘into’
development; this focus was named the
women-in-development (WID) approach.
The WID approach influenced the policies of
the World Bank without challenging existing
gender ideologies that conceive of all repro-
ductive work as women’s work. Some ten
years later, the focus was extended with
the influence of feminist theorizing about
research on women-and-development (WAD).
More recently, feminist researchers in the
North have underlined the need to contextual-
ize discourse on development in order to show
its effects on women. These studies are com-
plementary to those of indigenous feminists.
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Moreover, current feminist research on devel-
opment covers issues such as the debates
about the environment and about sustainable
development. Feminists have underlined
the fallacy of using numerical measures of
economic growth to assess the attainment
of goals. In this connection, one of the main
problems is the public–private dichotomy,
which maintains that women can gain equality
by participating more in the formal economy,
without assigning any economic value to
women’s reproductive work. Unequal gender
relations became a central concern of devel-
opment in the 1990s. Some feminists insist
that development policies have to be ‘engen-
dered’ and women have to be empowered so
that development will be beneficial to them.
Neo-classical development theories that con-
sider indigenous attitudes and institutions as
barriers to development tend to place
women’s understandings of life outside their
concepts of development. Recent feminist
scholarship has contributed to an examination
of the ways women’s labour is used in facto-
ries and in export-processing zones. These
scholars have documented how women
receive lower wages than men for comparable
work (Chow, 2003).
Using a gender perspective means asking
what kinds of development can promote the
interests of women in the South. This may be
the necessary link between human develop-
ment and economic development in a world
characterized by the neo-liberal globalization
credo.
Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel laureate in
economics added a further dimension to
recent discussions on cooperation: he under-
lined that globalization needs to be backed by
national social policies, a sort of social safety
net like the one which was created in Western
European states at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century. In France, the 2005–2006 urban
riots and youth protests suggest that not
only developing countries are concerned
with these effects of globalization when
economies open widely to international capi-
tal inflows so that people find it difficult to
survive in highly competitive environments.
According to Sen, programmes that
empower people have to focus on micro-
credits, literacy or land reforms. In his book
Development as Freedom, Sen (1999) under-
lines the conception that freedoms include
political freedom, economic facilities, social
opportunities and security. He reiterates the
advantages of capabilities (‘substantive
human freedoms’) over narrower measures
of human development. In Sen’s opinion, the
idea of human capital fails to capture the
contributions of human capabilities to well-
being and their influences on social change.
New concepts are thus incorporated in the
development discourse: empowerment and
participation.
In sum, up until the 1970s, development
theory and practice were dominated by the
idea of economic growth and economic indi-
cators. This understanding reflected a lack of
knowledge about the low level of investment
in human and social capital, and the weak-
ness of markets. The further assumption, that
growth would trickle down from the rich to
the poor, reflected ignorance about rather
different social structures. Distributional
issues began to emerge in the 1970s with a
focus on topics such as poverty and inequal-
ity in the South American centre-periphery
approach. The dependencia school high-
lighted the constraints imposed on the devel-
opment processes in the periphery by an
unequal international economic system.
In the 1980s, world system theorists inter-
preted interdependence in dynamic terms in
order to prepare the ground for studies of the
impact of globalization on poor people and
poor countries in the 1990s. North–South
cooperation thus remains complex, with its
slowly changing focus.
We can conclude this part on cooperation
by underlining the fact that, despite cooperation
measures for over 50 years, the elementary
needs of more than one billion of people are
not satisfied. Furthermore, the possibility of
satisfying them in the future is questionable.
Thus, we confront a double global crisis:
a crisis in the distribution of income and a
crisis in growth. The only convergent
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SOCIOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
phenomena in the economies of the South
and the North seem to be the growth of social
inequality and of poverty during the last two
decades. In the South, development is neces-
sary because of the fact that the most important
needs of huge population groups are not sat-
isfied. In the North, an improved life quality
of the whole population should be privileged,
not only a quantitative growth. Sustainable
development was defined by the Brundtland
Commission as a development that satisfies
the needs of the present without compromis-
ing the capacity of coming generations
(cf. McMichael, 2004: 250). Perhaps it is
necessary to reverse priorities: the economy
might be transformed in order to become an
instrument. Consistent with this choice
would be that economic and financial criteria
would no longer be societal priorities.
Projects for sustainable human development
would then tackle problems such as the
spread of wealth and an improving quality
of life.
THE NOTION OF CONFLICT
In the 1960s, a growing scientific literature
was convinced that conflict, defined as oppos-
ing social classes, allowed social change to
emerge. In the 1990s and at the beginning of
the twenty-first century, some scholars have
begun to stress that the absence of social
change has led to conflict situations that can
be found in several African countries, such as
the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and Liberia,
but also in the Balkans.
Conflict theories of the 1960s
A common feature of all conflict theories of
this period is the assumption that change is
explained by contradictions or elements that
generate tensions in all societal systems.
The reasons for these conflicts are linked to
elements of the social structure that, on
the one hand, determine or sanction norms
113
and, on the other hand, control and award
resources such as income, wealth, prestige,
influence, etc. Theoretical approaches insist
on processes of societal life that lead to insta-
bility and conflicts within the different
sectors of a society. Change is considered to
be taking place due to a dialectical relation-
ship of important structural elements of a
society (values, ideologies, power relations,
distribution of resources, etc.) and elements
that are in competition with these arrange-
ments. The result is societal change. Power
relations of a society in economic, political
and cultural systems are tackled, but normative
elements, such as rules or attitudes, are not
considered.
Marx, one of the earliest theoreticians of
conflict, studied the capitalist ‘revolution’,
which he described as a historical phenome-
non that contributed to providing the ‘prole-
tariat’ with opportunities to realize human
liberty and self-determination in order to
control historical processes. This idea had
two important consequences: first, according
to Marx, relations of production determine
the distribution of professional and financial
possibilities, the influence on enterprises
and the interest structure of a society. The
second conclusion is that an improvement
of material conditions will be linked to the
institutionalization of democratic forms of
interaction.
Marx saw two causes for societal conflicts:
structural contradictions and antagonistic
class relations. The structural contradictions
were seen in the negative consequences of
the social division of labour and the link
between productive forces and relations of
production. Marx and Engels considered the
division of labour the main factor that caused
contradictions between individual and socie-
tal interests. These contradictions, according
to Marx, should increase, because of struc-
tural contradictions between ‘base’ (Basis)
and ‘superstructure’ (Überbau). The changes
in the base (the productive forces) would
simply further changes in the societal super-
structure (laws, political institutions, educa-
tional programmes, family structures, etc.).
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The history of human interaction was,
according to Marx, determined by the
conflict of two social groups: one that
controlled the means of production and
another that did not possess this power. A
potential for conflict leading to a sponta-
neous change was thus created by the ‘natu-
ral’ difference of interests between both
groups. This conflict not only changes
system relations, but also leads to a break-
down of the given social structure and the
development of new sorts of relations based
on new means of production.
Varieties of non-Marxist conflict
theories2
The theories of conflict conceived by Ralf
Dahrendorf (1964), Lewis A. Coser (1967a),
David Lockwood (1964), Raymond Aron
(1963), John Rex (1981) and Randall Collins
(1975) maintained many elements of the
Marxist approach to the explanation of social
change, but dropped the utopian idealism of
Marx. By contrast, earlier theoreticians of
conflict, such as Gumplowicz (1885/1926)
and Ratzenhofer (1907), did not explain
social change as deriving from social struc-
ture; rather they looked at change as the out-
come of conflict between different social
systems. We can still find this position today,
expressed in claims that:
1 ‘Underdevelopment’ is the consequence of the
relation between different parts of the world
(‘First World’, ‘Second World’ and ‘Third World’;
‘core countries’ and ‘periphery’).
2 Less developed and more developed societies are
distinguished by looking for characteristics such
as individual traits of modernity.
3 Social change of less developed societies is
understood as the result of their own history and
that of the Northern countries.
Dahrendorf (1967), who discussed the
Marxist theory of class structure and social
change extensively, accepted the model of
a dichotomous class structure and the
Marxist position that class theory explains
social change. He developed a theory of con-
flict where group interests confront each
other and where change results from the con-
flict of antagonistic interests that are charac-
teristic of a given power structure.
Dahrendorf thought that the exercise of any
form of authority implied a latent conflict of
interests within the affected groups: those
who have power and those who must put up
with the power of the powerful. He consid-
ered the opposition of interests as the main
cause of social change while conflicts among
interest groups represented the medium that
led to the change of a given power structure.
Societal norms and rules that are fortified by
law are, according to Dahrendorf, the main
reason for the opposition of interests.
Coser (1967a) was interested in the conflict
approach insofar as he considered that social
change was the result of tensions resulting
from competition for scarce resources, such as
power, wealth and prestige. There is a constant
tension amongst those who have an interest in
the maintenance of the status quo and those
who seek an increase in their share of power,
income, ownership and prestige. This tension
does not always mean conflict, because efforts
to maintain or to change a given structure of
distribution result from a comparison with
others. Coser (1967b: 17–35) considered that
the degree of legitimacy of an unequal distri-
bution of rights and opportunities plays
a decisive part and may create conflicts
between members of groups occupying differ-
ent hierarchical positions in a society. A social
conflict between underprivileged and over-
privileged groups is created only when the
first has developed a consciousness that its
members are negatively privileged, in short,
that their share in societal resources is inade-
quate. Conflict always occurs during the inter-
action of two or more actors. There is a
‘transaction’ in order to create a changed
social structure. Social change is induced
because conflict always leads to the establish-
ment of a system of social relations or to its
re-establishment.
In contrast to Dahrendorf, Coser succeeded
in using a conflict approach to explain not
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SOCIOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
only power and its consequences for social
change, but also how social interests, needs
and the power structure of a society are inter-
dependent as they are modified and strength-
ened. Coser could thus develop a typology of
social conflicts that included international
and internal conflicts between and in groups,
and those conflicts that vary according to
their degree of violence. In addition, he
included conflicts that take place directly (for
example a strike) or indirectly (for example
through competition); moreover, he consid-
ered conflicts that include real participants or
their substitutes.
The history of industrial society is charac-
terized by a multiplicity of forms of conflict
(among them conflicts between employers
and employees) that have changed from
violent direct conflicts to organized conflicts
via labour unions. While the Marxist theory
of societal change predicted a widening of
industrial conflicts in the political sphere,
theoreticians influenced by Weber’s notion
of power3 believed that modern Western
industrial society was able to regulate eco-
nomic conflicts politically, by fixing laws on
employer–employee relations, for example,
and by elaborating schemes for assuring a
minimal wage and for social security. Other
conflict theoreticians explained the weaker
effects of class conflict by the weak link
between differences of interest and real con-
flict behaviour. They pointed out the plural-
ism of interests according to social positions
and social life-worlds (Dahrendorf, 1969) or
the stabilizing effects of some conflicts
(Coser, 1967a). In their efforts to explain
conflicts, however, functionalists underlined
the far-reaching disappearance of divergent
interests between classes, a fact that was
empirically proved by the existence of a
multiplicity of social classes and groups, the
delimitations of which presented empirical-
methodological riddles.
In a classic article, Aron (1950) examined
conflicts of interest that arise in pluralistic
societies, but he criticized the Marxist notion
of a society without classes. He wrote:
‘In one way a classless society resolves the
115
conflicts found in fully mature capitalist
societies, but the solution involves the reduc-
tion of society to obedience rather than gen-
eral liberation’ (1950: 134).
The relations between different groups
which are in competition for their share of
income and can be distinguished from one
another by their power and by the political
and economic means that they can utilize
often become conflictual. The two principal
sources of conflict in a modern society are,
according to Aron, on the one hand, unequal
conditions in the means at the disposal of a
given group in competition for income and,
on the other hand, the problem of an eco-
nomic recession that may affect industrial-
ized societies. Change takes place when
interest groups are formed and when they
enter into open competition.
While it is possible to analyze types of
conflicts, as well as their causes and conse-
quences at the level of social groups or soci-
eties, it is also possible to tackle the
sociological analysis of conflicts at an inter-
national level. Aron’s book Peace and War
(1963) is a good example of the importance
of the vocabulary of conflict theory for the
analysis of relations between states, when
power, violence, types of war and peace
are discussed. Aron saw two alternative inter-
pretations of war as a means to regulate rela-
tions between states that insist on their
national interest. Whether there is peace
through law (for example by interstate
treaties and international committees) or
peace through government (for example
through the construction of a world empire
or simpler, through zones of influence)
depends on
1 the extent of power that participant nations can
have at their disposal,
2 the interest that the participants display, and
3 the role that these elements have while produc-
ing or changing these constellations.
Together with further indications of the
integrative functions of conflicts (Coser,
1967a) and conflictual characteristics of
norms (Dahrendorf, 1964; Lockwood, 1964),
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116 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
these remarks allow us to note a decisive
characteristic of social life: the consensual
nature of conflict and war, and the antagonis-
tic nature of order and peace. Aron’s full
meaning is shown in his proposal (1963) of a
third alternative to war, namely peace
through power equilibrium. This situation
can be explained, on the one hand, by the
consensus of power blocs on minimal rules
of behaviour and on limits to spheres of
influence and, on the other hand, by an
equilibrium in the possession of weapons
of deterrence (for example the Cold War
situation).
Treaties on rules of behaviour may control
conflicts and conflicts may have positive
consequences for the further existence of a
society; but the history of most societies pro-
vides many examples that relations between
members of societies, based on norms, may
be founded on force and rule, and may
develop a great potential that can lead to con-
flict and change.
To conclude, we are able to show that the-
oreticians of conflict locate the origin of
social contradictions, conflicts and social
change in the redistribution of power. This
may be economic, political or status power,
or the ‘cultural’ power to define goals and
norms. Conflicts between those who control
access to scarce and valuable resources of a
society and those who wish to have a greater
share in these resources induce significant
changes. While social structures may be
explained by behaviours that result from
different types of available societal resources,
social change results from movements within
these possibilities or from preceding con-
flicts (Collins, 1975: 61, 89). To simplify,
one could describe non-Marxist theoreticians
of conflict as proponents of a cyclical con-
flict theory, because they consider conflict
and rule of law as universal. By contrast,
Marx and his followers present a dynamic
and evolutionary conflict theory. They con-
sider conflicts as necessary for social change.
The first theory speaks of gradual change as
a consequence of conflicts and the second
theory sees conflicts as the triggers for
sudden changes. However, both recognize
that the flexibility of a given societal system
can induce gradual and/or violent change.
When we return to current political situa-
tions, it is an essential task of international
political and social development measures to
try to maintain and fortify state structures in
order to prevent the collapse and the degen-
eration of states which may cause political
conflicts. Without development, ethnic con-
flicts may not end. Therefore, many states
are dependent on external aid measures that
permit them to democratize, decentralize and
demilitarize societies successfully. A desire
for self-determination, a lack of opportunities
for political and economic participation,
undermining the maintenance of a particular
cultural identity, etc., may cause conflicts
that are expressed in power struggles of com-
peting elites for the control of the state and of
its material resources. In such situations, the
cultivation of ethnic and religious identities
helps to create images of enemies. Political
entrepreneurs (two examples are those in the
Democratic Republic of Congo and in the
Ivory Coast) do not hesitate to mobilize a
politicized ethnicity as an instrument for
their conquest of power.4
On wars and development
Classical theories of war and development
have produced a statistically-based theory
known as the ‘Phoenix Factor’ (Strakes,
2006: 1677). This theory states that a country
that is defeated in a world war will catch up
and eventually overtake the victor as its post-
war development accelerates. In the frame-
work of this theory, it is the country’s
domestic economic performance that is
important for its recovery and not the provi-
sion of foreign aid. In fact, this theory may
apply to the great powerful nations, but not to
the majority of developing countries faced
with different structural problems inside and
outside their region. Conflicts may even be
perpetuated here when there is a lack of
effective means of dispute resolution.
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SOCIOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
Political leaders may, furthermore, be
responsible for policies that intend to main-
tain their hold of power or that intend to ben-
efit society as a whole. Certain privileged
groups, as some theoretical approaches have
emphasized, can hinder growth after a con-
flict. The deficiency in growth will perpetu-
ate tensions and the result will be further
domestic conflicts. Political and military
repression implemented to maintain the
power of the reigning elite will contribute to
fuel resistance movements. It is obvious that
these conflicts waste valuable resources and
hinder investments that may benefit the
whole of society. Illustrative cases are con-
centrated in sub-Saharan Africa in particular.
The above-mentioned findings demonstrate
that civil wars, which have become more
prevalent than international conflicts, cannot
be ignored by prosperous nations. They are
largely concentrated in low-income coun-
tries. Yet these conflicts can impact the world
as a whole, and not only neighbouring coun-
tries, as the Iraqi conflict demonstrates. The
attempt to impose democratic accountability
and constitutional government has been
destructive in this case. Reconstruction
aid must certainly be linked to reforms and
institution-building efforts, but political
pragmatism has to be supported by research-
based programmes, in order to obtain success-
ful post-conflict environments.
Empirical evidence of conflicts in
the post-World War II era
Conflicts have seldom become a topic of
empirical transformation and development
studies,5 yet some rather general remarks can
be formulated. The world of the end of the
nineteenth century was a world of nation-
states in competition. The global world of the
twenty-first century is a world characterized
by political unity where territorial frontiers
no longer form violent borderlines. After
World War II, the new global order was based
on the cooperation of states in the system of
the United Nations. Violence no longer
117
occurred at the frontiers between the princi-
pal Western states, but existed between the
‘free world’ and the states with communist
regimes. The Cold War led to a bipolar
system of military conflicts, even in develop-
ing countries, favouring one or the other of
the systems. The period beginning in the
1990s marks an era when major conflicts
between larger states disappeared and when
minor, but often highly violent, conflicts
of smaller states and societies became more
frequent.
The beginning and the end of the period of
the Cold War were marked by two principal
military and political crises: that of the period
from 1945 to 1947 and that of the period from
1989 to 1991, when the global order emerged
from the breakdown of the Cold War order.
The former national–international order was
characterized by international, or rather,
interstate conflicts. Revolutions and civil
conflicts were based on this international
structure. Conflicts of this period displayed
the antagonism between the two sides of the
Cold War. After the end of the Cold War, new
forms of disintegration appeared, linked to
the failure of communist states. Conflicts
arose in the former Soviet and the former
Yugoslavian multinational states, where
elites fought for political control of new
states and territories. In Somalia and in some
other African states, local forms of rule disin-
tegrated. Recent conflicts are thus geograph-
ically localized. In unstable forms of some
states there are now conflicts which question
the global order, rather than the Cold War
system, as was the case in the past. Currently,
interstate conflicts are more or less limited to
‘villain’ states, such as the Iraq of Sadam
Hussein. Most of the states in the world no
longer accept violent situations with other
states, although some may indirectly support
conflicts against populations in their own
territories or in those of their neighbours (for
example Congo (Vlassenroot, 2003)). Often,
these later states are no longer able to impose
taxes and/or raise armies. New forms of
policing, a function that the USA, the United
Nations and the European Union began to
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carry out in the 1990s, may characterize the
future. The political aim has been to guaran-
tee respect for law and order. Yet, it seems to
be certain, as Shaw underlines, that future
social transformations and global develop-
ment will continue to be characterized by
conflicts (Shaw, 2003: 75).
THE NOTION OF COMPETITION IN
TRANSFORMATION STUDIES
With the growing globalization of the last
decades, the breakdown of the communist
states and the spread of the neo-liberal
economic credo, the notion of competition
began to be discussed in the sociology
of development. The discussion centred on
whether the economic ideology linked to the
notion could be an impetus for development
in countries socially and culturally very
different from the Western core countries.
As there was no real alternative to the Western
economic ideal of competition, economists
and sociologists began to ask whether the
notion of economic competition could be
integrated into social, cultural and economic
systems in Asia, Latin America and Africa.
The answer depended on the social structure
of societies in the different world regions.
In this context, it is necessary to define the
notion of culture, which will make it possible
to show the importance of cultural elements
in economic endeavours. Culture can be con-
ceived as a system of common experiences
on the basis of which one can understand
one’s own group and confront other groups.
Culture is thus a network of meaning struc-
tures that help social actors to orient their
ideas toward a common worldview. These
values facilitate human actions in concrete
situations. Culture orients the actions of
human beings. It is obvious that some cul-
tures are better suited to active participation
in global phenomena than others. In the
tradition of Max Weber, a Confucian per-
formance ideal, for instance, is more adapted
to economic competition than egalitarian
African conceptions. The German historian
Hans-Ulrich Wehler recently stated that the
prevalence of socio-economic and political
constellations in social history should be
replaced by the prevalence of cultural life-
worlds that govern the construction of social
reality (1998: 9). This reflection on the cul-
tural construction of life-worlds in a global
society seems to be a precondition for the
analysis of discourses on economic global-
ization in non-European societies. In this
connection, it is not the image of globaliza-
tion that is in the foreground, but the construc-
tion and development of worldviews deriving
from cultural contexts. These worldviews
determine the result of cultural dialogues and
the outcome of globalization processes in dif-
ferent world regions.
It can no longer be denied that today all
cultures are exposed to a new historical
process of change and that elites and masses
are challenged to confront the outcomes
of global processes with creative answers,
protest, selective adaptation, etc. The era of
the uncritical acceptance of Western ele-
ments has been abandoned by non-Western
cultures for a greater consciousness of self.
Nevertheless, global players pressure local
and regional cultures to adopt Western
definitions of adaptation and efficiency. The
world market, defined by competitive capi-
talism, the importance of private property
and the virtue of individual aspirations for
gain, has become the dominant world
system, a system that was introduced by
colonial processes in non-Western societies
during the last several centuries. World
cultures are shaped by their adaptability to
global economic processes. The criterion for
selection as an acceptable culture is being
able to accommodate capital investment and
capital use (cf. Tetzlaff, 2000: 41).
Experience has shown that societies that
possess structural equivalencies to Western
societal models have been preferred by
transnational enterprises, and societies where
solidarity and equality are high social values
have been avoided. In its World Culture
Report (1998: 283), UNESCO shows that in
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SOCIOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
Asian countries values such as independence
and responsibility receive high social scores
whereas in African countries values such as
obedience and religious beliefs are favoured.
According to global players, competition for
socio-cultural systems that permit the highest
profits has become established. Societies that
are capable of learning changes required by
capitalist logic receive higher scores than
societies that resist these changes.
This approach that intends to unite eco-
nomic interests, cultural preferences and polit-
ical institutions in one logical system permits
analysis of why some societies are more able
to confront world market conditions than
others. The notion of competition is not easy
to accept in societies that value traditions and
mythical conceptions favouring, for example,
strong reciprocal exchanges based on kinship.
The notion of competition in
southern countries
Globalization has been considered by influ-
ential elites in Asia as merely an economic
endeavour that could be separated from its
parallel societal structures, such as democra-
tization or Asian values, especially family
values, respect of the ancestors and the com-
munity, hard work and thrift (cf. Schubert,
2000: 141). The integration of Asia into a
global economic world, with its required inter-
national competition, is generally not chal-
lenged. The discussion focuses more on the
right way to undertake this transformation
than on the target as such. Asian values have
been considered responsible for rapid eco-
nomic growth in the region. Western critics
emphasize that these values favour small
enterprises, but that they are not capable
of expanding their growth, because of the
centralized family organization. The need for
a cultural adaptation to the economic condi-
tions of globalization has been realized in
countries such as Singapore, Malaysia or
South Korea. At the same time, the region is
beginning to consider democracy as the nec-
essary political regime for a market economy,
119
even if some countries such as China
or Vietnam continue to resist this understand-
ing. After the crisis of the 1990s, the problem
of social inequality has received growing
attention in several countries in order to
permit the creation of social conditions that
are more fair.
In China, several understandings of glob-
alization exist (Keping, 2000): there are
scholars who insist that the visible side of
globalization is represented by economic
integration and the invisible side by the inte-
gration of democratic and global values.
Others consider globalization as the final
form of capitalism in its current structure.
In general, Chinese political elites think that
opportunities for globalization have to be
combined with challenges to Chinese society
that became obvious in the crises of the
1990s. Many intellectuals argue, however,
that globalization should be accepted in
Asia without a westernization of society
(cf. Keping, 2000; Schubert, 2000; Lin, 2001).
In Africa, the situation is quite different:
elites in most African societies have not
favoured economic competition (Damon and
Igué, 2003). Africa is situated at the margin
of economic globalization with few transna-
tional enterprises in a limited number of oil-
producing countries, such as Nigeria, Gabon
and Congo. Private capital flows are low
except for South Africa. Most of the coun-
tries are highly indebted and have low
productivity rates. The level of human capital
is low so that an economic take-off is diffi-
cult to realize. Intellectual elites leave the
countries for Europe or North America.
Economic elites place their savings in north-
ern countries. Structural economic factors
can hardly be changed. Social and cultural
values, such as the value of the family or
strategies of survival, traditional values, jeal-
ousy of another’s success, vertical networks
of redistribution between elites and masses,
hinder the advance of economic competition.
All these elements contribute to a marginal-
ization of Africa that can only be bypassed in
a few economic niches (cf. Aderinwale,
2000; Kappel, 2000).
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120 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
South America shares some of the charac-
teristics of the African continent. Economic
growth has not been declared the primary
target of society, and individual success has
not become the main aim of social actors
(Naím and Tuchin, 1999). During the twentieth
century, the market mechanism had no
chance to expand because of the many small
interior markets. State intervention was the
means for ensuring, and the consequence of,
the growing importance of the state. South
American societies are characterized by a
stability that has been guaranteed by an
extreme heterogeneity of economic sectors,
societal groups and states and that has
become a negative factor restraining eco-
nomic growth, learning and competition.
Traditional economic and power structures
continue to exist. With a power base in the
latifundia, elites have been interested in
consumption and the maintenance of their
privileges and fortunes. They have been
closely linked to church, military and conser-
vative forces in the United States and other
Western countries. Throughout there has
been no interest in the social integration of
poor black and underprivileged white people.
Elites have not favoured capitalist produc-
tion and economic competition. Integrative
tendencies have remained weak, despite a
more or less common history. Recent crises in
several states have shown that new values and
attitudes of workers and managers have
become necessary. These groups require more
equity and economic changes. But change
will be slow in a barely favourable societal
environment. In contrast to Asia, a reappraisal
of traditional values and norms that could sup-
port societal transformations is hardly possi-
ble. An outstanding example is the
authoritarian and paternalistic attitudes and
expectations and the neglect of a technical
culture in Cuba (Esser, 2000). In many coun-
tries, remittances sent home by transnational
migrants are substitutes for economic
progress. Since 1970, more than 10 million
women and men from Latin America have
settled in the United States. This means a grow-
ing cultural and economic interdependence
between North and Latin America. Asia’s par-
ticipation in transnational migrations is even
higher (1,000,000 emigrants in 2000) while
Africa’s emigrants were 500,000 in 2000
(Guilmoto and Sandron, 2003: 62–83;
Schuerkens, 2005).
Competition and the wealth of
nations
The causes of inequalities between nations
have been discussed for more than two
centuries. In 1748, Montesquieu published De
l’Esprit des Lois where he suggested that tem-
perate climates were more favourable to eco-
nomic development than tropical climates.
Some thirty years later, Adam Smith in his
Wealth of Nations proposed that the skills of a
group are the main factors influencing national
wealth differences. More recently, Diamond
(1998) re-introduced arguments on the signifi-
cance of climatic and geographic factors.
There is a further theoretical explanation
that suggests that national differences in
intelligence may play a crucial role in eco-
nomic development. Even if this approach
does not seem to be ‘politically correct’,
there is some evidence for this argument.
Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) published a book
with the promising title IQ and the Wealth of
Nations. It is widely assumed that the peo-
ples of all nations have the same average
level of intelligence, even if psychologists
know that there are large differences in aver-
age levels of intelligence between different
countries. The main argument against these
results seems to be that intelligence is meas-
ured according to highly valued capacities in
Western countries, so that it is culturally
biased, and that emotional and social capaci-
ties highly valued for example in African
cultures do not interest these scholars.
Nevertheless, there is evidence that intelli-
gence is a determinant of earnings among
individuals, a fact that has already been
established for early adulthood and that con-
tinues to be valid in later life phases. Since
the 1950s, these findings were extrapolated
9781412934633-Chap-08 1/10/09 10:52 AM Page 121
SOCIOLOGY OF DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
in different studies to groups and then to
nations (Lynn and Vanhanen, 2002). The
recent study of Lynn and Vanhanen used data
from the World Bank and the UNDP. The
authors could confirm the hypothesis that
national per capita incomes and rates of
economic growth are positively correlated
with national IQs. The following quote gives
the authors’ main argument:
Nations whose populations have high IQs tend to
have efficient economies at all levels from top and
middle management through skilled and semi-
skilled workers. These nations are able to produce
competitively goods and services for which there is
a strong international demand and for which there
is therefore a high value, and that cannot be pro-
duced by nations whose populations have low IQs
(www.rlynn.co.uk/pages/article_intelligence/10.asp).
The conclusions are based on a sample of
60 nations that the authors regard as repre-
sentative of the totality of nations because all
categories of nations were included (South,
North, East and West). If one accepts the
premise of the study about the definition of
IQ and its worldwide acceptance based on
Western success criteria, the evidence given
by this study may have significant political
and social implications.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
This analysis of the use of the concepts of
cooperation, conflict and competition in
the study of social transformations and the
sociology of development has shown that
cooperation is one of the fundamental
notions of our field and remains an important
element in the explanation of developmental
processes in our contemporary world. The
notion of competition is of interest if only
because the global economy introduces com-
petitive economic behaviour in all regions of
the world even if the upper social classes are
those most affected. The notion of conflict
was important during the period of the Cold
War. In recent years, it has begun to interest
scholars studying social transformations,
because the poor outcomes of transformation
121
processes in southern countries often mean a
growing escalation of conflicts, such as
ethnic conflicts, civil wars or violence in
other forms of social relations, for example
gender roles. If one compares the meanings
of the three notions, one sees that cooperation
and conflict are notions that are very helpful
for Marxist approaches or world system
approaches, while competition and coopera-
tion are notions favoured by scholars influ-
enced by the Weberian tradition and
modernization studies.
In our current global world characterized
by the neo-liberal credo, the notion of com-
petition is becoming even more important as
scholars begin to do research on the success
or the failure of economic policies in various
world regions characterized by different cul-
tural life-worlds (Schuerkens, 2004, 2008).
The results of these studies of recent trans-
formations of local socio-economic practices
may have wider implications for develop-
ment cooperation. Conflicts may thus be
strongly based on aspects linked to particular
cultures, a fact that would validate
Huntington’s thesis that the central political
actors of the twenty-first century will be
civilizations rather than nation-states.
As shown in this article, analysis in our
field is often at the macro level, but the meso
and micro levels interest scholars as well.6
Most of the time, individual actors are con-
strained to participate in macro settings char-
acterized by these notions, even if there may
be factors that exclude privileged and/or
underprivileged actors (for example elites
who go abroad during societal conflicts or
the poor who participate in an informal econ-
omy, who are hardly influenced by social
competition).
NOTES
1 The widely acclaimed book of Philip McMichael
Development and Social Change. A Global
Perspective (2004) was particularly helpful in prepar-
ing this part of the article on cooperation. The author
gives a historical and theoretically inspired overview
9781412934633-Chap-08 1/10/09 10:52 AM Page 122
122 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
of the topic of cooperation since the 1940s. For other
approaches see the reader edited by J. Timmons
Roberts and Amy Hite, From Modernization to
Globalization. Perspectives on Development and
Social Change (2000), and the book by Rist (1996).
The topics of development policy and aid cannot be
tackled here because of length constraints.
2 Cf. for more details Strasser and Randall 1979:
51–68.
3 Weber was more a historian of social change
than a theoretician. He considered power as the
capacity to influence the will of other people. His
approach is of interest to the notion of competition
where cultural factors are important (e.g., the
Protestant ethic).
4 Both conflicts are based on conflicts linked to
regional or ethnic belongings that the respective
ruling elites exploit in order to maintain their political
power.
5 Cf. Shaw (2003) for more information and
details on the topic.
6 Neil J. Smelser applied theory to social actors
and groups; Weber and Durkheim analyzed organi-
zations and social change; Hagen focused on psycho-
logical factors (cf. Roberts and Hite 2000: 1–23).
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Health Sociology: Conflict,
Competition, Cooperation
Elianne Riska, Ellen Annandale and Robert Dingwall
INTRODUCTION
There are few specialty areas in sociology
whose practitioners have pondered their mis-
sion and place in the discipline as much as
have those in the sociology of medicine and
health. Almost all the early medical sociolo-
gists have looked back, traced the socio-
political context giving rise to their field, and
asked why so little theorizing has been done
(e.g., Horobin, 1985; Jefferys, 1996; Mechanic,
1993; Straus, 1999). Most specialty fields can
draw on the classics of sociology or trace
their roots to the early Chicago School. This
automatically locates their work solidly in
mainstream theorizing. Medical sociology,
however, emerged and developed in the
US and Europe after World War II as a by-
product of the larger socio-political project of
constructing a health care system based on
scientific and hospital medicine, ideally one
that would be accessible to all citizens.
In the US, the momentum for the rise of the
discipline, and its institutionalization, came
from academic sociology and from financial
support from the National Institute of Health
in the 1950s (Bloom, 2002; Cockerham,
1983; Mechanic, 1993; Pescosolido and
9
Kronenfeld, 1995). The initiative in Europe,
e.g., in Germany and the UK, came from
medicine and was characterized by applied
and practical concerns. Thus, in its begin-
ning, medical sociology was less integrated
into sociology departments in the European
context than its US counterpart (Annandale
and Field, 2001; Claus, 1983; Cockerham,
1983; Stacey and Homans, 1978). In
the British context, this is revealed in
A. H. Halsey’s (2004) mapping of the ebb
and flow of interest in various subfields of
sociology from 1910 to 2000. His analysis of
topic areas which appeared in three leading
general sociology journals during that period
shows that stratification, social theory, social
policy, political sociology, religion, educa-
tion, economic organizations, occupations,
and gender all appear more frequently than
health and illness.
Medical sociology is often connected with
practical concerns – improvements in public
health and equality – and only a few works
have looked at the theoretical traditions of
medical sociology (e.g., Gerhardt, 1989).
This review uses the themes of conflict, com-
petition, and cooperation as analytical tools
to examine the theoretical streams that
9781412934633-Chap-09 1/10/09 8:44 AM Page 125
HEALTH SOCIOLOGY
shaped the early writings in medical sociol-
ogy and the later field of health sociology. It
is symptomatic that the Research Committee
on Medical Sociology of the International
Sociological Association, established in
1963, formally changed its name to ‘Research
Committee on Sociology of Health’ in 1986.
This change reflected not only the shifting
focus from illness to health but also develop-
ments in the theoretical perspectives in main-
stream sociology. The early division between
sociology of and in medicine was an effort to
highlight the specific theory-based concerns
of sociology as compared to the medicine-
driven inquiries of the latter (Straus, 1999).
The shift from an approach characterized as
medical sociology to the sociology of health
has developed in two stages.
The first stage became apparent in the
1970s when sociology began to take a critical
stance toward itself as well as toward medi-
cine (Twaddle, 1982: 350). Sociologists
began to promote health issues and an
approach that took into account the broad
range of institutions and occupations that
influenced health. A second phase emerged
in the 1990s, when a new post-Fordist econ-
omy with its neo-liberal policies and
demands for flexibility were reflected in
the rise of consumption and a new type of
individualism, and new health policies that
had to be conceptualized and understood
(Annandale and Field, 2001). For example,
cultural sociology and post-structural theo-
rizing have inspired sociological work on the
social construction of the gendered body, on
narratives of health and illness, and on health
promotion policies as part of a new type of
surveillance and governance in society.
Sociologists, who once gave little or no
consideration to matters of health, have been
drawn to do so following the corporeal turn
that has accompanied these shifts. This has
led some optimistically to assert that,
whereas once the sociology of health was an
‘outsider’, ‘much that is exciting in contem-
porary sociology is gaining from, and con-
tributing to, the field of health and illness’
(Bury and Gabe, 2004: 1). Yet it still has to be
125
said that many social theorists are less con-
cerned with the social patterning of health and
illness; the experience of illness; and the
delivery of health care – abiding concerns of
the sociology of health – than they are with
the body as an arena for consumption, desire,
and body projects. The social meaning of
obesity, for example, is typically given far
more attention than its material conse-
quences in terms of morbidity and mortality
(e.g., Bauman, 2005).
Our review is Western-centric, which itself
attests to the narrow focus of the sociology
of health and illness until very recently.
The three themes – conflict, competition,
cooperation – are self-evidently global con-
cerns played out differently in different parts
of the world (e.g., Doyal, 1995; Gallagher
and Subedi, 1995; Kawachi and Wamala,
2007). A more global perspective, which is
now beginning to emerge in the discipline,
would certainly raise additional questions
about the relevance of particular theories or
theoretical approaches.
THE MACRO-SOCIOLOGICAL THEMES
GIVING RISE TO MEDICAL
SOCIOLOGY
The social-causation perspective
The nineteenth-century classic texts in soci-
ology explored the character of industrial and
urban society, and the social order of moder-
nity. Classical social theory dealt with health
as an indicator of the distribution of resources
in modern society but did not look at it as a
social institution. Emile Durkheim (1952),
for example, treated the suicide rate as an
indicator of the character and degree of
social integration and social regulation in
modern and traditional societies rather than
seeing it as a public health issue. By contrast,
Friedrich Engels (1987) examined the poor
health of the English working class and saw
health as a key to characterizing their material
conditions and location in the class structure.
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126 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
Both Durkheim and Engels marked out a
new perspective for looking at health: the
social-causation perspective. This perspective
suggests that health is a value that is related
to social factors and unevenly distributed in
society. The themes of cooperation and con-
flict appear in the work of both authors,
although their focus was on the broader
workings of society rather than on the phe-
nomena of health and illness per se. Harriet
Martineau, who was a contemporary of
Engels, found a more central place for health
in her sociology. A medical sociologist
before the term was coined, Martineau not
only shared Engels’ and concerns with the
relationship between work and health and
what the status of a community could tell us
about its morals (or social convictions of
right and wrong) (Martineau, 1838, 1861),
but extended her interest to encompass
the experience of illness and a critical analy-
sis of the relationship between the medi-
cal profession and the laity (Martineau,
1844/2003).
When modern sociology emerged, health
was included in some of the early classics.
For example, Robert and Helen Lynd (1937)
discuss public health and the politics of med-
ical provision in the second of their famous
Middletown studies, but this work did not
generate a legacy of further research. Credit
is, then, usually given to Talcott Parsons as
the first major sociologist to devote sustained
attention to medicine as a social institution
that, like religion and work, regulates certain
kinds of behaviour in modern society.
Medical sociologists often depict Parsons as
a conservative figure, because of their lack of
attention to the more recent scholarship on
his life and work (e.g., Camic, 1991;
Gerhardt, 2002). However, his experiences of
the 1930s depression in the US, and his first-
hand observation of the rise of Nazism in
Germany, gave him a powerful sense of the
fragility of social order. The Social System
(Parsons, 1951) was his attempt to explain
how societies could sustain a sufficient
degree of order to survive through time. He
had a particular interest in the management
of deviance, and used medicine as a case
study in what we might now call ‘soft polic-
ing’. The sick role offered a space to people
whose deviance was unintended, but the
impersonal physician served as a gatekeeper
to prevent its various exemptions and claims
on others from being abused, and thereby
disrupting the smooth running of society.
While this was often read in the 1950s and
1960s as an expression of cooperation and
consensus as the values underlying the social
institution of medicine, we might now prefer
to see it as a joint process of managing a dis-
ruption of the social order.
The interactionist and social
constructionist perspective
Parsons may have pioneered the field, but
there were competing perspectives presented
by the disciples of the Chicago School of soci-
ology from the start. This perspective has con-
tinued as the interactionist and social
constructionist tradition in the field of medical
and health sociology. In the American context,
Everett Hughes (1958) and his students,
notably Howard Becker (Becker et al., 1961),
introduced the themes of competition and
negotiation in the description and analysis of
the socialization of the medical student, the
work of the physician, and work with clients.
This was taken up in the influential work of
Anselm Strauss and colleagues, who empha-
sized the ‘negotiated order’ of the hospital and
medical work (e.g., Strauss et al., 1963).
Working within the same broad tradition,
Erving Goffman (1959) and Eliot Freidson
(1970) also elaborated the Parsonian view of the
sick role and of the role and power of the physi-
cian. It is important not to overstate the opposi-
tion between interactionist and Parsonian
approaches: both Goffman and Freidson
reworked Parsons’s penetrating insights into the
issues raised by sickness for sustaining the eco-
nomic, political, and moral order of societies
into different theoretical contexts. But both
acknowledged its fundamental relevance to the
programme of medical sociology.
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HEALTH SOCIOLOGY
Freidson (1970) incorporated the sick role
into the new approach to the sociology of
deviance that had been developed during the
1970s. As Bosk (2006) points out, this was
the first application of ‘labeling theory’ to ill-
ness in general, as opposed to the specific
domain of mental illness. Freidson under-
stood that Parsons had illustrated the sick
role through examples from contemporary
industrial societies, but that it was essentially
applicable to any society. The gatekeeping
need not necessarily be performed by physi-
cians; it could be performed by anyone who
occupied a functionally equivalent role –
shamans, witches, priests, or whatever – and
the conditions attached to its tenancy would
also be locally defined. Co-operating with
recognized advice might mean concordance
with a drug regime but could equally mean
prayer, fasting, sacrifice, self-mortification,
or whatever practices were legitimated in a
particular social environment. The bound-
aries of exemption might be drawn in differ-
ent ways, depending on the perceived
seriousness of the condition. Nevertheless,
the core idea of a role available for occupancy
by those whose deviance was unintended,
providing a route for reintegration back into
the wider society, remained intact. As both
Freidson and Goffman saw, this made a con-
siderable contribution to understanding the
difficulties confronted by those who could
not overcome their deviance – people with
long-term sickness or disability in an indus-
trial society, but equally people who could
not shake off a possessive spirit in others.
This understanding of the sick role took
Goffman and Freidson in different but com-
plementary directions.
Freidson recognized the way in which the
sick role was a point of convergence between
two of the great institutions of any society –
medicine/healing and law. These were the
institutions that were, on the one hand, col-
lectively legitimated to manage deviance
and, on the other, supplied legitimacy to the
individuals and organizations that carried
out the practical tasks involved. Much of
Freidson’s work, then, became an exploration
127
of the conditions of legitimacy of the gate-
keepers to the sick role, the physicians. What
was the source of their authority to discharge
this responsibility? How effectively did they
do this? Over the course of thirty years, he
chronicled the changing nature of the rela-
tionship between US medicine, its patients,
the state and the corporations of advanced
capitalism. In the process, his views swung
round from the impassioned critique of the
abuses of medical power, with which he
closed Profession of Medicine (Freidson,
1970) to a more appreciative stance in his last
major work, Professionalism: The Third
Logic (Freidson, 2001). Here he sees profes-
sional autonomy and the independent culture
of professional work as one of the last pro-
tections that stand between the sick and the
ruthless calculative logic of neo-liberal
market societies. If the professions fall, then
the trapdoor of the iron cage will indeed
swing closed with a vengeance.
Goffman’s work, however, inspires a
somewhat more optimistic line of thinking.
Although not as elaborately formulated as
Freidson’s approach, Goffman (1969) identi-
fied face-to-face interaction as a crucial site
for the analysis of the sick role.
The interesting thing about medical symptoms is
how utterly nice, how utterly plucky the patient can
be in managing them … He is someone who does
not will to be demanding and useless. Tuberculosis
patients, formerly isolated in sanitaria, sent home
progress notes that were fumigated but cheerful.
Brave little troops of colostomites and ileostomites
make their brief appearances disguised as nice,
clean people, while stoically concealing the hours
of hellish toilet work required for each appearance
in public as a normal person. We even have our
Beckett player buried up to his head in an iron lung,
unable to blow his own nose, who yet somehow
expresses by means of his eyebrows that a full-
fledged person is present who knows how to
behave and would certainly behave that way were
he physically able (Goffman, 1969: 366).
In the same paper, Goffman goes on to
examine the implications for family interaction
and the links between a person’s immediate
caregivers and the medical profession in the
management of the sick. At the heart of his
paper is an understanding that the sick role is
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128 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
a co-production in everyday life, a claim that
is constantly fragile and needs endless renewal
and re-legitimation by interaction partners.
This becomes an important theme for studies
of doctor/patient interaction such as those by
Strong (2001) and by Maynard (2003).
In the early 1970s, further themes from the
labeling perspective were introduced through
the concept ‘medicalization’, as proposed by
Irving Zola (1972). The medicalization thesis
has been a popular framework in medical
sociology and absorbed into public dis-
course. In its crude version it harbors a
conflict perspective: physicians are not
Parsonian benevolent and altruistic servants,
but an occupational group with an interest in
expanding its domain of authority. Although
Zola himself did not portray the process
of medicalization in such conflictual and
conspiratorial terms, the medicalization
thesis resonated with a variety of social
movements, which began critically to exam-
ine the client’s status in larger social institu-
tions and the role of certain professionals
(physicians, police, educators) as agents of
social control.
The (then) new feminist health movement
is a case in point. The medicalization thesis
became a way of documenting that women’s
primary care health needs were inappropri-
ately medicalized. According to feminists,
medical knowledge pathologized women’s
bodies, and medicine was part of a broader
patriarchal control of women (e.g., Chesler,
1972; Ehrenreich and English, 1973, 1978).
Women’s health advocates urged women to
regain control over their health, especially in
the area of reproductive health, and to
demand health services which would con-
sider women’s specific health needs. In the
US, the early women’s self-help movement
of the 1970s resulted in the development of
specific women’s health agendas in the polit-
ical context, and also commercialized ver-
sions of women’s health centers from the late
1980s onward (Morgen, 2002). In
the European context, the importance of the
welfare state and of other health professions
beyond medicine in promoting women’s
health led to an interest in the impact of mid-
wifery (e.g., DeVries et al., 2001; Oakley,
1980) and public health nursing (Dingwall,
1977; Dingwall and McIntosh, 1978) on
women’s and children’s health. Feminists
drew attention to what hitherto had been neg-
lected, a qualitatively different domain of lay
or unpaid care beyond medicine (e.g., Graham,
1984; Stacey, 1984, 2002).
Although a popular thesis, the empirical
basis of medicalization was questioned from
an early point, most notably by P. M. Strong
(1979) in Britain. Drawing on his own
research on alcoholism, Strong pointed out
that most physicians had little interest in
expanding their professional jurisdiction and
argued that medical sociologists had simply
used statements by the profession’s moral
entrepreneurs to illustrate an a priori critique
based on their own interests and prejudices.
A similar argument has been made by
Maynard (1991), who noted how
doctor/patient interaction studies had identi-
fied power and oppression in phenomena,
such as the structural organization of turn-
taking or the maintenance of topical and
thematic coherence, that are much better
understood as functional requirements of the
interaction.
The inaugural themes of cooperation and
consensus were, then, subject to challenge by
the 1970s as sociologists sought to bring
issues of power and control to the heart of the
discipline. New dimensions were added
in the 1980s, when sociologists of health
began to draw in a significant way upon post-
structural theorizing, e.g., the works of
Michel Foucault (1965, 1975). Foucault’s
approach to power reconceptualized the sub-
ject, who was no longer viewed as a creative
agent in the manner of the conflict and inter-
actionist perspectives, but as a ‘complex and
variable function of discourse’ (Foucault,
1977: 138). A range of analyses explored the
ways in which specific historical configura-
tions of knowledge and power constructed par-
ticular ways of knowing about and acting in
relation to health and illness (e.g., Armstrong,
1987; Arney and Bergen, 1984; Turner, 1987).
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HEALTH SOCIOLOGY
The Foucauldian view of power contrasts
with realist approaches, including neo-Marxist
and neo-Weberian approaches as well as the
work of many feminists, all of which make it
clear that power and status are possessed
and exercised by individuals or groups,
sometimes to consciously repressive ends.
However, the ‘competition theme’ within the
sociology of health is concealed in the typi-
cally neo-Weberian conceptualizations of
society that underlie most social epidemio-
logical research on health inequalities
(e.g., Mackenbach et al., 1999). The concep-
tualization of social groups by means of their
socio-economic characteristics, transformed
into background variables, reflects the
Weberian status categorization of the distri-
bution of economic and social resources in
society. As Shim (2002) relates, this distils
the effects of social and relational ideologies,
structures, and practices
into characteristics of discrete and self-contained
individuals. Disciplinary paradigms and practices
effectively deny that historical changes in social
policies, ideologies and prevailing meanings of dif-
ference ‘get under the skin’ and fundamentally
affect well-being. Epidemiology thereby renders
invisible the very social relations of power structur-
ing material and psychic conditions and life
chances that contribute to the stratification of
health (Shim, 2002: 134)
This is reflected in studies of gender and
health inequalities where European research
has tended to use neo-materialist and
Weberian approaches to measure the rela-
tionship between social factors and ill health.
The North American tradition has continued
to be based on a role theory of health (e.g.,
Rosenfield, 1992; Waldron et al., 1998),
which has its origins in the Parsonian sex-
role theory (Annandale and Hunt, 2000).
The revitalization of the theme of
social integration as a prerequisite
for health
The theme of cooperation was revitalized in
the mid-1980s, when social cohesion, meas-
ured by social networks and psychosocial
129
mechanisms, was again perceived as crucial
for the maintenance of health. The social-
network thesis has captured a variety of the-
oretical concerns about the relationship
between social integration or social cohesion
and health. A renaissance of the Durkheimian
argument of the importance of social integra-
tion in understanding social behaviour has
been promoted in Lisa Berkman’s work,
where the concepts of social networks and
psychosocial environment have drawn atten-
tion to relationships between the individual
and the primary group, measured by a person’s
integration into social networks (Berkman,
1984; Berkman et al., 2000).
In the 1990s, the same theme of social
integration, consensus, and cooperation was
developed further, but with a focus on com-
munity or place, especially in terms of sense
of trust and social cohesion, and social sup-
port as an explanation for social differences
in health. This community-level analysis has
developed into the so-called social-capital
theory of health. Communitarian researchers
see the restoration of a sense of community
and voluntary organizations as the social
capital that will improve both individual and
social health. Others, who profess libertarian
views, give social capital a more market-
oriented meaning. They perceive the restora-
tion of trust as the necessary normative and
social infrastructure for both the workings of
society and the market. In the more conserva-
tive political climate of today, terms like trust
and social capital have become a way of ana-
lyzing the ‘health’ of society (Lemke, 2001;
Navarro, 2002).
The turn to psychosocial theorizing seems
to be a particular European trend of the late
1990s onwards. For example, a Special Issue
examining health inequalities as a product of
the psychosocial environment was published
by Social Science & Medicine in 2004
(Marmot and Siegrist, 2004). Furthermore,
British researchers Richard Wilkinson
(1996, 2005) and Michael Marmot (2005)
have argued that there is a psychosocial link
to health through the influence of social
inequality on social relationships. It is
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130 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
argued that, once societies have reached a
certain level of affluence or prosperity, they
pass through the threshold where the
absolute standard of living of a population
is no longer associated with improvements
in life expectancy. Instead what matters is
where people stand in relation to others;
that is, relative deprivation. Marmot dubs
this ‘status syndrome’. The argument is
that, striving for status generates social hier-
archies which in turn generate gradients
in health. It is therefore subjective experi-
ence that matters; it gets under our skin
and impacts upon the biological body
(Wilkinson, 2005). Those with more power
and status, more control over their life cir-
cumstances, and greater social support fare
better in terms of health. Those lower in the
status hierarchy suffer from feelings of
hopelessness, anxiety, insecurity, and anger,
and this leaves its mark on their health,
directly through biological stress pathways
related to weakened immunity and indirectly
through negative health behaviours such as
cigarette smoking, and excess consumption
of alcohol and high fat and high sugar ‘com-
fort foods’. Wilkinson (2005: 315) advances
that, ‘it is only by improving the quality of
social relations that we can make further
improvements in the real quality of our
lives’. In his view, it is not simply a matter of
reducing those social divisions that promote
stigma, stress, and intolerance, but also of
reducing the status competition that fuels the
pressure to consume.
Critics of social-capital theory and of the
psychosocial perspective point to the overem-
phasis on the positive effects of strong social
networks, arguing that such networks can
also be experienced as coercive. Bartley
(2004) and others take issue with the empha-
sis that is placed on people’s perceptions of
their place in society. As she puts it, ‘there is
something rather depressing about [the] idea
that not being a “top dog” in some kind of
fixed hierarchy could be so psychologically
catastrophic as to have an effect on life
expectancy itself … Do people die of envy?’
(2004: 125–6). In Canadian health sociologist
David Coburn’s view, it is not so much that
income inequality produces lower cohesion
and trust, leading to poor health, but that
‘neo-liberalism (market dominance) produces
both higher income inequality and lower
social cohesion’ (Coburn, 2000: 137). He
argues that lack of social cohesion is the
product of the social inequality and social
fragmentation of society caused by the com-
petitiveness of laissez-faire capitalism and its
undermining of the welfare state. Similar
views are expressed by British researchers
and others who deplore the romanticized pic-
ture of the traditional community in much
social-capital theory (Pearce and Smith,
2003: 128). They suggest that this rhetoric
sets unrealistic expectations of community
involvement and resources, and diverts atten-
tion from the health effects of macro-level
social and economic policies. In this way,
social-capital theory offers little in the way of
effective intervention.
Critiques of social-capital theory of health
have also been presented by advocates of the
political economy perspective stemming
from Marxist theory (e.g., Navarro, 2002;
Waitzkin, 2000). The materialist perspective
on health inequalities emerged in the 1970s
to draw attention to the way in which social
class inequalities are reflected in inequalities
in health status and access to health care
(e.g., Navarro, 1976, 2002; Waitzkin, 2000).
The neo-materialist interpretation suggests
that health inequalities result from the differ-
ential accumulation of exposures and experi-
ences that are based on material living
conditions (e.g., Lynch et al., 2000). Taking
up this theme and drawing on the work of
Jürgen Habermas, with reference to Britain,
Graham Scambler (2001: 103) emphasizes
that health inequalities are the product of the
growth of inequality within the shift from
‘organized’ to ‘disorganized’ capitalism,
which is characterized by the destabilization
of work and the emergence of new forms of
inequality (as well as derivative processes
such as the new individualization).
The invisibility of the structural sources of
health inequalities, especially economic
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HEALTH SOCIOLOGY
inequality and race, has been institutionalized
in the American context due to the special
political language adopted in current US health
policy. Health inequalities are described as
‘health disparities’, a new concept which,
more often than not, is sanitized from all
indications of economic and structural
inequalities. This conceptualization of ill
health has been confirmed in a recent US
law – the Minority Health and Health
Disparities Research and Education Act of
2000 (P.L. 106–525) – that encourages
research on what sociologists have tradition-
ally called race and class.
CHALLENGES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY
The entry of the biological body
and the cultural body
Brain research and genetic research have cre-
ated an intellectual climate that has increased
the authority of reductionist science for
explaining a wide range of social problems
and social behaviour (Duster, 2006). While
sociological research on health and illness
has looked at forces outside the body for
explaining inequalities in health, biological
scientists are searching for neurotransmis-
sion pathways and patterns or specific
genetic markers inside the body which would
provide a more generic and ‘fundamental’
scientific reason (Conrad, 2000, 2005;
Duster, 2006: 3–5).
Risk-factor thinking has introduced new
forms of reductionism and medicalization of
behaviour. This thinking tends to ignore the
structuring of health by social class, race,
age, and gender and therefore the way that
certain macro-level institutions and ideolo-
gies in society influence health. Health risks
are interpreted as individual responses that,
at the aggregate level, result in certain health
patterns. This reductionist view of the deter-
minants of health gives little credibility to the
impact of social factors related to the themes
131
of conflict, competition, cooperation as
explanatory factors on health.
While the reductionist explanations of
health and illness offered by the new neuro-
biological and biogenetic research challenge
the approach of medical and health sociology,
those taking a social constructionist approach
to technology and science gave sociology a
special role in unravelling ‘truth claims’,
especially to document how rates and cate-
gories are constructed (Duster, 2006: 10;
Epstein, 2004; Timmermans, 2000). For
example, it has enabled sociologists to point
to the ways in which subjects are sorted,
named, and classified into categories which
then become referred to in explanations as
‘natural’ categories, like gender and race.
The individualization of health risks over-
laps with another trend in current public
health thinking that attributes to health infor-
mation a crucial role in shaping health
behaviour. Increasingly the individual’s
health behaviour is interpreted in terms of a
conscious choice and personal responsibility
in avoiding health risks and in selecting
appropriate health services. As Mildred
Blaxter (2004) relates in a review, although
there is an increasing imperative to (attempt to)
control risks to health, the ability to do so is
not evenly distributed in the population.
She points out that this chimera of risk con-
trol is apparent even for the resource-rich.
For example, even when all known risk fac-
tors for heart disease – one of the (if not the)
leading causes of death in most developed
nations – are considered together, they
account for only about 40% of the incidence
of the disease.
Another challenge to the social-causation
perspective on health and illness is the emer-
gence of a new subfield in sociology: the
sociology of the body. The merit of early
sociological theory of the body was that it lib-
erated the sick role from its abstraction and
contextualized the body as part of modernity
(e.g., Shilling, 1993; Turner, 1984). As noted
earlier, the new theoretical focus turned
the body into a feature of reflexive modernity
and the reflexive self (Giddens, 1991) as it
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132 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
became a project of modification and
enhancement (Crossley, 2005; Featherstone,
2000; Shilling, 2005). These theoretical per-
spectives drew attention to the negotiated
character of the social order and the themes
of conflict and cooperation as the built-in
dynamics between agency and structure.
While early sociological works on the
body gave some credit to feminist research
as the vanguard that had brought this topic to
the domain of sociology, the same authors
have been criticized for not seeing the rele-
vance of gender in their own analysis of the
body (Adkins, 2004; Witz, 2000).
The invisible theme
A recent book on the history of medical soci-
ology in the US provides an encyclopedic
overview of the stages of the institutionaliza-
tion and subsequent trends of medical sociol-
ogy as an academic discipline (Bloom, 2002).
In that review, official agencies (e.g., NIH)
are given a crucial role in the development of
medical sociology, while the women’s health
movement and the crucial Boston Women’s
Health Collective publication, Our Bodies,
Ourselves (Davis, 2002) and later feminist
theorizing on health are totally absent.
Mainstream American medical sociology is
presented unproblematically as malestream.
Two theoretical developments in sociology
might explain this general trend in the sociol-
ogy of health.
First, the general tenets of theorizing on
gender and health grew out of the conflation
of sick-role theory and sex-role theory
(Gerhardt, 1989). The functionalist interpre-
tation of women’s high rates of illness has
been called the ‘compatibility hypothesis’,
which refers to the compatibility between the
housewife role and the sick role (Gerhardt,
1989: 280). The argument was that women’s
expressive role in society was congruent with
the adoption of the sick role (e.g., Cooperstock,
1971). This cultural interpretation of the
higher morbidity of women than men is still
today taken to be a valid framework in the
interpretation of men’s underutilization of
health services and their assumed under-
reporting of health symptoms.
Recent feminist critiques of classical and
contemporary sociological theory point to
the importance of unravelling the gendered
assumptions inherent in theoretical perspec-
tives in sociology (e.g., Adkins, 2004; Witz
and Marshall, 2004). This is also the case for
theories in medical sociology and the sociol-
ogy of health and illness. The founding
concepts – the sick role and the role of the
physician – exemplify how the two phenom-
ena rested on a consensus perspective.
Although originally both were gender neu-
tral concepts, the sick role became conceptu-
alized as compatible with the traditional
female role, while the medical profession
became a prototype of the kind of new occu-
pational and contractual (male) relations that
emerged in modern society.
This consensus theory of health has had a
strong position in mainstream American
medical sociology, where the sex-role theory
of health has been an underlying theme in
empirical research on women’s health. The
theme of conflict was introduced in the
mid-1980s, when role-strain theory became a
way of explaining women’s, but also more
recently men’s health (e.g., Rosenfield, 1992;
Umberson et al., 2006).
The second reason for the marginalization
of feminist theorizing and research in med-
ical sociology stems from the relegation of
feminist research on health to the field of
women’s studies rather than mainstream
medical or health sociology. The conflict per-
spective in theorizing on gender and health
stems back to the feminist critique of the
male-dominated profession and the sug-
gested male-biased character of medical
knowledge in the 1970s. The feminist per-
spective grew out of the critique of the male
body as the standard of health in the 1970s
(see Boston Women’s Health Collective,
1973; Chesler, 1972) and emerged as a the-
matic issue in the work of academic activists
such as Barbara Ehrenreich (Ehrenreich and
English, 1973, 1978) in the US and of
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HEALTH SOCIOLOGY
Margaret Stacey (1988) and Ann Oakley
(1984) in the UK. These early works rested
on the assumption of the existence of
patriarchy as the underlying organizing prin-
ciple in society, affecting women’s social and
cultural position. Later gender-relations
theory pointed to the social category of
gender as a binary and hierarchical classifi-
cation of gender status. The analytical
tools for understanding the gender order have
been hegemonic masculinity and the inter-
sectionality of gender, race, class, and age
in shaping gender, femininities, and mas-
culinities (Annandale, 1998; Connell and
Messerschmidt, 2005; Lorber, 2001; Witz
and Marshall, 2004).
This conflict perspective has been further
developed within post-structuralist femi-
nism, which has been inspired by the works
of Michel Foucault (1975; see Petersen and
Bunton, 1997) and Judith Butler (1993). The
body has become the site for exploring
the discourses of medical knowledge and the
medical profession in the construction of the
gendered body (Lorber and Moore, 2002).
International and national research on
gender and health has tended to divide into
those who undertake quantitative research on
gender inequalities in health and who work
within the tradition of social epidemiology
(e.g., Kuh and Hardy, 2002; Mackenbach
et al., 1999) and those who use a social con-
structionist or phenomenological approach
and qualitative methodology, and look at
the gendered aspects of illness experience
and health (e.g., Elson, 2004; Mamo and
Fishman, 2001; Popay and Groves, 2000).
Since the mid-1990s, men’s health has
emerged as a new field of research (e.g.,
Sabo and Gordon, 1995), and recent pro-
feminist research on sexuality and masculinity
has developed a male-focused health approach
(Loe, 2001; Mamo and Fishman, 2001;
Rosenfeld and Faircloth, 2006). This genre
of studies has been characterized by a con-
flict perspective, largely based on social con-
structionist and post-structuralist theorizing.
This shift is reflected, for example, in the
reintroduction of the medicalization thesis as
133
the biomedicalization thesis (Clarke et al.,
2003). In much of this work men’s health –
rather than women’s health – has been
examined.
A gender-analysis of men’s health has,
though, been hard to promote for a number of
reasons. For example, public health advo-
cates tend to reduce male gender to psycho-
logical concerns, reflected in a preoccupation
with the association drawn between norms of
masculinity and men’s reluctance to seek
professional help. Furthermore, feminists
tend to interpret claims for resources and a
higher profile for research on men’s health as
a form of backlash against the importance of
women’s health concerns which have drifted
from view (e.g., Gordon and Thorne, 1996).
The examples above suggest the impor-
tance of identifying the systems of super-
ordination and subordination that characterize
society and their implications for men and
women. A clear gender perspective on health
professionals, on illness and health, and
on gender differences in the use of health
services is still needed. The challenge for a
twenty-first century sociological research
agenda on gender and health is twofold.
First, it is important to unravel the hidden
agenda of the terms gender and health: at
issue is not only women’s health but also
men’s health. Second, there is currently a
curious vacuum in theorizing on women’s
health at a time when theorizing on men’s
health seems to proliferate, seemingly
inspired by the medicalization of men’s sex-
uality and the availability of life enhance-
ment drugs like Viagra and its descendants,
Cialis and Levitra.
The current vogue for ‘gender sensitive’
health policy, reflected in the gender main-
streaming policies of many countries (e.g.,
Doyal et al., 2003; Jonsson et al., 2006;
Wamala and Agren, 2002) may dampen
down the fiery stand-off between ‘men’s
health’ and ‘women’s health’. It has been
argued that, by making both female and male
health visible, gender mainstreaming ‘holds
the greatest potential for improving the health
of both women and men’, i.e., for achieving
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134 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
gender equity (Khoury and Weisman,
2002: 61). Effectively, gender sensitive
health policies attempt to turn (or return)
gender-as-conflict (between men and women)
into gender-as-consensus (i.e., something
that, in varying ways, matters for everyone).
While the consensus approach has its merits,
it also harbours the risk of turning gender
into a characteristic of individuals. Gender is
at heart a relational concept that connotes
structural relations of inequality, which does
not simply imply difference, but also hierar-
chies of power (Busfield, 1996; Lorber,
2001).
CONCLUDING REMARKS
The themes of conflict and competition char-
acterized much of the theoretical critique
of the consensual perspectives forming the
mainstream of medical sociology in the
1970s. These themes have been replaced by
the theme of cooperation in the twenty-first
century’s debate on health. The theme of
cooperation/social cohesion – the Illichian
pastoral and the Durkheimian characteriza-
tion of lost village life – was present in ear-
lier decades, but social-capital theory has
revitalized the theme of social factors related
to health, factors that hark back to the (seem-
ingly) less complicated days of social and
human relations as the promoter of human
health. A similar backward look at the
archaic body and primordial society as the
basis of health is present in recent neurobio-
logical stress theories on the impact of cur-
rent urban and work environments on health.
An appeal to consensus is also evident in
recent gender sensitive policies in health care
which focus attention on the individual man
or woman. These kinds of perspectives on
health (re)introduce reductionist thinking in
explaining health and thereby make the
social patterning of health invisible.
The emphasis on social structures as influ-
encing health and on medicine as a social
institution – the founding themes of medical
sociology – needs to be more overtly present
in research in medical and health sociology if
the field is going to maintain a vibrant theo-
retical profile. Similarly the social categories
of gender, class, age, and race should not
only be used as social background variables
in mapping health, but also as structures
and embodied social categories which have
bearings on health experiences and health
behaviours (Krieger and Davey Smith, 2004;
Shim, 2002). A gender-informed approach
guarantees a rich area of research on gender
and health that has a potential for providing
new insights and theoretical contributions to
both international and national sociological
knowledge in medical and health sociology.
Critique of the lack of theory generation in
medical sociology has been expressed in the
past. Horobin (1985) characterized medical
sociology in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s as
‘small-scale, here-and-now ethnography’
because a large part of the body of medical
sociology was project-based, a circumstance
that he argued impeded the cumulative theoret-
ical development of the field. Although more
academically based, medical sociology in the
US tended to lose touch with the basic theoret-
ical issues of the early founding theories some-
where in the 1980s (Mechanic, 1993).
Along with the neo-liberal health policies
characterizing most Western societies, med-
ical sociologists have lost their previous
major promoter and funding agency – the
government. Health care and its delivery is
less and less a matter of direct concern to
government, as marketized models of socie-
tal organization are increasingly presented as
the only possible strategy for success in a
globalized economy. Governments do not
need to design health systems: the market
will sort out what is efficient and effective,
whether or not it is also equitable or humane.
If governments have no stake in this, and if
the correctness of their assumptions about
the market is taken a priori, then there is no
reason to use tax funds to investigate the
design of delivery systems. Similarly, if class
inequalities in health – or, as it appears we
must now call them, ‘health variations’ or
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HEALTH SOCIOLOGY
‘health disparities’ – are the result of poor
individual choices in the impersonal market,
then they are not great policy issues that will
drive investments in social science. A marke-
tized system needs market research, not med-
ical sociology.
This situation is a challenge for a field that
grew after World War II as part of the new
trends in medical education, and in the devel-
opment of primary care and of the welfare
state. This challenge could also provide a his-
torical moment for the field to return to the
major theoretical issues and, in the words of
David Mechanic (1993: 96), to once again
ask the big questions.
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9781412934633-Chap-10 1/10/09 8:45 AM Page 140
Sociological Theories of
Professions: Conflict,
Competition and
Cooperation
Julia Evetts, Charles Gadea, Mariano Sánchez and Juan Sáez
The sociological study of knowledge-based
work, occupations and professions is a long-
standing field of academic research which
has been boosted significantly over the past
decade and is set to expand further as soci-
eties and economies become even more
dependent on service sector work, both
nationally and internationally. There have
been important historical reasons for differ-
ent concepts, theories and analyses of profes-
sions in Continental European societies
(particularly Germany and Scandinavian
countries) in contrast to Anglo-American
societies. The Continental functional prox-
imity between state government bureaucra-
cies, public state universities and professions
created a minority of free professions, (‘freie
Berufen’ and ‘professions libérales’), and
favoured sociology of class and organization
to the disadvantage of sociology of profes-
sions (Burrage, 1990). The Anglo-American
less centralized state governments, private or
10
at least relatively independent universities
and free professions, on the other hand, cre-
ated a majority of market-related professions
and an elaborated sociology of professions,
which has had strong impact worldwide. By
means of so-called Anglo-American neo-
right ideologies and Continental neo-liberalism,
an extensive convergence has, however, taken
place. Work on new public management,
managerialism, entrepreneurialism, marketi-
zation, and more explicit and integrated pro-
fessional work organizations has made
Anglo-American sociology of professions
even more applicable in Continental societies
as well (Svensson and Evetts, 2003).
For several important reasons, the need for
comparative studies of different professional
occupations is becoming increasingly impor-
tant. Firstly, considerable convergence has
taken place between Continental European
and Anglo-American societies. Secondly,
control by the management in professional
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SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES OF PROFESSIONS
work organizations, the self-control exercised
by professionals, and the control by customers
have changed and become more intertwined;
and as a consequence the organizational con-
text strongly determines the relations and the
conditions for professional work. Thirdly, the
prevailing ideology and quest for profession-
alism demands more comparative studies of
occupations in general and in the context of
the division of labour as a whole. These
reasons are further developed and examined
in the ‘Introduction’ to Svensson and Evetts
(2003).
This type of work and workers forms the
structural and institutional arrangements
for dealing with uncertainties in modern
risk societies. Knowledge-based work, occu-
pations and professions are extensively
engaged in managing risk. In this sense, risk
assessment and the use of expert knowledge
enables customers and clients to deal with
uncertainty. Knowledge-based occupations
control the conceptualization of problems
and issues in their areas relating to risk, as
well as access to, and definitions of, possible
solutions. Examples of such groups range
from the old established professions of law,
engineering, religion and medicine to those
involved in service sector employment in
education, health and social care – as well as
the newer categories of knowledge workers
in areas such as information technology,
management, security, leisure, the arts and
entertainment. Professionals and knowledge
workers are also emblematic examples of
contemporary changes in public policy, in
corporate management and the organization
of work. Thus, social workers are coping
with the crises of welfare in social services,
engineers and lawyers have to manage the
‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and
Chiapello, 1999), and most European profes-
sions are trying to find new methods of regu-
lation in order to be able to deal with the
effects of globalization and European Union
expansion.
The sociological study of knowledge-
based work, occupations and professions is
one in which international comparison and
141
collaboration has been particularly fruitful.
One example of this is the productive con-
trast between concepts, models, interpreta-
tions and theories developed and used by
English-speaking sociologists and the orien-
tations developed by French and by Spanish-
speaking researchers. The field has its own
history and has developed in different ways
in these linguistic sociological communities.
This chapter will review and assess the theo-
retical differences and similarities, focusing
particularly on aspects of conflict, competi-
tion and cooperation in the interpretations.
ANGLO-AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL
INTERPRETATIONS: FROM
OCCUPATIONAL COOPERATION AND
CONFLICT TO OCCUPATIONAL
CONTROL
In Anglo-American sociological interpreta-
tions and theories, the concepts of profession,
professionalism and professionalization have
received considerable (sometimes critical)
attention. Four phases can be identified and
each phase focussed on a different key con-
cept which resulted in different theories and
explanations. The balances of conflict, com-
petition and cooperation in interpretations is
different in each phase with cooperation pre-
dominant in the first two phases, conflict and
competition in the third phase and a focus
more on aspects of control in the latest phase.
Professionalism as occupational
value
In early British sociological analysis, the key
concept was ‘professionalism’ and the
emphasis was on the importance of profes-
sionalism for the stability and civility of
social systems (e.g., Carr-Saunders and Wilson,
1933; Marshall, 1950; Tawney, 1921). In
these interpretations professionalism was
regarded as an important and highly desir-
able occupational value and professional
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142 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
relations were characterized as collegial,
cooperative and mutually supportive.
Similarly, relations of trust characterized
practitioner/client and practitioner/manage-
ment interactions since competencies were
assumed to be guaranteed by education,
training and sometimes by licensing.
The early American sociological theorists
of professions also developed similar inter-
pretations and again the key concept was the
occupational value of professionalism based
on trust, competence, a strong occupational
identity and cooperation. The best known,
though perhaps most frequently mis-quoted,
attempt to clarify the special characteristics
of professionalism, its central values and its
contribution to social order and stability, was
that of Parsons (1951). Parsons recognized
and was one of the first theorists to show how
the capitalist economy, the rational-legal
social order (of Weber) and the modern pro-
fessions were all interrelated and mutually
balancing in the maintenance and stability of
a fragile normative social order. He demon-
strated how the authority of the professions
and of bureaucratic hierarchical organiza-
tions both rested on the same principles
(for example of functional specificity, restric-
tion of the power domain, application of
universalistic, impersonal standards). The
professions, however, by means of their col-
legial organization and shared identity
demonstrated an alternative approach (com-
pared with the managerial hierarchy of
bureaucratic organizations) towards the
shared normative end.
The work of Parsons has subsequently
been subject to heavy criticism mainly
because of its links with functionalism
(Dingwall and Lewis, 1983). The differences
between professionalism and rational-legal,
bureaucratic ways of organizing work have
been returned to, however, in Freidson’s
(2001) recent analysis. Freidson examines
the logics of three different ways of organiz-
ing work in contemporary societies (the
market, organization and profession) and
illustrates the respective advantages and
disadvantages of each for clients and practi-
tioners. In this analysis he demonstrates the
continuing importance of maintaining pro-
fessionalism (with some changes) as the
main organizing principle for service work.
Professions as institutions: the
‘trait’ approach
In the 1950s and 1960s, Anglo-American
researchers shifted the focus of analysis on to
the concept of profession as a particular kind
of occupation, or an institution with special
characteristics. The difficulties of defining
these special characteristics, and clarifying
the differences between professions and
occupations, have long troubled analysts
and researchers. For a period the ‘trait’
approach occupied sociologists who strug-
gled to define the special characteristics of
professional (compared with other occupa-
tional) work. For example, Greenwood
(1957) and Wilensky (1964) argued that pro-
fessional work required long and expensive
education and training in order for practition-
ers to acquire the necessary knowledge and
expertise; professionals were autonomous
and performed a public service; they were
guided in their decision-making by a profes-
sional ethic or code of conduct; they were in
special relations of trust with clients as well as
with employers/managers; and they were altru-
istic and motivated by universalistic values. In
the absence of such characteristics, the label
‘occupation’ was deemed more appropriate and
for occupations having some but not all of the
characteristics, the term ‘semi-profession’ was
suggested (Etzioni, 1969).
The ‘trait’ approach also emphasized
cooperation as well as the special importance
of professional work. It is now largely assessed
as being a time-wasting diversion in that it
did nothing to assist understanding of the
power of particular occupations (such as law
and medicine) historically, or of the appeal of
‘being a professional’ in all occupational
groups.
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SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES OF PROFESSIONS
Professionalization and market
closure
Following this institutional diversion, sociol-
ogists became sceptical about the whole idea
of professionalism. The emphasis on occupa-
tional cooperation shifted to aspects of occu-
pational competition and conflict. The 1970s
and 1980s produced a highly critical set of
literature on professions where the key
concept was the processes of professionaliza-
tion, particularly in dominant and powerful
occupational groups such as medicine and
law. During this period professionalism came
to be dismissed as a successful ideology
(Johnson, 1972) and professionalization was
interpreted as a process of market closure
and monopoly control of work (Larson,
1977) and occupational dominance (Larkin,
1983). Professionalization was intended to
promote professionals’ own occupational self
interests in terms of their salary, status and
power as well as the monopoly protection of
an occupational jurisdiction (Abbott, 1988).
A further development of this theorizing
was the linking of gender and occupational
closure. Witz (1992) examined how both
men and women engaged in professional
projects but, because they had differential
access to resources, gender necessarily influ-
enced both the form and the outcome of the
closure projects.
Since the mid-1980s, the flaws in the more
extreme versions of this view of profession-
alization as market closure and occupational
power, dominance and competition have
become apparent (e.g., Annandale, 1998). In
particular, radical governments have success-
fully challenged the professions and intro-
duced regulatory regimes which include
target setting, performance review, manageri-
alist regimes and accountability measures.
One line of development has been the view
that the demand-led theory of professional-
ization needs to be complemented by an
understanding of the supply side (Dingwall,
1996). Thus, instead of the question – how do
professions capture states? – it is suggested
143
that the central question should be – why do
states create professions, or at least permit
professions to flourish? This has resulted in a
renewed interest in the historical evidence
about the parallel processes of the creation
of modern nation-states in the second half of
the nineteenth century and of modern profes-
sions in the same period (Perkin, 1988). It
also resulted in renewed interest in compara-
tive analysis as well as in consideration of
professional occupations in Europe where,
for the most part, the concept of profession
(if it existed at all) was used and interpreted
by sociologists in rather different ways.
Return to professionalism: new
directions
In the 1990s researchers began to reassess
the significance of professionalism and its
positive (as well as negative) contributions
both for customers and clients, as well as for
social systems. Freidson (1994, 2001), for
example, has argued that professionalism is a
unique form of occupational control of work
which has distinct advantages over market
or organizational and bureaucratic forms of
control. As already indicated, to an extent
this indicates a return to the concept of pro-
fessionalism as a normative value which was
developed by Parsons (1951).
In addition there are new directions in the
analysis (Evetts, 2003). This interpretation
involves the examination of professionalism
as a discourse of occupational change and
control in occupational groups and work
organizations where the discourse is increas-
ingly applied and utilized by managers.
Fournier (1999) considers the appeal to ‘pro-
fessionalism’ as a disciplinary mechanism in
new occupational contexts. She suggests how
the use of the discourse of professionalism in
a large privatized service company of mana-
gerial labour serves to inculcate ‘appropriate’
work identities, conducts and practices. She
considers this as ‘a disciplinary logic which
inscribes “autonomous” professional practice
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144 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
within a network of accountability and
governs professional conduct at a distance’
(1999: 280).
At the level of individual actors, the appeal
to professionalism can be seen as a powerful
motivating force of control ‘at a distance’
(Burchell et al., 1991; Miller and Rose,
1990). This professionalization will be
achieved through increased occupational
training and the certification of the workers/
employees – a process labelled as credential-
ism by Collins (1979, 1981). In these cases
the appeal to professionalism is a powerful
mechanism for promoting occupational
change and social control. The appeal to the
discourse by managers in work organizations
is to a myth or an ideology of professional-
ism which includes aspects such as exclusive
ownership of an area of expertise, autonomy
and discretion in work practices and the
occupational control of the work. The reality
of the professionalism that is envisaged is
very different. The appeal to the discourse of
professionalism by managers most often
includes the substitution of organizational for
professional values; bureaucratic, hierarchi-
cal and managerial controls rather than colle-
gial relations; managerial and organizational
objectives rather than client trust based on
competencies; budgetary restrictions and
financial rationalizations; the standardization
of work practices rather than discretion; and
performance targets, accountability and
sometimes increased political controls.
The use of the discourse of professional-
ism is not confined to managers in work
organizations, however. As a discourse of
self-control it can also be interpreted as an
ideology which enables self-control and some-
times even self-exploitation. Born (1995)
illustrates this very well in her account of the
world of French contemporary music prac-
tice. It is also clearly expressed in the work
culture of artists, actors and musicians in
general. One is self-defined as a professional,
imposing time or other limits on one’s efforts
is rendered illegitimate. The expectations by
self and others from the professional have no
limits. For the professional, the needs and
demands of audiences, patients, clients and
students become paramount. Professionals
are expected and expect themselves to be
committed to, even to be morally involved in,
the work.
In sum, it seems that in Anglo-American
interpretations of profession, professionalism
and professionalization, the early analyses
based on occupational value emphasized
cooperation, collegial support and manage-
rial and client trust. Later interpretations
based on market closure resulted in a theoret-
ical and conceptual emphasis on occupa-
tional conflict, competition and domination.
In some recent interpretations, processes of
occupational (self) control and social order
are receiving increased attention, thereby
enabling other organizational occupations
(including journalists, social workers and the
military) as well as artists and musicians to
be considered as occupations controlled by
the discourse of professionalism.
FRENCH INTERPRETATIONS: A LONG
HISTORY AND A LATE DEVELOPMENT
In French sociology, as elsewhere in conti-
nental Europe, professions are defined more
broadly and the research focus is on ques-
tions of occupation more generally, including
occupational identity, career trajectories,
training and expertise, and employment in
public sector organizations. It is also the case
that the continental ideal-type emphasizes
‘elite administrators possessing their offices
by virtue of academic credentials’ (Collins,
1990: 15) and the political struggles for con-
trol within an elite bureaucratic hierarchy
(1990: 17). The sociology of professional
groups in France has also utilized conflict,
competition and cooperation in interpreta-
tions, though the historical development has
been different in this country.
The sociology of professional groups has
old roots in French sociology. At the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, Durkheim
(1992) called for the revival of professional
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SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES OF PROFESSIONS
organizations which had been destroyed by
the French Revolution. He assessed profes-
sionalism as a form of moral community
based on occupational membership. Such a
moral occupational community would
require a more locally based and individually
operated form of professional control of
work which is dependent on strong processes
of occupational socialization, identity forma-
tion and reinforcement. In his view, these
professional associations could provide an
antidote to the dangers of anomie produced
by capitalism and the risks posed by the
collapse of ethics in the world of work and
production.
Clearly there are difficulties with the
Durkheimian vision and Freidson (2001) has
indicated some of these problems. Firstly, it is
necessary to emphasize that when Durkheim
used the concept of ‘profession’ he was follow-
ing French usage and meant occupations
in general, and not the particular set of presti-
gious and privileged occupations referred to in
English usage. Secondly, Durkheim did not
have in mind occupational associations like the
medieval guilds or contemporary professional
associations such as the Law Society, the
British Medical Association and the French
medical syndicates, composed of worker/prac-
titioners only. He wanted explicitly to include
both workers and employers (practitioners and
managers) in the same ‘self-governing’ units.
Thirdly, and more importantly for his vision,
Durkheim was extremely vague about what he
meant by an occupation and an occupational
group. It is also the case that there is no evi-
dence in his work of any, even potentially,
viable occupational associations. Indeed the
only example he gave was of what he terms a
pathological form of specialization. He
claimed that in science, for example, special-
ization had created fragmentation and isolation
rather than the organic solidarity Durkheim
had anticipated.
Despite these difficulties, the Durkheimian
model had a big impact on early Anglo-
American interpretations of professionalism
(such as Carr-Saunders and Wilson, 1933;
Marshall, 1950; Tawney, 1921; and even
145
Parsons, 1951). The theoretical interpretation
was functionalist and the emphasis was soci-
etal stability through occupational relations
of collegiality and cooperation. Durkheim’s
hopes seemed to be fulfilled a few years after
his death in 1917 in the tense economic con-
ditions of the 1930s. In this period in France
the demand for legal protection and advan-
tages was very strong, several professions
acquired legal status, such as journalists in
1935 (Delporte, 1999), and a licence or pro-
fessional title, such as engineers in 1934
(Grelon, 1986). Occupational competition
was beginning, however, in that this social and
political movement which has been called the
‘professional fact’ by some historians
(Ruhlmann, 2001), was involved in the unsta-
ble social space of the middle classes and in
the troubles produced by the economic crisis.
Then the dramatic changes produced by
World War II intervened. The corporatism
that had been strongly promoted by the Vichy
Regime became linked to collaboration with
fascism and Nazi power. As a consequence,
after the war, corporatism – together with the
defence of professional interests (other than
workers’ interests) – became taboo and was
not an accepted subject for many French
sociologists.
The first decades after the war have been
recognized as the ‘second birth’ of French
sociology. Partly under the influence of
American methods and theories, French soci-
ology became more empirical and tried to
analyze the developments in a society
involved in accelerated modernization. The
social category of the ‘cadres’ (corporate
executives), created before the war, became
more and more visible and some sociologists
tried to introduce notions inspired by the
sociology of the professions into their analy-
sis of this special kind of employee.
For example, the categorization of ‘cosmo-
politan’ versus ‘local’ (which is classic in
Anglo-American analysis of the role and
value conflict between identification with the
‘profession’ and identification with the
‘organization’) was adopted in some French
papers (e.g., Durand, 1972).
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146 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
During a thirty year period, the sociology
of professional groups in France remained
fairly stationary – despite the intellectual
developments taking place among English-
speaking sociologists in this field. The soci-
ology of professional groups had been a
major theoretical perspective in the sociol-
ogy of the cadres, but it was a marginal field
in the discipline of sociology more generally
and it could not be compared with the pow-
erful sociology of work. The sociology of
work tended to focus on the situation of
workers (usually male workers, in big indus-
trial enterprises) and this trend increased in
importance after 1968, when the class para-
digm became dominant in French sociology.
No sooner had the sociology of professional
groups begun to be known in France than it
was in decline.
Some research on the professions was
done at the beginning of the 1980s, for
instance on the medical profession
(Baszanger, 1981), but the amount increased
progressively. Some important research was
published in the middle of the decade:
Segrestin (1984) dares to return to the ‘phe-
nomenon of corporatism’; Paradeise (1984)
presents professions as ‘closed labour mar-
kets’. In some ways, these studies comple-
ment the critical literature on professional
groups that was also prominent in English
language analyses during this period where
the interpretations were of occupational
conflict, competition and dominance.
Interactionists’ approaches to work and occu-
pations increased in importance (Desmarez,
1986). Some historians also contributed and
were able to attract the interest of young
researchers to the study of engineers and
technical occupations (Grelon, 1986; Shinn,
1980; Thépot, 1985).
In the 1990s French society faced a crisis
in employment, and the integration of young
people into the labour market became more
and more difficult, even though they had a
higher education level than previous genera-
tions. Professional integration and the
construction of professional identity by
young people become a major political and
social concern. These factors, combined with
the collapse of East European communist
states and the decline of Marxist theories, but
also with other internal changes in the disci-
pline (Dubar, 2004; Gadea, 2003), help to
explain the return to the development of the
sociology of professional groups in France in
the 1990s. The interactionist approach and
micro-level analysis of worker integration,
identity and socialization became dominant
in France and the sociology of professional
groups began again to attract research inter-
est. Dubar’s theory of social and professional
identity (1991), inspired by Mead, Hughes,
Becker and Goffman, is one of the most
quoted works of the decade. It can be seen
also in the collective book from the first
interim conference of the ISA working group
‘sociology of professional groups’ (created in
1990 in Madrid), held in Paris in 1992
(Dubar and Lucas, 1994) that the range of
occupations studied by French sociologists
became larger and many young PhD students
chose a professional/occupational group for
the subject of their research. The interaction-
ist theoretical paradigm tends to focus on the
occupational labour market and social inte-
gration, although the conditions or contexts
for such integration can be conditions of con-
flict, competition and cooperation. There are
also additional complicating factors includ-
ing race and ethnic tensions, gender and class
inequalities. These changes were also linked
to the arrival of new generations of empirical,
research-orientated young sociologists and to
a major shift in the relationship between
social scientists, managers and public policy
makers. During this period the French social-
ist government encouraged social research
on work, technologies and employment in
large enterprises and public services. Thus
managers and corporate officials became
more interested in the sociological interpreta-
tions of the dynamics of professional groups
both inside organizations and within the
labour market. The question of professional
identity had important policy and political
dimensions. Currently in France the sociol-
ogy of professional groups is seen to be an
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SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES OF PROFESSIONS
attractive and successful research field, but
some questions persist which could be
important for the future of this field.
It is important to emphasize that the con-
tinuing dominance of the interactionist para-
digm is uncertain. In the sociology of
professional groups additional and stronger
links need to be established with other theo-
retical perspectives. If these links are not
made, then, at the next ‘scientific revolution’,
the sociology of the professions could
decline again along with the outdated para-
digm. It is surprising to see how this almost
monopolistic position of interactionism
masks or hides other possible approaches.
For instance, the neo-Weberian authors, who
have been the most popular in the sociology
of professions internationally, are hardly ever
cited in France. Moreover, this current inter-
actionist orthodoxy seems to want to deny
some important French schools such as
Bourdieu’s work or Foucault’s theories of
knowledge and power which are prominent
in international theorizing. It would be
regrettable if the rediscovery of the stimulat-
ing American interactionist school of the
1950s tended to isolate French sociology
both from more recent Anglo-American and
international approaches as well as from
other French sources. In addition, a sociolog-
ical field also needs to be present in sociolog-
ical curricula and this teaching has to be
helped by textbooks and manuals. There is
little available about sociology of the profes-
sions in teaching materials, and only one
textbook has been published in France
(Dubar and Tripier, 1998).
The recent development of this field needs
to be reinforced and we can find in the diver-
sity and creativity of young researchers many
reasons to think that this development will
continue. As proof of this vitality, the net-
work on the sociology of the professions,
recently created in the national Association
Française de Sociologie (AFS), has grown
rapidly, so that now it is one of the very
biggest networks, and many of its partici-
pants are young researchers and doctoral stu-
dents. There are examples of excellent theses
147
recently published on subjects as diverse as
auctioneers (Quemin, 1997), nursing auxil-
iaries (Arborio, 2002) and chartered account-
ants in a globalized context (Ramirez, 2005). At
the same time, the specific professional cate-
gory of the ‘cadres’ has been studied by
researchers who link it with new themes such
as unemployment (Pochic, 1999), or with the
increasing influence of managerial rationality
in such fields as social work (Chéronnet, 2005).
In sum, conflict was the dominant per-
spective in the scientific field. It was, how-
ever, implicit, in a latent state, between the
paradigms of the class-focused sociology
of work and the interactionist paradigms of
the sociology of the professions. The weak-
ening of the first seems to have left more
space for the development of the second. The
sociology of the professions is sometimes
seen as challenging the well-established soci-
ology of work, but it is more important to see
these two fields as complementary and as
creating and facilitating additional links with
other domains, such as the sociologies of
organizations, education, health, law, culture,
arts and sport, at national and international
levels.
SOCIOLOGY OF THE PROFESSIONS
IN SPAIN
Similar theoretical shifts, changes in key
concepts and chronological developments
have been apparent also in Spanish sociolog-
ical research on professional groups. An
early focus on theoretical functionalism
resulted in the production of mainly descrip-
tive studies of the occupational work of par-
ticular occupational groups. Here the
emphasis tended to be on the contribution of
particular groups of workers and the impor-
tance of their work. A key text, Martin-
Moreno and de Miguel which constituted a
milestone in the development of the field in
Spain, was published in 1982. This book
made a number of interesting observations
and significant contributions although a clear
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148 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
emphasis on analysis and interpretation came
later. The more recent period is characterized
by marked improvements in both data collec-
tion and international influences. In this sec-
tion we review these periods with particular
emphasis on the concepts of conflict, compe-
tition and cooperation.
Sociology of the professions in Spain
before 1982: the liberal professions
During this period Spanish analyses of the
professions centred mostly on the study of
particular occupational groups (usually
important professional groups) and there was
little or no comparison between them.
Examples of these early studies are those by
Marañón (1952) on medicine, Alvarez-Sierra
(1955) on medical assistants and midwives,
and Gómez Barnussell (1972) focusing on
teaching as a profession. The approach was
essentially descriptive with a functionalist
interpretation. The kinds of information
offered in such research considered questions
such as the place of the profession in the
social context, its potential for employment,
its social role and status and the motives of
practitioners for becoming professionals and
doing that work.
Martin-Moreno and Miguel (1982) identified
two main features of research during this early
period. Firstly, it was professional practitioners
themselves (rather than scholars and rese-
archers) who analyzed their own work practices
and procedures. As a consequence, the findings
are mostly descriptive as well as subjective in
that they underline and amplify the positive
aspects and contributions of professional work.
However, there were some interesting excep-
tions; analyses such as that by Marcos Alonso
(1974) around engineers in Catalonia, and
those by Estruch and Güell (1976) on so-called
social assistants (the future social workers) by
Martín Barroso (1978) about the potentialities
of nursing as a profession in the welfare state,
and by Todolí (1975) reflecting on ethical com-
mitments of professionals, represent descriptive
but independent approaches (by outsiders) to
professional practices.
These essentially functionalist interpretations
emphasized contributions and cooperation
and the research is mostly idealistic and
rhetorical. Secondly, the data sources most
often used in these accounts were the work of
professional associations, newsletters, jour-
nals and codes, and again subjectivity and
partiality are predominant. Thirdly, assess-
ments tend to be self-laudatory, almost
uniquely centred on the virtues and positive
aspects of professionals such as doctors
(Marañón, 1962), lawyers (Belda Calatayud,
1957), or teachers (Manjón, 1945).
In general then this was a period of slow
but sustained development. There were
debates about the need to improve the quality
of previous studies and to operate with more
adequate concepts, research methods and
processes. There were the beginnings of a
critique of the liberal model which, although
still weak, indicated the start of a search for
alternative interpretations. It is also the case
that functionalist theories were predominant
in the first part of the period. The main traits
and features of professions (Lacalle, 1976;
Laguna, 1975) had strong links with the
‘trait’ approach to professions as institutions
in Anglo-American interpretations. In addi-
tion, other researchers were beginning to
show an interest in processes of conflict and
competition which included how older pro-
fessions evolve and new professions come
about in a context of other important social
changes (Busquets, 1971; De Miguel, 1979;
Iice, 1975; Lacalle, 1976; Martín-Moreno
and De Miguel, 1976; Subirats, 1981). Spain
was becoming more and more a services soci-
ety (the role of tourism in Spanish economic
renewal from the early sixties was outstand-
ing), but still one within a non-democratic
regime. In this context, professions (and the
welfare state) developed unevenly: higher
professional status and privileges remained
in the hands of the dominant social classes.
Martín Serrano (1982), from a Marxist
perspective, criticized this form of domi-
nance linked to professions. The relation-
ship between professions and gender also
gained research prominence since some pro-
fessional groups seemed to be more feminized
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SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES OF PROFESSIONS
than others (Álvarez Sierra, 1955; De Borja,
1981; De Miguel, 1979). However, this issue
would not be tackled in depth until later (for
example García and García, 2000; Gómez
Bueno, 1996; Jar Couselo, 1992; Sánchez-
Apellaniz, 2001). Conflict theories and
interpretations (including Marxism) became
increasingly important in the second part
of this period as Spanish sociologists tried
to understand the apparent power and
influence of some particular occupational
groups. However, positivist and interactionist
approaches (e.g., De Miguel, 1979; De
Miguel and Salcedo, 1987, which exemplify
the latter) were also predominant in this
period.
Martín-Moreno and de Miguel
(1982): a milestone text?
This was the first book in Spanish on the
sociology of professions. Its title, Sociología
de las profesiones, clearly acknowledged the
existence of such an intellectual field in
Spain and it included a review of earlier
Spanish work in this area. Despite its signif-
icant contribution towards a more scientific
and independent (non-self-laudatory) analy-
sis of the professions, in retrospect it seems
to have had only a limited influence on sub-
sequent theoretical developments.
In general the book lacked historical back-
ground. Also, its reflections are disconnected
from developments in the field abroad. The
authors refer to the liberal model of profes-
sions and its principles and drawbacks; to the
ideology of professionalism; and to the mer-
itocracy and elitism of professional groups
which result from their corporate motivations
and strategic power locations. However, this
liberal model is criticized by reference to
Spanish sources which do not draw their con-
clusions from either sound research or firm
theoretical interpretations. Therefore, the
analysis by Martín-Moreno and de Miguel
lacks not only an appropriate use of ade-
quately constructed models, but an effort to
compare and confront the liberal model of
professions with alternative interpretations.
149
In addition, concepts such as career, prestige,
professional body and class, salaried workers
and bureaucrats are introduced. However,
these concepts are not related to any body of
theory which helps to understand the mean-
ings they are conveying. Instead, these con-
cepts are used as issues/topics around which
some statistics about professions are pre-
sented. It is also the case that the only empir-
ical research in the book is the literature
review its authors produced.
Sociology of the professions since
1982: professionalization and
jurisdictional competition
Studies of and publications about profes-
sions, and the number and kinds of profes-
sions considered, have certainly increased
during this later period. Indeed almost any
occupation was considered to be a profes-
sion: those in, for example, public transporta-
tion (González Carbajal, 1998), agriculture
(Gago, 1996) and many others. While the
quality of these publications was very hetero-
geneous, there were some common features.
In particular, the concept of profession was
neither discussed nor compared with similar
concepts to find out differences; it seemed
that occupation and profession were just
equivalent terms. In this respect, Spanish
studies tended to be similar to those in
France and elsewhere in Europe where the
distinctiveness of professional (in contrast to
occupational) work was seldom emphasized.
It is, then, only in more recent interpretations
that the category of knowledge work – and its
increased significance in modern and global
economies – is gaining in importance.
For a time, the proliferation of so-called
professions, trades and occupations chal-
lenged the sociology of professions. These
occupations were colonized by lay knowl-
edge and common sense which seemed to
threaten the prospect of concept building in
the field. In effect, two different sectors of
research emerged: one devoted to publicizing
and popularizing professions and attracting
clients as well as practitioners, and another
9781412934633-Chap-10 1/10/09 8:45 AM Page 150
150 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
one more concerned with developing a scien-
tific field within the terms of reference of the
social sciences.
Contributions of the first type (Colegio de
Abogados de Barcelona, 1983; Pérez Pulido
and Herrera Morillas, 2003; Tejada and
Rodríguez, 2003) were mostly descriptive,
with no reference to international literature
and based predominantly on the analysis of
survey data (although some qualitative
research techniques such as interviews were
also included) about a specific occupational
or professional group.
In the second type of research literature, the
influence of international concepts and theo-
ries became important and significant. In par-
ticular, professionalization became the key
concept around which researching efforts were
organized and interpreted (Fernández Pérez,
1995; González Moll, 1996; Guillén, 1992;
Llovet and Usieto, 1990; Riera, 1998; Sáez,
1996, 1998a–c, 2003). This concept came to
occupy a core place in discussions and
replaced the term profession as the central
organizing concept or focus in the field. As a
consequence, and in line with developments in
Anglo-American interpretations, the concepts
of occupational closure and jurisdictional com-
petition became prominent in interpretations.
The international work which has had a
strong influence on Spanish sociologists in
the field has been that of Abbott (1988).
However, during this period, an effort to
review the sociological literature connected
to the analysis of professions was carried out
by Múgica (1998, 1999), who makes an inter-
esting link between classical sociological
theory (Weber, Durkheim and Simmel) and
both traditional and emergent professions. In
addition, there has been a shift away from the
liberal concept of profession towards a more
democratic one, in line with developments by
Swedish colleagues (e.g., Bertilsson, 1990)
where professions located within a demo-
cratic society may become agents for the
equitable distribution of goods and resources.
Connected with this, we are also witnessing
efforts to revise professional codes of ethics
(ASEDIE, 1999a, b; Gómez Pantoja, 2001;
Wanjiru, 1995), analysis of issues of autonomy
and competition within professional markets,
and how the control of professionals from gov-
ernment agencies can arise. In addition, in a
context in which the citizen-client-consumer
is mainly bound to market-driven processes,
attention to both information management
(documentalists, librarians, archivists and
journalists) and economic professions has
increased (Alonso and Vázquez, 2000; Canel
et al., 2000; De la Sierra et al., 1981; Guillén,
1989; Moreiro et al., 1995).
The key concepts in Spanish theories and
interpretations of professional groups con-
tinue to be professionalization together with
deprofessionalization and proletarianism
(Fernández Enguita, 1993; Fernández Pérez,
1995; Rodríguez and Guillén, 1992). As a
consequence, interpretations tend to focus on
processes of occupational closure and compe-
tition. Occupational conflicts, particularly in
respect of the power and dominance of some
occupational groups, continue to be empha-
sized. In addition, the clashes of managers and
professionals in service work organizations
have been analyzed – sometimes as a form of
deprofessionalization. The study of profes-
sionalism as a discourse of occupational
change and social control has not yet been
addressed directly. Also, the renewed attention
to the advantages of professionalism as a third
logic (Freidson, 2001) for both clients and
practitioners has not made an impact, though
the influence of Bertilsson (1990) could antic-
ipate and lay the foundations for such an
effect. Thus, in the Spanish sociology of pro-
fessional groups, interpretations based on
occupational competition have mostly
replaced both the emphasis on conflict and an
earlier focus on contribution and cooperation.
Issues to do with occupational change and
control are yet to be systematically included.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
From this brief review of the theoretical
developments in the intellectual field of the
9781412934633-Chap-10 1/10/09 8:45 AM Page 151
SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES OF PROFESSIONS
sociology of professional groups in Anglo-
American, French and Spanish research
literature, the concepts of conflict, competi-
tion and cooperation have all been utilized
and emphasized at different times. Early
functionalist analyses of professionalism
emphasized occupational cooperation as well
as collegial support and managerial and
client trust. Later interpretations of profes-
sionalization as a process of market closure
were accompanied by a change in conceptual
emphasis to occupational conflict, competi-
tion and domination. More recent interpreta-
tions have returned to the concept of
professionalism whereby the occupational
values of cooperation, collegiality, discre-
tion and trust have been perceived to have
distinct advantages for clients as well as
practitioners compared with the logics of the
organization and the market. In addition,
however, recent interpretations have also
included the analysis of professionalism as a
discourse of occupational change and social
control. In these respects, sociologists of pro-
fessional groups have refocused attention on
some of the questions of classical sociology
about mechanisms of social order and social
control. In this framework, the important
research question becomes how and in what
ways the discourse of professionalism is
being used (by states, by employers and
managers, and by some relatively powerful
occupational groups themselves) as an instru-
ment of occupational change (including
resistance to change) and social control. Thus
sociologists of professional groups would
want to add (occupational) control to the
identified key concepts of conflict, competi-
tion and cooperation in sociological theory.
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Competition, Conflict and
Cooperation, and the
Naturalization of Social
Difference in Sport1
The notions of conflict, cooperation and
competition are clearly polysemous, and
have different meanings according to con-
text, culture, values, intellectual trends and
historical periods. The use of these terms
varies as well within the sociology of sport.2
Once we have clarified their meanings, we
intend to show that (1) while competition
represents an important object of study
within the sociology of sport, conflict and
cooperation have received only secondary
attention. Indeed, competition constitutes the
reference point from which cooperation and
conflict have been observed. We also intend
to show (2) that researchers have often
approached competition and conflict through
the perspective afforded by the analysis of
capitalist ideologies. However, other
research has shown competitive sport to have
broader ideological underpinnings that
cannot be reduced to class conflict.
Moreover, (3) competitive sport, particularly
11
Fabien Ohl
through its staging and narration, helps to
naturalize gender and race. Further, (4) com-
petitive sport cannot be considered a homo-
geneous social practice, because of the
variety of ways people relate to competition.
Lastly, (5) while cooperation is not as visible
as competition, research shows that they
must not be viewed as existing in opposition
to each other: the connections between them
are constructed in many different ways from
one culture to another.
COMPETITION, CONFLICT AND
COOPERATION IN SPORT: POINTS OF
REFERENCE
Competition, understood as a confrontation
codified and regulated by accredited organiza-
tions, is a central element in sport. The history,
resources and identities of the most powerful
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156 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
sports organizations (CIO, FIFA, NBA, etc.)
are all closely linked to competition.
A number of studies (Elias and Dunning,
1986; Veyne, 1987) have shown that modern
sports competitions are characterized by the
quest for records and for ever-higher levels of
performance. This veritable ‘cult of perform-
ance’ (Ehrenberg, 1991) owes its success to
the fact that sporting competition embodies a
democratic ideal. Everyone, whatever their
origin or status, is encouraged to surpass
themselves, to flirt with limits and to reinvent
themselves with a new social identity. Given
competition’s central role, it is hardly sur-
prising that, among the keywords in the pub-
lications studied (395 articles drawn from the
Sociological Abstracts3 database), it is cited
far more often than ‘conflict’ or ‘cooperation’
(see Figure 11.1). This is not to say that
what is at stake in these publications is a sys-
tematic analysis of competition and its
significance. Competition is, as it were, a
contingency, whose role is as the benchmark
of sporting activity. As such, it receives
extensive treatment in the media. Whether
one is comparing the media treatment of
men’s and women’s sports, or engaging with
the question of doping, or the iconic figures
of sports heroism, competition invariably
constitutes the backdrop. Studies of the phe-
nomenon of competition itself and of the
consequences of its use as a social model are
rarer. The analysis of a sample of articles
(483) taken from the three main journals
of sports sociology4 both confirms these
tendencies and makes them more complex.
Competition is mentioned nine times as a
48; 12%
136; 34%
Competition Conflict
Figure 11.1 Distribution of articles concerning conflict, cooperation and competition.
keyword, while conflict and cooperation
each receive six mentions (Ohl, 2000b). If
the numbers seem small, the fact is that other
themes (women, 66 mentions, socio-cultural
factors, 52, etc.) also contain analyses in
which conflict, cooperation and, especially,
competition are treated without being refer-
enced as keywords.
A more qualitative examination of schol-
arly work shows that references to conflict in
sport follow two main patterns. On the one
hand, the notion of conflict is associated with
those of confrontation and violence in sport.
Hooliganism, violence on the field and
inflicted injuries and pain are the subject of
numerous studies. On the other hand, and
more obviously, conflict is considered in terms
of class conflict. In this perspective, sport is
seen as a locus for the expression and reaffir-
mation of social class. In both cases, two dom-
inant attitudes influence the analyses. The first
is characterized by a positive, even laudatory,
perception of sport. This position leads to the
proposition that sport constitutes a special
space, which is relatively free from class
conflict and societal violence. In this concep-
tion, sport is a neutral, even apolitical, field;
and it is necessary to struggle against those
evils, supposedly ‘external’, that threaten it.
The second position is articulated around two
types of criticism of sport: on the one hand,
that it constitutes a praxis in which symbolic
violence is expressed and which naturalizes
class differences (Bourdieu, 1980), and, on
the other hand, that sport constitutes an instru-
ment of state ideology serving capitalism and
totalitarian ideologies (Brohm, 1976).
211; 54%
Cooperation
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SOCIAL DIFFERENCE IN SPORT
Cooperation is rarely used as a keyword;
nevertheless it is present in studies, particu-
larly those that focus on sports organizations.
In a rather naïve and idealistic way, sport is
seen as representing an ideal carrier of coop-
eration and friendship between peoples. In
fact, it presupposes ‘external’ cooperation
between competitors – at least they must
agree on the rules or agree to discuss them –
and often ‘internal’ cooperation as well.
In team sports, winning is predicated on
cooperation among the members of a given
team. Furthermore, in individual sports as
well, it often involves the mobilization of a
complex group of professionals (coaches, fit-
ness and psychological trainers, doctors, phys-
iotherapists, etc.) to assist in the production
of the performance.
Aside from G. Lüschen (1970), few
authors have attempted to analyze the notions
of competition, cooperation and conflict
directly in the sociology of sport. For
Lüschen, competition is a safeguard against
conflict,5 inasmuch as the space and time of
competition are stable and well-defined.
Moreover, competition is very predictable
and structured, with specific rules and a judge
whose authority is recognized by competitors
on both sides. This is not necessarily the case
with conflict, whose outcomes are far more
uncertain. For analogous reasons, N. Elias
and E. Dunning (1986) prefer to speak of
‘tension’ rather than ‘conflict’. As a result, the
adjustments made to cooperative undertak-
ings and to the regulation of conflicts – both
of which allow social organizations to come
to agreement about the terms of future inter-
actions – are much less varied within sporting
organizations than elsewhere.
Of course, the history of sport is dotted
with numerous conflicts, mishaps, incidents
of violence and situations of crisis, but only
rarely have these modified the foundations of
any particular game. If it is clear that sport
today is more dependent on the economy and
on the media than at any time in the past, it is
equally true that, compared to other social
organizations which are more vulnerable to
economic competition and to the choices of
157
consumers or voters, the monopoly which
sports organizations enjoy over major com-
petitions affords them considerable autonomy
within their environment. Nevertheless, due
to their high degree of international interde-
pendence, sports organizations have little
local or national autonomy: even locally,
sports organizations enforce international
rules. In addition, the involvement of individ-
uals in sports, which is usually voluntary,
goes hand in hand with processes of social-
ization which legitmate acculturation to the
values of various sports subcultures, and thus
foster cooperation among participants
(Coakley, 2003). In most institutionalized
sport, competitions result in few conflicts
over the basic rules of engagement. This fact
differentiates institutional competitive sport
from traditional games whose rules fluctuate
much more, from sports, which are not
organized, and from new practices whose
definitions are more a matter for negotiation.
Despite this, competitive sport does take a
variety of forms. There are, of course, those
major media events, in which competition is
a contest between people or groups repre-
senting larger social communities (a city,
region, or nation). These competitions differ
from more traditional contests in terms of the
attention given to measurement and to
records (Guttman, 1978). Competition may
also be ‘internal’, played out among mem-
bers of the same team to obtain a leadership
position, or to become the player with the
most recognition. Research into the effects of
‘internal’ competition has provided no clear-cut
results (Lüschen, 1970). It can be beneficial:
by increasing pressure on players, it chal-
lenges them to improve their performance.
But it can also be harmful, as in instances
where it destroys trust among team members
and prevents them from cooperating.
Imagine, for example, the members of a team
of mountain climbers who distrust each other
completely, or who are competing against
each other to reach the summit.
In many sports, competitive success pre-
supposes cooperation, and there have been
numerous inquiries with utilitarian goals.
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158 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
Their objective is to discover the optimal
levels of cooperation and competition in
order to maximize a group’s performance.
Yet sociologists of sport have shown little
interest in this type of approach, preferring to
focus on various forms of cooperation, both
those among members of a team and those
with opponents (which G. Lüschen, 1970,
has designated by the term ‘association’).
This brief discussion of the meanings of
these concepts within the sociology of
sport shows that they are not necessarily con-
tradictory and that they cannot be defined
unequivocally (with, for instance, internal
conflict and competition defined as nega-
tives, and internal cooperation and external
competition as positives). We can also see
from this that competition is a fundamental
element of sports culture. Consequently,
we shall structure our discussion around
competition, while examining how conflict
and cooperation have also been taken into
consideration.
COMPETITION AND CONFLICT IN THE
SOCIOLOGY OF SPORT
Although earlier research into these ques-
tions exists, such as the work of J. Strutt
(1801) in the area of sports history, or that of
T. Veblen (1970 [1899]) on the intersection
of economics and the sociology of sport and
leisure; the sociology of sport only came into
its own as a speciality in the 1960s. Initially
it was not a uniform field; instead it was char-
acterized by a great variety of approaches.
Analyses at the time were often informed by
functionalism, treating competition in sport
as making a positive contribution to social-
ization. The idea was to show that sport,
particularly through competition, offered a
way to prepare for social life.
In fact, international sports activities have
generally been viewed as a means of integra-
tion, of rapprochement between communities
and of the prevention of conflict (Maguire,
1999). For the majority of media and sports
organizations, sports competitions provide
an opportunity to go beyond nationalisms
to promote international cooperation and
conflict regulation. Indeed, some examples
of sport affecting armed conflict exist. For
example, for a few days at the beginning of
September 2005, the Ivory Coast seemed to
forget the war – the separation of the north of
the country, in the hands of rebel forces, and
the south, held by the government, and the
rumours of military coups-d’état – because
of the last phase of the qualifying process for
the 2006 World Cup in football. Of course,
the effects of this truce were very short-lived;
the fighting was subsequently taken up
again.
Despite the existence of these beliefs in an
(Olympic) sporting truce and the existence
of a functionalist approach, however, sport
and competition have most often reinforced
established divisions. The role of sport in the
construction of nationalisms, the develop-
ment of conflicts and violence, as well as in
sexism, has, of course, inspired distrust and
has been subjected to criticism by sociolo-
gists of sport. The contradictions between
official discourses on sports, which like
to insist on the educational outcomes of
competitive sport (good health, lessons in
fair play, equality, etc.), and the darker reali-
ties (inequality of access to sports, health
problems among athletes, widespread
doping, organized cheating in competitions,
ties to the mafia, the role of sport in reinforc-
ing nationalism, etc.) were quickly picked up
on, particularly in Marxist-inspired analyses.
Such analyses of sport were more prevalent
during the 1970s and early 1980s than they
are at present. Sociologists and other sports
analysts felt they should concern themselves
with the power wielded by sports organiza-
tions, the media and big business. Their argu-
ment was intended to demonstrate that sports
culture, and the spectacle offered by compet-
itive sport in particular, constituted, as part of
mass culture, an instrument of indoctrina-
tion. In the transformations which the culture
of sport has undergone, these researchers
perceived a dependence on and a submission
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SOCIAL DIFFERENCE IN SPORT
to the requirements of the mass media
(Gruneau, 1983), and the logic of the capital-
ist system (Brohm, 1976, 1993). Underwritten
as they were by the State, businesses and the
media were seen as being excessively power-
ful, involved both in the control that the capi-
talist system exerted over day-to-day existence
and in the production of nationalisms and vio-
lence in sport.
We understand, then, that during the 1970s
and 1980s, it was conflict – viewed as class
conflict – that dominated the sociology of
sport. References to conflict allowed many
important questions about the use of sport in
society to be raised. The main objective was
to examine how sport was used to maintain,
or even reinforce, power and privilege.
Questions mainly related to the body of the
athlete, alienation and dispossession of the
body, the role of sport in sustaining social
inequalities, the effects of the commercial-
ization of sport on social bonds, and of the
profits made from sport by those who con-
trolled economic power (Coakley, 2003).
Competition, as a system associated with
capitalism, was the most common target of
these analyses. Radical critiques of sport
were more prevalent in Germany, France,
Canada and elsewhere than they were in the
United States (Ohl, 2006). The frequency,
during this period, of references to the notion
of conflict is an indication of the will to
understand the political role of sport.
Widespread representations of the apolitical
nature of sports organizations (Holt, 1992:
146) tended to leave the monopoly of sports
discourses and investments in the hands of
the bourgeoisie. Marxist approaches allowed
scope for opposition to these beliefs. Indeed,
the progressive commercialization of sport
and the greater access enjoyed by the working
class to participation in sports, including in
competitive forms, could not be considered
an acceptable form of working class culture.
Often inspired by the Frankfurt School,
researchers considered sport to be an element
of the cultural and ideological superstructure,
particularly because of the perceived proximity
between sport and the capitalist organization
159
of labour (Rigauer, 1969). Such researchers
underscored the alienating dimensions of the
processes of both the commercialization of
sport (Vinnai, 1970) and the consumption of
sports events (Hoch, 1972). Capitalist ideol-
ogy was accused of alienating popular cul-
ture and leading the working class into
passivity, if not degradation. Competitive
sport, with its obsession with records and
violence, acts as ‘an opiate for the people’
that masks class conflict (Brohm, 1976).
In addition to its references to class conflict,
Marxism also inspired some feminist work
on sport (Laberge, 2004). The contributions
of Theberge (1984) and Hall (1985), for
example, showed how class – and gender –
based differences together have contributed
to sustaining structures of social domination.
COMPETITION AS IDEOLOGY AND
OBSTACLE
Marxist critiques of sport corresponded with
objections by social actors themselves to the
influence exerted by traditional competitive
sports at a time when the sports culture was
diversifying. Forms of competition were
multiplying, and participatory leisure activi-
ties were overtaking formal competition in
terms of numbers of participants. This diver-
sification of practice coincided with greater
accessibility to sports for women. As a result
of this, the question of competition has often
been approached from the angle of gender
inequality. Indeed, sport had plainly con-
structed itself as ‘a fiefdom of virility’ (Elias
and Dunning, 1986) and its history was
marked by considerable segregation.
This highly masculine articulation of sport
is not based on its intrinsic characteristics,
especially not on the bodily constraints that it
imposes. It is not, therefore, a ‘naturally’
determined attribute of sporting praxis.
Rather the initial resistance to the feminiza-
tion of sports was cultural. One need only
observe the inroads women have made,
during the latter part of the twentieth century,
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160 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
into traditionally highly ‘masculine’ sports,
such as football, rugby, ice hockey, boxing,
wrestling or body building, to be convinced
that it is not physical obstacles which prevent
women from participating in such sports
(Mennesson, 2005). It is mainly because pro-
found and enduring upheavals have changed
masculine identity during the twentieth
century that sport was invented and has been
used in this way by men. A. Rauch (2005)
has shown how women have been able to
assume roles reserved, until recently, for
men; how, among others, they have taken
control of their reproduction and their sexual
pleasure. The sense of what it is to be a man
has changed and sport has been instrumental-
ized as an important resource in the celebra-
tion of
masculine identity. In line with their general
aspirations for gender equality, women have
fought throughout the twentieth century for
access to sport and physical education as a
right. Sporting institutions, which have, for
the most part, been exclusively masculine,
have had reservations about women’s partic-
ipation. Gaining access to competitive sport
was a long-term struggle for women, and
took the form of demands for equality of
access without segregation to both sporting
activities and organizations. In the face
of continuing segregation and the difficulty
of limiting masculine control, some feminists
have also advocated the creation of
women-only associations and competitions
(Hargreaves, 1994).
Researchers have shown that competitive
sport has played a role in the difficulties
women faced in gaining access to sport
without being undervalued. Gender order or
hierarchy, feminine submission and mascu-
line hegemony are strongly reinforced by the
images and commentaries in competitive
sport. They reinforce sex roles and a domi-
nant image of masculinity which is con-
structed and promoted almost systematically
by competitive sport (Connell, 1987). For
instance, Garber (1995) shows how the nar-
ratives associated with couples’ ice-skating
routines invariably dramatize heterosexual
romance. It is not merely a pair, but explicitly
‘a couple’ simulating erotic and loving
aspects of a very traditional vision of
male/female relationships. Other work has
shown that media commentaries on the trials
and performances in women’s sports rein-
force stereotypes of women. Thus, MacNeill
(1988) published a critique of how aerobics
performances are staged, arguing that the
staging feeds the commodification of
women’s bodies and works against their
empowerment. In aerobics, both the presen-
tation of self and the staging seem to be
guided by a culture of seduction: the aerobic
movements shape the female body in accor-
dance with male desire. In the face of this
control of competition over the way sport is
practised, some sports feminists like Birrell
and Richter (1987) also question the defini-
tions of sports proposed by researchers in the
social sciences (that of Guttman, 1978, in par-
ticular), because these are predicated largely
on competition and thus present a very mascu-
line and reductionist view of sport. These
authors also show that women can transform
sporting techniques, by playing on goals, seg-
regations, hierarchies, and transform practices
informed by their dependency into resources
to fight against male hegemony.
It has been observed that competitive sport
offers the paramount opportunity to bestow
praise on athletes who are male and, preferably,
white. It extols aggression as a value, and
thus promotes a very traditional and often
homophobic understanding of masculinity,
while contributing to the construction and natu-
ralization of gender (Hargreaves, 1994;
Messner et al., 2000). Researchers have also
underscored that this predominance of tradi-
tional definitions of masculinity, promoted by
the culture of sport and its competition, is not
even unproblematic for men, especially with
regard to the construction of their masculine
identity. Participation in sports that entail
aggressive competition creates relational diffi-
culties for men. Messner and Sabo (1990: 14)
note that men are ‘aware of how competition,
homophobia, and misogyny in the sports
world limited [their] ability to develop truly
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SOCIAL DIFFERENCE IN SPORT
intimate relationships with women and with
other men’.
While much work has been done on
gender, other social categories are also essen-
tialized by competitive sport. This is true of
‘racial’ categories. Without being able to give
a full account of the rich body of work
available on the question, we can point out
that competitive sport fosters a naturalization
of social behaviour in several ways: through
a racialized perception of competitive sport
fed by an ostensibly ‘scientific’ discourse
(scientism) (Coakley, 2003); through the
media which convey racial stereotypes by
recalling clichés about the physical abilities
of black athletes, the psychological qualities
of white athletes and the tactical talents
of Asian athletes (McCarthy and Jones,
1997; Tokiharu Mayeda, 1999); through
sports organizations, clubs in particular,
which promote racial discrimination in
play or in the allocation of positions of
responsibility in professional teams (coach,
administrator, etc.) (Smith and Leonard,
1997).
Other authors have shown how, contrary to
the idealization of competitive sport as an
important factor in the promotion of self-
esteem and personal development, socializa-
tion through competition can result in
isolation. Sparkes (2004: 409) illustrates
such effects of competition well through an
analysis of the case of Lance Armstrong,
who asserted that ‘the things that were
important to people in Plano were becoming
less and less important to me. School and
socializing were second to me now; develop-
ing into a world-class athlete was first’. This
social isolation can, of course, produce
excellent sports results, but existential suffer-
ing too. Economic pressures on competition
limits the autonomy of athletes and empha-
sizes the instability of their social situation.
Certain very visible organizations take
charge of athletes, but the construction of
self-identity becomes problematical, espe-
cially because of the contradictions inherent
in the juxtaposition of the instability of ath-
letes’ social situations and the demands made
161
on them for loyalty and total commitment to
a club (Robidoux, 2001: 191).
THE DIVERSITY OF RELATIONS TO
COMPETITION
Without discounting the problems generated
by competitive sport and its spectacles,
researchers influenced by ‘cultural studies’
approaches or by ethnographic research have
observed a diversification of sports culture.
Their work has attested to a much more com-
plex and varied vision of sports. Many of
these authors, including some feminists,
were inspired by Gramsci (1971). The idea
that dominant groups impose their hegemony
by ideology and political and cultural prac-
tices has been influential in the sociology of
sport. While Gramsci underscores the impo-
sition of norms and processes of reproduc-
tion, he also notes a certain instability and
complexity of practices, particularly owing
to the relative autonomy of grass-roots social
groups.
Similarly, Gruneau (1983) has concluded
that one cannot approach sports as a stable
and uniform social praxis. His neo-Marxist
analyses of sporting practices in Canada is
informed by the work of the Birmingham
School. He uses the concept of hegemony to
analyze the singularities of modern sport and
show that sport is not merely a space for the
maintenance of hegemony: it also constitutes
a space for dispute. In its combination of crit-
ical Marxism and cultural studies, the work
of J. E. Heargreaves (1986) shows that, while
sporting culture may reproduce the social
order, it is not a rigid mechanism. Cultural
hegemony results from the continuous effort
of dominant classes to maintain their pre-
eminence, but this should not let us ignore
the complexity of the social order and of the
processes of dissent by the dominated classes
themselves – their processes of resistance to,
rejection of and re-appropriation of dominant
practices. In these iterations, sport and sport-
ing competition do not boil down to a simple
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162 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
system of rivalry. Sport may also be a mode
of resistance to power and a means of acting
on and modifying practices (Howell, et al.,
2002). Such resistance to hegemony here
forms part of a logic of conflict, principally
of class conflict. Starting from the perspec-
tive of a number of different problematics,
studies in French inspired by the work of
Pierre Bourdieu (1980) have dealt with a vari-
ety of resistance movements to the prevailing
sports orthodoxy, which are frequently sym-
bolized by traditional competitions promoted
by the major international organizations (fed-
erations, CIO, FIFA, etc.) as being the
expressions of class conflict (Pociello, 1981).
Anti-competitions or newly invented forms
of competition – mass road running, mass
sporting events, alternative competitions and
sports, etc. – have often been backed by
groups with greater cultural capital, which
are opposed to sports organizations that they
consider highly conservative.
Another argument used to show that com-
petition cannot be analyzed uniformly is the
claim that there are multiple forms and
diverse processes of consumption which
must be considered. Indeed, the success of
competitive sport goes hand-in-hand with a
vast range of commentaries: journalists, fans,
athletes, TV spectators, and even sociolo-
gists, all participate in this process of making
sense of competitive sport. One tends prima-
rily to retain scores and images, all too often
neglecting the discourses associated with
them. Competitive sports have often been
approached as warlike contests, which
promote nationalism and masculine hege-
mony (Brohm, 1993). The metaphor of war
certainly lends itself to the construction of
narrative, but sports commentary does not
discuss this aspect exclusively. The narra-
tives of sport also provide opportunities to
recount human cooperation and conflict in
the context of competitive contests.
Moreover, texts and commentaries on
sports are hardly idle chatter. The putatively
apolitical nature of sports conceals concepts
that are politically charged (Defrance, 2000)
and the chatter – such as that heard, for
instance, on the hundreds of American
radio stations devoted to sport (talk radio) –
constitutes a space where individuals who
think of themselves as apolitical or unable to
express their political opinions freely (men,
whites, conservative Republicans, members
of the middle and lower social classes; see
Goldberg, 1998) can express very political
points indeed. Even in football (soccer),
often considered the most remarkable enter-
prise of indoctrination and creation of fanati-
cism in sport, uses are more diverse. Indeed,
football has been the object of a plethora of
studies, particularly by European researchers,
because of its unrivalled global reach, its
economic dimension, its impact through the
media and the hyper-abundance of ‘chit-
chat’ that it generates. Football can serve as a
‘metaphor for life in society’ (Bromberger
et al., 1995). It is sport in general, however,
that plays this role. Eco (1985) discerns an
ambiguity in modern competitions. On the
one hand, they serve as a pretext for small
talk and gossip which have the effect of belit-
tling individuals. For, even if sport provides a
reliable resource for social interaction, chat-
ter about sport is shallow both conceptually
and in terms of human relations. On the other
hand, given the extreme complexity of soci-
ety and that the possibility of understanding
it is beyond the reach of (most) individuals,
talk about sporting performances and compe-
titions has become a metaphor for life in
society. In the process, this kind of talk
impoverishes social debate and displaces
political involvement. A real anxiety there-
fore exists about such mass culture. This
should not, however, stop us from noting that
the chit-chat engendered by sports competi-
tions nonetheless facilitates the expression of
a variety of social values (Ohl, 2000a). While
the conditions of everyday life are not con-
ducive to such clearly defined competitions
as those enacted in sport, sporting competi-
tions and their rituals are undeniably symbol-
ically efficient (Birrell, 1981), and contribute
to making sense of daily life by supplying
models of identification. Public interest is
stimulated even more since the narratives of
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SOCIAL DIFFERENCE IN SPORT
sport are grounded in real situations polarized
by elements such as: contests versus acts of
cooperation; important levels of rationalization
(physical movement, training, economy, etc.)
versus the uncertainty of results (a favourite
can lose); a model of equality that seeks to be
exemplary versus injustice (fraud, doping,
etc.). A sociology of entertainment shows us
that even if images and commentaries are
often stereotypical, spectators are not passive
consumers of the media; rather, they extract
meaning on the basis of their own social
experience (Rowe, 1999).
OVERCOMING THE OPPOSITION
BETWEEN COOPERATION AND
COMPETITION
The staging of competition tends to intensify
rivalries and downplay the fact that many
different forms of cooperation can be observed
in the variety of both competitive trials and the
relationships among competitors. If we have
concentrated on the question of competition,
it is because of its importance – both objec-
tive and symbolic – and because so much
of the research in the field of the sociology of
sport is concerned with it. It is difficult to
dissociate the analysis of the concept of
cooperation in sports from competitions
which are often thought of as pretexts for
cooperation and the ritualistic staging of
friendship between cities, nations and peo-
ples. This implicit denial of victory as a final
outcome and the analysis of conflict and ten-
sion as integral habitual elements of contests –
consider the political uses of sports during
the Cold War, for instance – has often been
exposed by sociologists of sport. However,
due to the dominance of references to com-
petition, the notion of cooperation has not
been very successful in the sociology of
sport. Most authors have thought about sport
from the perspective of competition, with
some even asserting that sport is not ‘a coop-
erative venture’ (Heikkala, 1993).6 Moreover,
paying some attention to cooperation does
163
not mean that one must be unaware of the
segregation that occurs in sports, nor of the
inequalities of access and the persistence of
social, sexist and racial stereotypes. Sport’s
apolitical ethic, its notions of the rapproche-
ment of peoples and of neutrality have been a
longstanding smokescreen: systems of social
segregation, particularly by race, class and
gender, have only allowed cooperation across
highly selective social networks. Cooperation
mainly occurs within these groups. Segregation
is amplified by media narratives which essen-
tialize differences. The sporting models broad-
cast through the advertising and marketing of
sports brands generally promote a highly tra-
ditional vision of gender and ‘race’, and
mobilize athletes in the defence of their com-
mercial interests. The values of equality, jus-
tice and cooperation are a fiction in which we
can observe how ethics and justice are instru-
mentalized in support of the financial inter-
ests of brands and sports organizations
(Jackson and Andrews, 2005).
One need only watch competitive sport in
order to conclude that it seems normal that
men and women do not work together in the
production of a performance. Of course, we
may sometimes accept that male trainers can
oversee female teams, but the opposite is
extremely rare. In any case, on the playing
field mixed events are very few and far
between. Nor should one resort to clichés
about childhood as a period of innocence
about confrontation when cooperation in
sports can be encouraged. In a study con-
cerned with heroism in sports, P. Duret
(1993) examined how children between the
ages of 8 and 12 conceived of relations of
opposition and cooperation within competi-
tion. They were asked to comment on a
comic strip about a volleyball match. One
result was that there were fewer (47%) posi-
tive elements of encouragement, which indi-
cate forms of cooperation, than negative
elements of denigration and rivalry (75%).
Another result was that the ‘time spent in
practising a sports activity emerged as a
major source of change in the ratio of
encouragement to jeering’(my translation).
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164 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
A sustained involvement in sport led to a
significant drop in encouragement and to an
increase in denigration: beginners are more
cooperative than experienced players (Duret,
1993: 111). Furthermore, and contrary to
accepted stereotypes, in this study, girls were
no more generous and altruistic than boys.
Still, physical performance is also a social
performance that is predicated on quite
extensive cooperation. For a competition to
take place, there has to be a minimal level of
agreement about the values of the game, the
intrinsic interest of taking part in the sport,
its rules, how a winner is decided, how the
plays are judged, etc. Relations between
participants can never simply be reduced to
conflicts. Sports enthusiasts cooperate to
produce emotion, to create interesting games,
to break a record, and so forth. Sport is even
used as a model of cooperation. To be con-
vinced of this, one need only consider how
frequently advertisements deploy images of
sportsmen and women, or the use of sport in
human resources management in business
and industry. The work of N. Elias and
E. Dunning (1986) has contributed to the analy-
sis of cooperative acts by showing that one
could not set cooperation in opposition to
tension between groups. These two notions
are very closely linked, and neither would be
the same without the other. There is thus a
basic polarity in sports between cooperation
and tension between two teams; cooperation
and competition also exist within each
team, and it would be a mistake to oppose
these processes (Coakley and Dunning, 2000:
16). Cooperation is present in most social
interactions, and sport is but one particular
form of interaction. International sporting
competitions are especially suited to a stag-
ing of cooperation through a kind of ‘dra-
maturgical cooperation’ (Goffman, 1959)
intended for an audience of fans or spectators
who expect to receive from their team a pos-
itive image and a celebration of the values of
being part of a shared community.
Cooperation is also a requisite for playing
games, whether they are competitive or not.
In tennis, for example, cooperation between
partners, on both sides of the net, is essential.
Both must produce a ‘good’ game if it is to
be an enjoyable one. Cooperation cannot be
limited to the activities of members of a team
who are cooperating in the production of a
performance. There is also ‘antagonistic
cooperation’ which Lüschen (1970) calls
‘association’. The very different approach
taken by Bourdieu (1980) offers a comple-
mentary analysis of cooperation on the basis
of the properties of fields and the logics that
structure the field of sports. His notions of
‘habitus’ and field have been used to observe
social rivalries outside sport, which are
expressed through the culture of sport.
Several works (Pociello, 1981) have shown
that conflicts over the definition of sporting
practices reflect the various social positions
of protagonists or masculine domination
(Laberge, 1995). However, within each field,
including that of sport, protagonists cooper-
ate and share the fundamental values of the
field. Within sport, there are shared beliefs
and agreements about the interest and value
of sport, all of which both make possible and
structure cooperation and competition on the
one hand, and reduce the potential impact of
conflict on the other (the game itself is very
rarely questioned in institutional contexts,
but the rules are often negotiated in self-
organized praxes).
Research has also shown that teams and
the media, as well as spectators, cooperate to
produce the sporting performance. If such
spectacles have achieved their present popu-
larity, it is because these actors, drawn from
different fields, all cooperate in their produc-
tion. This is particularly true of agents in the
fields of media, business and politics who
cooperate to produce large-scale sporting
events and who, thus, make up the media
complex of sport (Rowe, 1999).
Sport depends on economic, political and
social configurations, but it is also the active
production of meaning by individuals and
groups (Hargreaves and McDonald, 2002:
52). Individuals also cooperate within sport-
ing groups to challenge dominant sporting
cultures, to create new sports or to renew the
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SOCIAL DIFFERENCE IN SPORT
ways old ones are practiced. Cooperation is
integral to the game but equally to how the
game is conceived (e.g., taking it more or less
seriously, etc.).
THE DIVERSITY OF SOCIAL USES OF
COMPETITION AND COOPERATION
IN SPORTS
Competitive sport has very variable practices
which can celebrate confrontation or cooper-
ation, depending, of course, on culture.
Pepitone (1980), for example, reports that, in
the United States, attitudes toward competi-
tion vary among children, depending on their
social background. Those from underprivi-
leged and rural milieux are less inclined to
become involved in competitive activities.
Other work has shown that culture influences
the social use of competition. Indeed, for the
Navajo Indians whom Allison and Luschen
(1979) have studied, the main goal of compe-
tition is not to win but rather to affirm group
solidarity. In this example, competition even
elicits embarrassment since dominating
one’s adversary and using the body to impose
oneself are not valued in their culture.7
Sports competitions can also serve as the
context for an encounter in which the actors
cooperate for the production of an identity
(see, for example, Francophone identities in
Dallaire and Denis, 2000). Thus competition
is often a pretext for cooperation rather than
a quest for victory.
If the time-honoured saying that ‘playing
is more important than winning’ is little more
than a cliché in major sporting events, it is a
more influential ethic in other sports compe-
titions. Thus in most countries there are
numerous grassroots contests in which the
primary motives for participation are such
factors as social bonding, conviviality or the
pleasure of taking part in a shared activity.
Competition, therefore, is more a pretext
than an end in itself. One need only consider
such contests as the Médoc Marathon, which
takes place in the vineyards of Bordeaux in
165
France, and where the final results are based
on the quality of participants’ fancy dress as
well as their time. The event has more to do
with the party atmosphere than with the race,
and participants can taste the local wines and
produce during the run (Bessy, 2000). The
Internet site of the Médoc Marathon (2006)
states that the event is aimed at ‘those for
whom sport is synonymous with health,
enjoyment and conviviality. Anyone dour,
aggressive or obsessed with performance
should stay away’ (my translation). Thus,
the event positions itself in opposition to
traditional forms of competition, which are
considered to be too combative and not
convivial enough. The Médoc Marathon is
not unusual; indeed there is a wide variety of
sporting events in which the notion of com-
petition is no more than an excuse. The Gay
Games would be a case in point. These are
organized in a number of countries and
attach more importance to cooperation and
social bonding than to rivalry. These and sim-
ilar competitions are not about achieving vic-
tory over others, but rather in relation to
oneself. This is managed by avoiding com-
petitive situations in which there is only one
winner while all the other participants are
losers. The approach explains the refusal of
the games’ organizers to adopt the classic
model of competition, preferring a different
ethos instead. Tom Waddell, a former
Olympian who started the Gay Games,
points out that ‘You don’t win by beating
someone else. We defined winning as doing
your very best. That way, everyone is a
winner’ (Messner, 1994: 126).
While there is intensive media coverage
for competitive events, sport cannot be
reduced exclusively to competition and spec-
tacle. It would be wrong to consider sport as
a homogeneous culture and to focus only on
the dominant and mediatized forms of com-
petitive sport. There is a diversity of sports
cultures which it would be wrong to ignore,
although segregation and sexism in sport fre-
quently result in the devaluation of certain
practices and groups. Sport is also made up
of a set of minority practices, far removed
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166 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
from the major institutions, in which people
meet, create bonds and cooperate without any
consideration of rivalry or competition.
Consider the gatherings of roller skating
enthusiasts, which are common in major cities,
where thousands of people meet without seek-
ing confrontation or ranking.8 In fact these
devotees report that the social bonding is more
important than performance or winning.
Clearly acknowledging the diversity of
sport and of the forms of sporting participa-
tion, as well as giving attention to the acts of
cooperation which they entail, should not
lead to an idealized vision of sport. Work on
globalization (Harvey and Saint-Germain,
1995; Maguire, 1999) and on the loss of
autonomy within the field of sport – with
respect to the media, to marketing and to
the economy (Rowe, 1999; Sugden and
Tomlinson, 1998) – has shown that sporting
spectacles and the way sport is practised
remain very much at the mercy of political
and economic forces.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In conclusion, making an a priori opposition
of the concepts of competition, conflict and
cooperation appears to be problematic. We
have observed the wide variety of social uses
made of sport, including competition, which
can be an occasion for rivalry or a pretext for
cooperation. A gulf exists, however, between
the diversity of sport’s uses and the most
visible forms of sports culture, particularly
the way it is presented in the media. Despite
the many nuances that can be applied, repre-
sentations of sport contribute to the essential-
ization of social difference and give the
impression that competition is the normal,
even the sole form of social relations.
Competitive sport is presented as a demo-
cratic ideal that cancels out social difference
in favour of equality of opportunity
(Erhenberg, 1991). It frequently promotes
the idea of a society where, through work,
activity and determination, every individual
has the same opportunities in social competi-
tion, and each must construct his or her own
success. This is an anti-deterministic view of
the social order.
What is at stake in sport and in its media-
tized competitions is not, therefore, only of
concern to sociologists of sport. The socio-
cultural context that has shaped the processes
of identity construction has favoured these
uses of sport, thereby contributing to an
inflation of practices, images and commen-
taries about competition. The decline of the
‘great narratives’ (Lyotard, 1979) and of class
conflict as points of reference for identity
has upset the symbolic organization of soci-
eties and exacerbated problems associated
with the construction of the self in modernity
(Kaufmann, 2004). Narratives built around
competitive sport are part of a much more
general evolution of social identities, and
contribute to the construction of new modes
of selfhood. The idealization of individuals
and communities who succeed through their
talent is a dramatization of the role of indi-
vidual will and merit, and reinforces the idea
that success does not depend on one’s social
background (Erhenberg, 1991). Thus compe-
tition is not simply a codified contest, but
also a backdrop for social interaction. If we
are not careful, the ‘de-socialization’ and nat-
uralization of performance through the lens
of competitive sport may bolster the idea that
competition, whether against others or one-
self, is the sole legitimate ideology by which
human behaviour may be understood.
NOTES
1 I make a point of thanking Ann Denis and
Devorah Kalekin-Fishman for their help as editors
and as ‘rewriters’ of the English version of the text. It
goes without saying that the text itself is completely
my responsibility.
2 We will deal mainly with Western sociology,
mostly European and North-American, and thus with
Western sport. There has been research in Japan,
China, South Korea, and also in South America and
other countries, but apart from the language diffi-
culty, that work was not available to me.
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SOCIAL DIFFERENCE IN SPORT
3 Articles concerning the sociology of sport pub-
lished before January 2004.
4 The content of three international journals,
International Review for Sociology of Sport (n=157),
the Journal of Sport and Social Issues (n=140) and
the Sociology of Sport Journal (n=186), was analyzed
for the period between 1990 and 1996.
5 This is not about class conflict, but more broadly
any conflict of interests among individuals or groups.
6 ‘Specifically, in top sport, the problem is that
self-interest is justified within the logic of competing;
the rationality of competing does not support the
cooperation needed for the proposed solution’
(Heikkala, 1993).
7 It is doubtless true that the processes of the
globalization of sporting cultures may have had the
effect of reducing these cultural specificities and
imposing a more unified competitive model
(Maguire, 1999).
8 When asked about motivation – ’What does
participating in sport [as a player or spectator] mean
to you?’ – the answers ‘sport is for being with close
friends’ (75%) and ‘sport is for meeting people’
(63%) far exceed the answer ‘sport is about perform-
ance’ (42%) (Mignon and Truchot, 2002).
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Controversies as Sites of
Conflict and Collaboration:
Insights from Sociology of
the Arts
INTRODUCTION
Conflict and collaboration have been depicted
as opposing poles in studies of theoretical and
methodological approaches (Burrell and
Morgan, 1982). In sociology of the arts no
single theoretical framework prevails, but
notions related to these ideas occupy an
important place in the field. The first part of
this chapter presents selected theoretical
frameworks of importance for contemporary
work in sociology of the arts and discusses
them in connection with the themes of this
volume: conflict, competition and coopera-
tion. The second part of the chapter presents
research on art controversies and discusses
how controversies can serve as observation
points for the study of society. Controversies
may be considered sites of conflict (between
groups with divergent values and practices)
and sites of collaboration (in establishing con-
sensus and coordinated action within groups).
12
Jan Marontate
We argue that research about art controver-
sies provides rich insights into values and
practices in art worlds and in society more
generally.
CONFLICT AND COLLABORATION
IN THE FIELD OF SOCIOLOGY OF
THE ARTS
Studying the arts sociologically
There are many ways of studying the arts
sociologically. Research in sociology of the
arts focuses on processes such as artistic pro-
duction (or creation), mediation, and recep-
tion (or consumption) as well as the values and
practices of people, networks and organiza-
tions involved with these processes
(Zolberg, 1990). Increased general interest in
the field has been stimulated by cultural ana-
lysts and policymakers who have identified
9781412934633-Chap-12 1/10/09 8:48 AM Page 171
SITES OF CONFLICT AND COLLABORATION
the arts as a critical component for community
well-being and economic vitality in contempo-
rary society (Florida, 2002). In addition to
drawing on toolkits developed by sociologists,
sociologists of the arts also sometimes engage
with scholarly debates rooted in other fields,
among them: musicology, art history, literary
theory, film studies, cultural studies, political
science, economics, arts management, museol-
ogy, philosophy and aesthetics (Bennett, 2000
[1995]; Clifford, 1998; Levine, 1980; Lopes,
2002; Nochlin, 1973 [1971]).
Some scholars working in humanistic tra-
ditions maintain that art expresses aesthetic
values and is created by exceptional geniuses
who are somehow ‘outside’ of society. As
Vera Zolberg, a founding member of the
sociology of art research committee of the
International Sociological Association,
observed, proponents of these ‘internal’
approaches in the humanities have opposed
the ‘external’ approaches favoured in sociol-
ogy (Zolberg, 1990). Their arguments are
similar to those expressed by historians and
philosophers of science and technology who
reject sociological approaches. But few soci-
ologists of the arts advocate the extreme
forms of relativism and social constructivism
associated with the ‘strong programme’ for
social studies of science (Barnes and Bloor,
1982; Mukerji, 1994). Sociologists of the
arts do, however, differ among themselves
about whether and how to take aesthetics or
specific characteristics of artworks and
artists into account in their research
(Heinich, 2002; Hennion, 2002; Léontsini,
2002; Zolberg, 2005).
How can sociologists make meaningful
statements about patterns in the arts while
recognizing the distinctive qualities or ‘sin-
gularity’ of artworks or artists? Nathalie
Heinich created an insightful, somewhat
irreverent typology of positions adopted by
researchers in reflections on ‘what art does to
sociology’ (1998a). She identified various
stances adopted by researchers, including
anti-reductivist (emphasizing aesthetic quali-
ties of the art), critical, descriptive, pluralist,
relativist and committed stances (akin to
171
‘action research’). She favours a neutral
stance that confronts the apparent incom-
mensurability between the nomothetic bent
of sociology (with its search for patterns and
laws) and the ostensibly ideographic charac-
ter of singularities associated with distinctive
artistic events. Heinich argues that singulari-
ties in the arts, such as the practice of break-
ing with past artistic traditions by innovators
in the contemporary visual arts, may be con-
sidered features of patterns of behaviour
associated with social recognition processes
in contemporary art (Heinich, 1998b, 1998c,
2000). Other sociologists have developed
different theories and methodological strate-
gies that take aesthetics into account in
varied ways. For example, Tia DeNora
(2003) has proposed a way of studying musi-
cal events that embraces the complex inter-
play between characteristics of music and the
meaning-making processes of listeners
who are considered active agents in an inter-
pretative approach she has called ‘music
sociology’. Zolberg (2005) and Jacobs and
Hanrahan (2005) have argued that aesthetic
sensibilities have emerged as a central theme
in scholarly work in the sociology of culture,
and that this ‘aesthetic turn’ in scholarly
research provides new avenues for re-invig-
orating ways of thinking about agency and
structure.
Models of agency adopted by sociologists
of the arts vary, with profound consequences
for research design. Vocabulary varies too.
Specific terms may be selected or avoided in
order to evoke different approaches: for
example ‘arts consumption’ and ‘reception’
imply different views of cognition and
praxis. ‘Consumption’ is often used in arts
management studies by advocates of quanti-
tative methods focused on predicting behav-
iour or organizational analysis, while
‘reception’ is more commonly used in inter-
pretative work that seeks to understand lived
experience and meaning-making. However,
more than one theoretical framework and
methodological approach may be associated
with the exactly the same term. For example
the term ‘production of art’ (as opposed to
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172 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
‘creation’) might signal a positivist orienta-
tion or refer to Pierre Bourdieu’s complex
notions about the ‘field of cultural produc-
tion’ or to Richard Peterson’s ‘production of
culture’ perspective.
Several prominent approaches engage
with notions related to conflict, competition
and cooperation in distinctive ways. Let us
consider the place of conflict and collabora-
tion in selected perspectives that have
marked sociological research on the arts and
informed emerging new perspectives, among
them: Marxist and neo-Marxist approaches,
symbolic interactionism, neo-structuralism
and the ‘production of culture approach’.
Conflict as a basis for social action
and Marxist approaches
Approaches that emphasize conflict as a core
element in social processes related to
research on the arts and culture were popular
with sociologists in Latin America, French-
speaking Canada, Britain, France and else-
where in Europe during the twentieth
century, but have been less important in
English-speaking North American scholar-
ship interested in the arts (Wolff, 1981).
Seminal early work by Marxist sociologists
such as Theodor Adorno, Antonio Gramsci
and Lucien Goldmann conducted during the
middle of the twentieth century continues to
fuel debates about the place of class-based
tastes and aesthetic practices in processes of
domination and resistance. Adorno (1962)
suggested that certain art forms and practices
associated with them stimulate cognitive
process and enhance critical thinking
(i.e., classical music in the Western traditions
he admired) whereas American culture
industries promoted art forms (like popular
music broadcast on radio stations) that can
induce passivity or states of consciousness
that are detrimental to society and human
consciousness. Others disagree with this neg-
ative assessment of the place of popular art
forms in social life, contending that artistic
phenomena catering to working class values
or ‘low brow’ tastes can challenge elitist
hegemony in creative ways (Fiske, 1993).
Studies of art forms associated with popular
culture (like graffiti or country music) some-
times focus on how these forms of artistic
expression express resistance and create new
genres. However, many art forms now asso-
ciated with ‘high culture’ and elites, like
opera or Shakespearean theatre, once catered
to ‘low-brow’ audiences (DiMaggio, 1991;
Levine, 1980). Popular and outsider art forms
have served as resources for artistic avant-
gardes and inspired social movements.
Nonetheless, the appropriation of styles and
content associated with marginalized groups
does not necessarily signal democratization of
the arts (Marcus, 1998; Michaels, 1993 [1987]).
Western high culture institutions and art mar-
kets continue to marginalize many ‘minority’
artists (such as women and non-white males)
and their work (Trajtenberg, 2003).
Relations between artistic genres and taste
are frequently examined from the perspective
of conflict theory, however early critical the-
orists often failed to take into account the
specificity of aesthetic content and tended
not to test their theories with systematic
observation. Sociologists of the arts have
generally moved towards a more nuanced
understanding of art–society relations with a
greater emphasis on empirical testing (Lee
and Peterson, 2004; Lena, 2004).
Nonetheless, the legacy of conflict theory
persists, even in non-Marxist perspectives.
Marxist aesthetics combined with insights
from psychology and semiotics have con-
tributed to new ways of considering ‘substan-
tive content’ (i.e., aesthetic and symbolic
characteristics of artworks) by examining
works as ‘texts’ or codes. Moreover, art
world participants may ‘use’ the arts in
diverse manners that are not necessarily in
conflict, even though the uses are different
(Marontate, 2004a, 2004b). In this connec-
tion scholars have revisited Adorno’s com-
plex oeuvre (DeNora, 2003; Witkin, 1998,
2002). DeNora’s approach integrates the
interplay of the qualities of music, con-
sciousness and agency in studies of how
people engage with music in everyday life,
passively and actively, in ways that make
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SITES OF CONFLICT AND COLLABORATION
music-listening a technology of the self
adding new dimensions to Adorno’s ideas
about reception (DeNora, 2000). Others pro-
pose more macroscopic approaches that fea-
ture conflict and cooperation in a national or
world systems perspectives (Luhmann, 2000;
Trajtenberg, 2002, 2005).
Art worlds as sites of collaboration
Art worlds are also studied as sites of collab-
oration. Note here the choice of the term
‘collaboration’ instead of ‘cooperation’.
Collaboration means working together and
implies active agency. ‘Cooperation’ is a
form of collaboration but it is more restric-
tive since it implies working together for a
specific shared goal of common interest.
Instances of cooperation in this narrower
sense do occur in the arts (for example, in
artists’ collectives, professional associations
or special interest groups); however, the more
general notion of ‘working together’ implied
by the term ‘collaboration’ seems better suited
to much sociological analysis of the arts.
Howard Becker proposed a highly influen-
tial model of the social organization of the arts
in what he termed ‘art worlds’. His work is
rooted in interpretative sociology, notably in
symbolic interactionism, but has been deeply
marked by his own creative experiences in his
work as a jazz musician (Becker, 1982, 2005).
In his model participants in art worlds develop
creative relationships through shared conven-
tions, consensus and collaboration. ‘Art
worlds’ include various types of participants,
some with roles outside occupational cate-
gories traditionally associated with the arts
(for example, camera equipment manufactur-
ers). Art worlds differ according to the form
of collaboration and level of integration of
artists. Participants may be involved with more
than one art world at a time, for example a
musician in a symphony orchestra might also
perform with a band in jazz clubs. People may
participate in more than one way. An art con-
servator working in a museum may serve as an
arts administrator for an artists’ cooperative. A
jazz musician may also play Italian popular
173
music or Yiddish tunes at weddings or Bar
Mitzvah celebrations.
Becker identified four main types of artists
in terms of their degree of integration with a
‘system’ of aesthetic values and practices:
integrated professionals (who work within
the conventions of their art world in highly
structured organizational frameworks, like
classical musicians in symphonies), maver-
icks (who know the rules of the game but
choose not to follow them), folk artists (who
work in genres with shared traditions and
utilitarian uses, like quilt-makers) and naïve
artists. Becker’s model is widely considered
to be more egalitarian than Pierre Bourdieu’s
‘high culture model’, in part because Becker
acknowledges the work of individuals not
always associated with art making (such as
technicians), and in part because he recog-
nizes different types of art worlds as distinct
entities rather than as lesser or imperfect
forms of artistic practice. However, Becker’s
model is not wholly egalitarian, since it ranks
types of art worlds in comparison with highly
structured elites.
The high culture model as an arena
for competition
Sociologists of the arts are not only con-
cerned with direct participants in artistic cre-
ation. Publics, fans, connoisseurs and patrons
have played crucial roles in structuring both
popular and high culture art forms
(Martorella, 1995). Arts organizations shape
(but are influenced by) social boundaries and
practices. Participants in dissemination
processes like critics, gallery owners and
impresarios may serve as gatekeepers in
processes that define and legitimate practices
in conflicts and in collaborative endeavours
(Balfe, 1993; Crane, 1987; Fournier and Roy-
Valex, 2002; Moulin, 1987; Shrum, 1996).
In the so-called ‘high culture model’ agents
or actors compete for power and position in a
field with a hierarchical structure (Bourdieu,
1993). Organizational structures of arts insti-
tutions and patterns of patronage are often
intimately connected to status distinctions
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174 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
and power relations. Formal organizations
may provide either an arena for conflict and
competition among agents vying for position
in an artistic field or a milieu for collabora-
tion (DiMaggio, 1986; Marontate, 2005).
Paul DiMaggio (1992) studied how the use of
not-for-profit organizational models in theatre,
opera and the dance in the United States
promoted institutional change and trans-
formed status hierarchies, creating new
elites. Although the high culture model is
associated with elite tastes and learned cul-
ture, it is also used in research about the per-
sistence of inequalities and the failure of
democratization efforts to erase class bound-
aries. Elite participants in arts organizations
have sometimes tried to balance prestige with
diversity and accessibility (Ostrower, 2002).
In research on the social production (and
reproduction) of culture Pierre Bourdieu
developed core concepts associated with the
high culture model that are now used by many
sociologists of the arts (sometimes rather
indiscriminately), among them, cultural capi-
tal, habitus and the notion of the creation of
belief in the value of symbolic goods
(Bourdieu, 1984, 1993, 1996; Bourdieu et al.,
1991/1969). His work on taste as class-based
predilections and a process distinction met
with opposition from some sociologists.
For example, Antoine Hennion (2001) rejects
the idea of ‘objective’ distance and insists on
understanding the meaning-making practices
of people involved with the arts in a version
of actor-network theory applied to the study
of taste as a reflexive performative mediation
practice. Hennion proposes that a sort of
collaboration occurs between artworks and
art-lovers (who he calls ‘amateurs’) in a
co-production of aesthetic experience and
aesthetic object.
The production of culture
perspective and other new
approaches
Richard Peterson’s ‘production of culture per-
spective’ has different origins than Bourdieu’s
‘field of cultural production’ despite similar-
ities in their names (Peterson, 1976). It is
rooted in American empiricism and main-
tains that the symbolic content of culture is
shaped by the context in which it is produced
and disseminated. The perspective encour-
ages systematic observation. For example,
Peterson observed that collaboration among
music promoters, musicians and fans was
crucial for the invention of conventions that
came to define country music, but competi-
tion and conflicts were factors in change and
innovation (Peterson, 1997). His work has
been influential on research about the interplay
of the arts, media and informally-produced
culture enhancing understanding of artistic
‘scenes’ as social phenomena (Alexander,
2003; DiMaggio, 2000; Dowd, 2002).
Other recent research is founded on quite
different ontological and epistemological
assumptions. Sociological approaches to the
study of aesthetic phenomena as singularities
have been developed in connection with
research on the working lives of arts pro-
fessionals (Heinich, 1993, 1998b, 1998c;
Marontate, 2001). The very notion of ‘career’ in
the arts is marked by tensions between the idea
that career profiles develop in a predictable
pattern with routine stages and systems of
artistic recognition premised on originality and
unique practices that distinguish new art from
non-art and avant-garde artists from their pred-
ecessors (Heinich, 1998c). The need to be rec-
ognized as singular has became a pattern in
contemporary artistic careers.
Pierre-Michel Menger (1989, 1999) pro-
posed that artists develop careers through
a series of strategic choices and a succession
of jobs. Work may be difficult to distinguish
from training opportunities. Menger observed
that performing artists confront the precari-
ousness of the demand for their services by
developing strategies for rational diversifica-
tion analogous to the sort of risk manage-
ment practiced by managers of investment
portfolios. Rather than ‘putting all their eggs
in one basket’ they develop networks of clients
and employers to maximize their chances of
finding remuneration at any given moment.
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SITES OF CONFLICT AND COLLABORATION
Artists do not always make ‘rational’ choices
from an economic standpoint. Given a choice
between roles, actors did not always choose
the highest paid position but the one with the
best chance of enhancing future opportunities
(for example choosing roles in prestigious
performance venues).
Research on artistic labour markets sug-
gests that patterns observed in the arts may
be useful for anticipating broader trends rel-
evant for the future of work (Menger, 2003).
Work in the arts is characterized by rapidly
changing tastes, strong seasonal variations,
irregular remuneration and multiple con-
comitant part-time employment. The trajec-
tories of artists’ working lives, marked with
insecurity and competition, may provide
insights into twenty-first century patterns of
working lives in the new economy in other
fields (Marontate, 2002).
Studies of outsider art and non-Western art
forms suggest that art worlds may be diversi-
fying but symbolic and material boundaries
maintain inequalities in access to resources
and recognition (Griswold, 2000; Kasfir,
1999; Zolberg and Cherbo, 1997). Only a
select coterie of artists attains national and
international recognition. Controversial art
may be suppressed even destroyed because it
commemorates events that powerful groups
prefer to forget or expresses values that
offend (Lubar, 1996; Roth and Sala, 1998;
Tota, 2001, 2002; Wagner-Pacifici and
Schwartz, 1998).
ART CONTROVERSIES AS
OBSERVATION POINTS FOR
STUDYING SOCIETY
Studying cases in which art is rejected,
attacked, destroyed or neglected can help us
understand the multiple meanings of art and
provide insights into more general sociologi-
cal issues raised by the notions of conflict,
competition and cooperation (Marontate,
1998, 1999). Art controversies do not simply
constitute a paradigmatic case of social conflict
175
but conflict is always present. Controversies
also provide a rallying point for collabo-
ration among like-minded participants.
Methodologically, art controversies provide
opportunities for observing how antagonists
make sense of their world and actively work
to shape society. Controversies may be seen
as social events in which antagonists express
themselves about ‘usual’ patterns, communi-
cate their expectations by highlighting rules
they believe have been broken and justify
their positions (Boltanski and Thévenot,
1991; Canguilhem, 1975; Gamboni, 1997).
REJECTION AND DESTRUCTION OF
ART AS FORMS OF RECEPTION
Dario Gamboni (1997) observed that the
rejection and destruction of art is not a new
phenomenon. ‘Vandalism’ was named after
violent fifth century invaders who destroyed
imperial monuments. ‘Iconoclasm’ was a
method to enforce the official Byzantine doc-
trine devoted to eliminating the worship of
graven images. Ironically ‘iconoclasm’ is
often used in a way which gives cultural
legitimacy to destructive acts since it
acknowledges that the people who damage or
destroy artworks do so consciously. It also
underlines the power of artistic representa-
tions in society; otherwise there would be no
need to destroy them. On the other hand
‘vandalism’ commonly refers to senseless
acts, committed without intention. Vandals
are seen as ignorant people unaware of the
values embodied in works they destroy. Yet,
even acts that may appear gratuitous can
engender a sort of dialogue providing
insights into the interplay of material and
symbolic culture. In Gamboni’s words, ‘works
of art are rarely – though not never – meant to
be degraded or destroyed. It follows that
attacks generally represent a break in the
intended communication (pattern) or a depar-
ture from the “normal” attitudes and modes of
communication ...’ (Gamboni, 1997: 11). Thus,
acts of aggression are acts of communication,
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176 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
too, expressing different attitudes about
morality, ethics, politics and aesthetics.
Gamboni’s research in this area began with
a study of a 1980 outdoor exhibition of
modern sculpture in Bienne, Switzerland in
which over half the works were willfully
damaged or destroyed. This was surprising
because outdoor art exhibitions had been
held there for 25 years without incident.
There were no simple explanations. Gamboni
(1983) examined events leading up to the
show and the context. Publicized conflicts
among the exhibition’s organizers, and
reports of large expenditures in this town of
skilled labourers badly hit by rising unem-
ployment had set the stage for public outrage.
The exhibition was installed in a public park
making regular park users (largely working
class men) a captive audience and intruding
on their leisure space. Purchase of a hard-to-
find exhibition catalogue was necessary for
informed viewing. Gamboni found many dif-
ferent explanations for the rejection of spe-
cific works. For example, works made of
expensive materials displaying technical
skills valued in industry suffered less damage
than pieces in less conventional materials,
perhaps due to the anger of unemployed fac-
tory workers at the use of public funds to
subsidize what they saw as poor craftsman-
ship. Nude sculptures (which are common-
place in art museums) were surprising and
offensive to some members of the general
public.
One case attracted considerable publicity:
the destruction of an installation by Gerald
Minkoff called ‘Video Piece’ by the town’s
chief gardener who was taken to court. The
work consisted of painted television sets that
had been partly buried in a design that
spelled out in Braille the equivalent of
‘I see’. The pattern could only be perceived
from an aerial view making the work inac-
cessible to the blind (or sighted viewers with-
out an airplane and knowledge of Braille).
The gardener claimed he had mistaken the
work for garbage. When ordered by the judge to
pay the artist damages, the gardener countered
with a newspaper advertisement asking for
donations of old T.V. sets with the idea of
replacing the work himself, heaping insult
onto injury from the point of view of the
artist by implying that anyone could remake
this work of art.
Transgression and the ‘rules of the
game’ in contemporary art
Art controversies are forms of social interac-
tion frequently associated with ‘successful’
recent art. Nathalie Heinich (1998c) main-
tains that controversies are intrinsic features
of recognition processes in the field of the
contemporary visual arts. She identified a
three-fold process that is reminiscent of a
French children’s game called ‘the hot hand’.
The game involves keeping one’s hand on
top of others in a frantic rules-oriented game
of transgression (of norms by artists), rejec-
tion (of works by publics) and integration (of
new art into artistic canons by peers and gate-
keepers). New art deliberately challenges
boundaries between good taste and bad,
between art and non-art, fomenting conflict
between uninitiated publics and art-world
insiders. Consequently, new forms of con-
temporary art have become increasingly
provocative as avant-gardes compete and art
professionals collaborate in innovation
processes that become difficult for publics
to understand. Heinich maintains that indif-
ference is purgatory for contemporary artists.
Negative public reactions are preferable
to indifference for artistic careers. Successful
contemporary art generates social conflict
but it must receive critical acclaim from art
professionals and thus entails collaboration
too (to establish consensus in art worlds).
As well as the ‘game’ of transgression,
rejection and assimilation produces an esca-
lating sense of alienation in the general
public because many tastes and values
expressed in contemporary art worlds are
irreconcilable with widely-held standards in
civil society.
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SITES OF CONFLICT AND COLLABORATION
Controversy as a forum for public
debates about civil society: a case
study
Art controversies and the rejection of art by
diverse publics inform us about more general
social issues too (Balfe, 1993; Halle, 2002;
Heinich, 1998b; Tota, 1997). For example, a
conflict in the United Kingdom over the
award of the prestigious Turner Prize pro-
vided a forum for debates that focused not
only on art world politics and aesthetics, but
also on social issues such as housing short-
ages, racism and poverty while garnering
much publicity for participants (Button,
1999; Marontate, 1998). The Turner Prize,
with a purse of £20,000, is awarded annually
to a British artist under 50 years old for the
‘best artistic production’ in the year. Four
finalists exhibit their work at the prestigious
Tate Britain art gallery and become the topic
of public debates. Demonstrators often stage
protests about the choices, voicing objections
on the basis of aesthetics, politics or moral-
ity, depending on the dominant discourse of
the season. Since 1993, the Turner Prize
has attracted much attention, thanks in part
to another prize known as the ‘X Prize’
offered by the K Foundation in that year
(K Foundation, 1993a).
The K Foundation was formed by two
musicians, Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond,
members of a music group known then as
‘KLF’ (Kopyright Liberation Front). These
musicians, who had made a fortune with
techno-rave music, had outraged the music
industry on the occasion of a music awards
ceremony (the Brit Awards) that was tele-
vised live. They had been nominated for a
relatively calm chill music album. For their
performance at the Brit Awards gala, the
musicians organized a raucous battle of the
bands. Drummond pointed a machine gun at
the audience and fired a round of blanks,
embarrassing music industry representatives
who lost face by ducking while on camera.
They further dismayed gala participants
by putting a dead sheep in the foyer of the
177
theatre, a gesture that was all the more com-
bative because the musicians they shared the
stage with that night were militant vegetarians.
When the K Foundation offered the X
Prize, worth £40 000 (twice the value of the
Turner Prize) for the worst work of art done
by a British artists in 1993, observers first
thought the offer was a hoax (Anonymous,
1993b, 1993c). The musicians launched an
expensive publicity campaign that ridiculed
the selection processes of prize competitions
and poked fun at contemporary art
(K Foundation, 1993b). One ad mimicked a
grant application form but featured questions
like ‘Numerous non-short listed artists
believe they deserve the K Foundation Award
prize money. Are they thus implying they
deserve the £40 000 cash more than Amnesty
International, Oxfam, Shelter ... or Battersea
Dogs Home?’ (K Foundation, 1993c). Other
ads had already indicated that the finalists for
the X Prize competition had already been
chosen, and were the same as the Turner
prize finalists. One invited the public to vote,
presenting a ballot under the heading ‘Let the
People Choose’, with a message at the
bottom of the ballot mocking political slo-
gans used in election campaigns: ‘Remember
that democracy is a gift, not a birthright’
(K Foundation, 1993b). The musicians paid
for television commercials during the broad-
cast of the Turner Prize Awards, promising to
‘transform art history forever’. Estimates of
the total cost to the musicians of the prize,
advertisements and related activities went as
high as £200,000 (Cooper, 1993; Lister,
1993).
A young artist named Rachel Whiteread
won both prizes, for the best and the worst in
British art that year. She was judged on all of
her artistic production in 1993, but particular
attention was paid to a life-sized outdoor
sculpture called ‘House’ that was made
from poured concrete impressions of the
interior of a Victorian home. The home was
demolished and she reassembled the concrete
slabs on the site turning the impressions of
the inside of the building into outside walls.
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178 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
This expensive project was sponsored by
Artangel, a non-profit foundation which
solicits funds from the private sector for
contemporary art. The principal corporate
patrons were a brewery and a construction
company, but the project was also partly sub-
sidized by public funds.
Issues related to the site, financing and
iconography of the work were complex and
inspired contradictory readings. Even
Whiteread’s choice of materials – poured
concrete – was significant since it made ref-
erence to the practice of British proprietors
of blocking toilets in abandoned houses as a
way of discouraging homeless squatters.
Some saw this as an expression of solidarity
with the homeless. However, the work was
located on the site of a planned subsidized
housing development and its presence there
was delaying the construction of 67 homes for
people with low incomes. On 23 November
1993 (one month after completion of the work
and the very day the Turner prize jury
announced its decision), city councillors
voted for the demolition of the sculpture in
order to allow the construction project to pro-
ceed as planned (Ellison and Donegan,
1993). A professional photographer had been
hired to document each stage in the construc-
tion and these images were featured in a lim-
ited edition publication but Whiteread had
deliberately avoided publicity before the
installation was finished in order to maxi-
mize the impact of the completed work
(Lingwood, 1995). After the unveiling a
growing crowd of visitors came to see the
work before it was demolished.
Whiteread issued a statement declaring
that she would refuse the X Prize. In response,
the K Foundation threatened to burn the
money at its own award ceremony if she
didn’t accept it. They invited journalists from
music magazines and the popular press to an
award ceremony held three weeks after the
Turner Prize awards (Cooper, 1993). Each
guest was given a stack of bank notes and
asked to nail it to a wooden panel in an elab-
orate frame. The finished ‘picture’ made of
prize money was photographed before being
veiled and transported to the entrance of the
Tate Gallery in a procession of limousines
escorted by armoured tanks. Whiteread
arrived three minutes late for the scheduled
presentation ceremony and accepted the
money.
Denounced for staging a vulgar publicity
stunt, the musicians responded with the pub-
lication of a catalogue of their own works of
art, all made of banknotes nailed to framed
panels which they offered for sale at half the
face value of the materials. For £5000 a
collector could buy the artwork called ‘Ten
Thousand’ (made with £10,000 worth of
banknotes) and make an immediate profit of
£5000 by destroying the artwork and using
the currency. Defenders insisted this expen-
diture confirmed the musicians’ genuine
commitment to offering a critique of contem-
porary art worlds. (The Crown prosecuted
them for defacing currency.)
Dozens of articles about the events and the
artwork were written by journalists, critics
and art historians. Some found references to
feminism and the body in the impressions of
the interior walls. Others likened the work to
major monuments of public art and architec-
ture. Although art critics were on the whole
delighted with the work, the general public
and mainstream press reacted with shock,
amusement and disdain (Farson, 1993).
Cartoons and letters to the editors published
in newspapers ridiculed the artists’ tech-
niques, questioning their aesthetic worth and
symbolism (Graham-Dixon, 1993). Much
criticism centred on doubts about claims that
the sculpture expressed solidarity with home-
less people, a sentiment taken up in a cartoon
showing squatters trapped in poured concrete
(Williams, 1993). The cost of the project left
others perplexed. Why spend all this money
on an uninhabitable concrete mould instead
of building a real house (Anonymous,
1993d)? There were also debates about the
conditions for the construction of the work.
The house was the last building situated in an
historic community, but the former owner
was an elderly man who didn’t want to leave
and had refused to sell it to the construction
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SITES OF CONFLICT AND COLLABORATION
company for demolition. What were the
motives of the people who managed to con-
vince him to leave his home expecting that an
artist would memorialize his residence?
Protests took many forms, including acts of
vandalism – like splashed paint and graffiti.
One hand-scrawled message read ‘homes for
all—black and white’. Art world insiders
claimed the controversy only served to
consolidate evidence of the pertinence of the
artist’s work. In the words of one jury
member ‘Talent at the highest level attracts
derision’ (Ellison and Donegan, 1993).
Criticisms of the musicians continued. One
cartoon depicted them as ‘art terrorists’
dressed as masked bandits holding the X Prize
money (Anonymous, 1993a). The musicians
portrayed themselves as iconoclasts, and pre-
sented their gesture as an assault against hyp-
ocritical and unfair elites, a rebellion against
the very institution of prize competitions and
a statement about the lack of opportunities for
young artists and young people in general, tar-
gets that appealed to the adolescent fans of
their techno-music.
Questions about the sincerity of the musi-
cians and the artist were irrelevant to many art
world insiders because, as Heinich observed,
in some art worlds controversy and rejection
by uninitiated publics are common, at least for
successful artists. The musicians had chal-
lenged conventions in the world of popular
music too at their own award ceremony
by expressing disdain for the people who hon-
oured them and then later generated conflict
with their injurious characterization of
Whiteread’s work as the worst of the year. But
respect for tradition is an expectation that
applies to ordinary citizens, not to artists. The
careers of the artist and many key figures in the
controversy flourished. The musicians who
funded the X Prize experienced financial and
legal problems but soon resumed work as per-
forming artists. The story of the reception and
destruction of Whiteread’s work illustrates
both how controversy and singular events con-
tribute to recognition processes within art
worlds and provide opportunities for public
debates about broader issues in civil society.
179
Art controversies and the new
dynamics of culture, money
and power
Not-for-profit cultural institutions, like
publicly-funded museums, have complex
relations with wealthy patrons. Many have
put in place arms-length governance policies
that make arts professionals nominally
responsible for aesthetic decisions, in order
to reduce the influence of financiers or fund-
ing agencies and to enhance their credibility
as cultural authorities (DiMaggio, 1991,
2000; Ostrower, 2002). However, recent art
controversies provide evidence that eco-
nomic forces have considerable power in art
worlds, especially in arts institutions.
In the context of the controversy in con-
nection with the 1993 Turner and X Prizes
the amount of money involved heightened
public interest in the musicians who awarded
the X Prize and in the artist who won both
prizes. The musicians had spent a small for-
tune. Their advertisements and public state-
ments suggested that hypocrites make money
more important than artistic values, but by
awarding their prize for the worst in British
art they showed that an artist who creates art-
work many people consider worthless can
make a great deal of money. The young artist
had, after all, won £60,000 and benefited
from considerable funds to create an artwork
that was destroyed. This outraged the former
owner of the site the artist used. According to
one observer:
Mr. Gale [the former owner] couldn’t get his head
around the idea that art money is funny money (as
the K Foundation, in their confusion, were soon to
prove). You don’t buy a new flat with this stuff. It’s
theoretical, an equation that has to be balanced.
It’s more like a signature or hallmark. Money is the
guarantee of seriousness.… If you’re already
famous, then it’s the material you work with, your
medium. If you’re unknown and you cop an unex-
pected bundle from the Saatchi’s you are pro-
moted directly into the heavy paper surveys. But
you can’t spend this kind of cash. That would be
like squeezing the juice from one of Zurbaran’s
lemons. Contemporary art is about credit; the
metamorphosis of money into power (Sinclair,
1993 reprinted in Lingwood, 1995: 22).
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180 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
Debates about the place of money in art
worlds and the rights of those who contribute
funds to control cultural institutions were
central in another art controversy related to
an exhibition called the ‘Sensation Show’ at
the Brooklyn Museum in 1999–2000. The
NY City Mayor Rudy Giuliani condemned
the exhibition – sight unseen – and tried to
punish the museum by withdrawing city
funding. Giuliani claimed the show offended
the public’s moral standards in matters of
religion and sexuality. The mayor was
derided in the press for his ignorance
(embodied in his refusal to view the show)
and accused of racism and self-serving polit-
ical motives (in courting publicity to appeal
to conservative voters). Giuliani’s wrath cen-
tered on Christopher Ofili’s use of elephant
dung and images of genitalia from a porno-
graphic magazine in a mixed media depiction
of a black Virgin Mary done in a faux-naïve
style. (Ofili is a Catholic of African heritage.)
Commentators also impugned the motives of
the show’s curators, the museum, other
artists, and the show’s patron, Charles
Saatchi, who owned many of the works. In
addition to press coverage there was also sys-
tematic empirical research conducted on this
case. Sociologist David Halle (2002) studied
public attitudes towards censorship through
interviews with visitors leaving the exhibi-
tion and a telephone survey. He found
that people did not support censorship in
‘bounded’ institutions (that is, museums with
entrance fees) as opposed to art in freely-
accessible public spaces.
As we have seen, art world reputations that
profit from controversies do so by converting
notoriety into cultural capital and often (not
incidentally) material capital. In the case of
the ‘Sensation’ controversy, the museum, the
artists and the collector who owned the
works did just that. The museum was
mobbed with visitors. Its director publicly
defended the involvement of the collector
with aesthetic decisions (the traditional realm
of curators) in a statement posted on the
museum’s website despite criticism that this
private collector was using the museum to
increase the market value of his art collection.
(Christie’s auction house handled the subse-
quent sale of some of the collection in 2000.)
Had financial interests usurped the place of
aesthetics as a gatekeeping principle? This
open embrace of the authority of funding
sources with economic interests constitutes a
significant break with American traditions of
art philanthropy and not-for-profit models of
elite involvement in museums.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
As we have observed, there is no single domi-
nant theory or methodological stance in sociol-
ogy of the arts but conflict, competition and
collaboration have marked many approaches.
Hierarchical models of the field of artistic pro-
duction and reception that emphasize conflict
and power relations have guided much
research about organizational structures and
recognition processes. Perspectives with dif-
ferent epistemological roots emphasize the
place of collaboration and shared conventions
in art worlds, particularly in work on creative
processes and mediation. Interestingly, the
idea of competition in sociology of the arts is
associated with both collaboration and con-
flict, with inclusion and exclusion. In competi-
tion for recognition, artists must be recognized
as artists to be included in processes that carry
with them the risk of exclusion and that can
engender controversy.
Art controversies may bring notoriety to
contemporary artists, but their meanings in
art worlds and in general society differ.
Controversies do not only involve art world
subcultures or sectarian interest groups.
Strong negative reactions demonstrate the
power of art to stimulate discourse about
issues that are often neglected in public dis-
course (Lavine, 1992). Controversies provide
opportunities for the peaceful airing of
opinions and differences in civil society,
promoting solidarity among like-minded par-
ticipants, and have the potential to inspire
cultural change but conflict is always present.
9781412934633-Chap-12 1/10/09 8:48 AM Page 181
SITES OF CONFLICT AND COLLABORATION
Studies of art controversies provide insights
that are relevant for other research areas in
sociology, among them: sociology of organi-
zations, sociology of work and occupations,
research methodology, sociological theory and
political sociology. For example, they provide
opportunities for understanding disputes in
other areas. In research about forms of justifi-
cations used by opponents with irreconcilable
differences in various types of disputes, Luc
Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (1991) pro-
posed a typology of appeals to higher author-
ity used to justify positions (such as political
philosophies of civic worth or market worth).
The trick, of course, for competitors is to
arrange the hierarchy of justice in such a way
that one’s own set of criteria prevails.
Justifications based on the market place are
only one element in public debates about
art but economic issues often surface in con-
troversies. Boltanski and Chiapello (1999)
developed a theory about the ‘new spirit of
capitalism’ that identified changing attitudes
towards money in civil society. They adopt a
minimalist notion of capitalism as a cycle of
conversion of capital into goods and then back
into capital resulting in an unlimited accumu-
lation of wealth premised on consumption.
This neo-capitalist ideology justifies commit-
ment to economic goals and profit-making
becomes a moral imperative. Profit-making is
considered ‘desirable, interesting, exciting,
innovative or meritorious’ with dire conse-
quences for the poor and for public welfare
more generally (Chiapello, 1999: 95). Social
inequalities escalate, inducing a generalized
political nihilism.
If we reconsider the case studies of contro-
versies presented in this chapter from this
perspective, acceptance of the open interven-
tion of economic forces in art worlds may be
seen as a manifestation of neo-capitalist logic
with profound implications for the study of
broader socio-political trends. Sociological
research on art controversies has the poten-
tial to provide insights into how groups nego-
tiate authority and arrive at a sense of justice
in a changing world, helping us to better
understand ways in which conflicts and
181
collaborations shape and are shaped by the
new dynamics of art, money and power in
contemporary society.
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9781412934633-Chap-13 1/10/09 8:49 AM Page 185
Rethinking the Sociology
of Childhood: Conflict,
Competition and
Cooperation in
Children’s Lives
Robert van Krieken and Doris Bühler-Niederberger
INTRODUCTION – THE SOCIAL
CONSTRUCTION OF CHILDHOOD
In the US political soap opera, The West
Wing, there is an episode where a group of
middle-school children calling themselves
the ‘Future Leaders for Democracy’ visit the
White House with a view to arguing for low-
ering the voting age. In the ensuing discus-
sion, the point is made that the exclusion
of children from voting has the effect of
uncoupling decision-making from decision-
consequence bearing. The argument was that
it seems problematic that those who have to
live with the future outcomes of today’s
debates and arguments should be denied any
voice in those public discussions. As the
young man advocating the lowering of the
voting age, Cody, puts it: ‘We’re children, and
13
that in itself shouldn’t render us meaningless.
But in this society, we are meaningless,
because we’re powerless. We have no voice.’1
This is not the first time that the question of
children’s ‘voice’ has been addressed in
the public sphere, but over the course of the
twentieth century and into the twenty-first,
some important shifts have taken place in the
way children and childhood are understood,
both in broader public debate and in the
social sciences.2
The background to our analysis of these
shifts is the three-fold distinction between
the concepts competition, conflict and coop-
eration. The roots of this conceptual triad lie in
Park and Burgess’ (1969 [1921]) outline of
what they saw as four central social processes:
competition, conflict, accommodation, and assim-
ilation. For Park and Burgess, competition
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186 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
was the most elementary and universal char-
acteristic of all social interaction, understood
as the struggle for existence in a world of lim-
ited resources. When humans become con-
scious of competitive dynamics and organize
their social relations accordingly, these
processes need another term, conflict, to cap-
ture the various social forms which subse-
quently emerge, such as status, hierarchy,
subordination, and so on. ‘Competition,’
wrote Park and Burgess, ‘determines the
position of the individual in the [ecological]
community, conflict fixes his place in society’
(Park and Burgess, (1969 [1921]: 574).
Accommodation was the mechanism of
stabilizing and institutionalizing processes of
conflict, the basis of social order, but also
always provisional and fragile, always vulner-
able to being undermined by competition and
conflict. Assimilation, finally, refers to more
deeply-seated mechanisms of accommoda-
tion at the level of culture and habit. It is,
they wrote, ‘a process of interpenetration and
fusion in which persons and groups acquire
the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of
other persons and groups, and, by sharing
their experience and history, are incorporated
with them in a common culture’ (Park and
Burgess, (1969 [1921]: 735). Effective
assimilation does not eliminate competition
and conflict altogether, but does integrate
cultural and symbolic orientations suffi-
ciently to establish a more or less stable
‘community of purpose and action’ (Park and
Burgess, (1969 [1921]: 735). Since Park and
Burgess’s original formulation, the tendency
in the social sciences has been to group
accommodation and assimilation together
under the term ‘cooperation’, seeing them as
closely connected with each other.3
To see how these three processes run
through the social development of childhood,
we need to start with the following observa-
tion. Beginning with the League of Nations’
Declaration of Children’s Rights in 1924, and
decisively reinforced by the UN Convention
on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989,
an essential element of the social and political
discourses surrounding children is now that
they have certain kinds of rights specific to
them, even if the actual meaning and effect of
the idea varies enormously (Alston et al.,
1992; Freeman, 1998; Guggenheim, 2005;
Roche, 1999). This does not mean that
the development has been continuous; Göran
Therborn points out the historical discontinu-
ity between the first wave of interest in chil-
dren in philanthropy, medicine (pediatrics),
and law around the turn of the twentieth
century, and the post-welfare state dominance
of the discourse surrounding children by con-
ceptions of public welfare and services, social
science, economics, and politics (1996: 30).
To say that there may be increasing recog-
nition of children as social and political sub-
jects is also not to deny how partial that
recognition remains, in social and political
theory as much as in the public sphere more
broadly. It remains difficult to link questions
of human development over the lifespan to
‘big issues’ such as state formation, modern-
ization and development, globalization, and
changing political structures and relations.
As one of us wrote, ‘the standard categories
of sociological research – individual, society,
gender, class, action, structure, state, econ-
omy, and so on – continue to operate without
reference to the fact that human beings exist
in an interdependent relationship with both
previous and succeeding generations’ (van
Krieken, 1997: 447), and this is only gradu-
ally changing.
The observation that childhood and chil-
dren’s experiences have been given less
attention than they deserve is itself not espe-
cially new. Erik Erikson complained in 1950
about the absence of ‘reference to the fact
that all people start as children and that all
peoples begin in their nurseries’ (1950: 16).
The anthropologist Charlotte Hardman pro-
posed in 1973 that children should be ‘stud-
ied in their own right, and not just as
receptacles of adult teaching’, aiming to
reveal ‘whether there is in childhood a self-
regulating, autonomous world which does
not necessarily reflect early development of
adult culture’, and suggesting that ‘at the
level of behaviour, values, symbols, games,
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RETHINKING THE SOCIOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD
beliefs, and oral traditions, there may be a
dimension exclusive to the child’ (Hardman,
1973: 87). But the identification of a distinct
field for the study of childhood began to take
off roughly two decades ago (Alanen, 1988;
Jenks, 1982; Lee, 1982; Synnott, 1983;
Thorne, 1987) and is still unfolding in rela-
tion to the organization of sociological
research. In the United Kingdom this stream
of sociological thought has been called ‘the
new sociology of childhood’ (James and
Prout, (1997 [1990]), although one could
argue about whether there was ever an ‘old’
sociology of childhood, since until the 1980s
children were more or less the province of
developmental psychology and education,
and in sociology would generally be sub-
sumed within studies of the family, socializa-
tion, and youth.
A central role has been played by French
historian Phillippe Ariès’ 1960 book L’enfant
et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime, pub-
lished in English two years later as Centuries
of Childhood.4 Although there have been
extensive critiques of his method and inter-
pretation of the evidence (e.g., Cunningham,
1995; Pollock, 1983), Ariès denaturalized
childhood by outlining how children have
been understood and treated differently in
different historical periods. In many respects
the emergence of a distinct sociology of
childhood can also usefully be understood as
an ongoing intellectual wrestling match with
the concept of ‘socialization’ (Alanen, 1988:
57–61), which dominated social scientific
approaches to the study of childhood until
the 1980s and framed the sociological
approach to children entirely in terms of their
‘becoming’ adult and as ‘productions’ of the
family and the school (Alanen, 1988, 1989;
James and Prout, 1997 [1990]; Lee, 1998;
Qvortrup, 1993, 1995; Zeiher 1996).
The historical emergence of a conception
of childhood as ‘socially constructed’ had the
following three features related to the inter-
play between competition, conflict, and
cooperation. First, childhood became a ter-
rain across which various aspects of the three
processes were played out. The bourgeoisie,
187
for example, found an ally in the new
childhood experts for the optimization of
their children’s chances as self-maximizing
individuals in an ever-changing modern
world.
Second, childhood had a particular function
in class relations. The construction of a
distinct sphere of childhood, isolated from
the labour market and protected from the
worst excesses of urban, industrial society,
contributed to the social success of the chil-
dren of the bourgeoisie. From its beginnings
in early modernity until today, a construction
and maintenance of a ‘correct childhood’
made an important contribution to the real-
ization of the status aspirations of, first the
middle class, and gradually the ‘respectable’
working class (Budde, 1994; de Coninck-
Smith, 1997; Schlumbohm, 1980; Tanner,
1998). The competitive dynamics of the
ongoing construction of childhood can be
seen in the constant tension between a
‘proper’ childhood and a deficient one, with
particular groups – the lower working class,
migrant groups, in countries like Australia
Indigenous families – being identified as
generating inadequate childhoods requiring
some sort of intervention (van Krieken, 1992,
1999a, 1999b, 2003).
Third, the question of changing relations
of power and authority between adults and
children has led many scholars towards the
concept of a ‘generational order’ in which
childhood is seen as having a social-structural
character similar to class, race, or gender. As
Leena Alanen put it:
Hence childhood, too, is a relational concept:
childhood only exists in relation to adulthood. …
This leads to the suggestions that parallel to a
‘gender agenda’ we can also imagine a ‘genera-
tional agenda’ being at work – a particular social
order that organizes children’s relations to the
world in a systematic way, allocates them positions
from which to act and a view and knowledge
about themselves and their social relations.
(Alanen, 1994: 37)
In one sense every generational order is one
of conflict, or at least potential conflict, to the
extent that there is a power relation between
adults and children. However,childhood
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188 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
sociological studies also point to the cooper-
ation between age groups, without which the
daily practices of ‘growing up’ could not be
realized, even though the arrangements of
such cooperation may be quite divergent at
different times and across national as well as
class cultures.
In the next section we will examine some
of the main research themes in contemporary
sociological studies of childhood, but with a
view to seeing how they might usefully be
re-thought in terms of the concepts competi-
tion, conflict, and cooperation. Different the-
oretical orientations and empirical concerns
generate differing degrees of attention to all
three, and we will suggest considering that
there may be conceptual advantages to be
gained in a relatively diverse field of socio-
logical research by making the treatment of,
and linkages between, all three concepts more
explicit.
THEORY AND RESEARCH IN
CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGIES OF
CHILDHOOD
The sociology of childhood has been charac-
terized by an initially very enthusiastic
embrace of social constructionism, theories
of action, and ethnomethodology. As Alanen
put it, childhood was and is,
… the ever-constituted result of decisions and
actions of particular historical social actors, in the
economical, political and cultural struggles that
potentially concern the whole spectrum of their
interests. To account for childhood then calls for
analyses of these broad social processes that in
their interaction come to constitute – rather than
deliberately aim to constitute – social practices that
define childhood. (1988: 64)
Against this background, it is possible to
distinguish roughly three different theoretical
approaches:
● In a structural approach one studies statistical
distributions of poverty, wealth, life chances,
health conditions, educational outcomes, and so
on (Bradshaw and Mayhew, 2005; Qvortrup,
1998; Sgritta, 1996).
● In a historical and constructivist approach, one
analyzes discourses and practices concerning
childhood, including the construction of expertise
and scientific knowledge concerning children,
and the emergence of particular strategies of
governance in relation to childhood (Alanen,
1989; Ambert, 1986; Best, 1990; Bühler-
Niederberger, 1998; Donzelot, 1979; James et al.,
1998; Nelson, 1986; Zelizer, 1985).
● In an ethnographic approach one studies interac-
tion and communication in children’s everyday
experiences, in the family and at school, on the
street, among peers, at play, etc. (Alanen and
Mayall, 2001; Breidenstein and Kelle, 1996;
Corsaro, 1992).5
It is now fair to say that there are a number
of analyses of childhood that make produc-
tive use of key concepts and debates in soci-
ological theory, which play a significant role
in establishing the research agenda in the
field. Different authors have established a
variety of connections between studies of
childhood and the broad range of theoretical
orientations in economic, political, and
cultural sociology, the work of feminist
theorists, Foucault, Lefebvre, Luhmann,
Latour and actor-network theory, complexity
theory, Elias, Beck, Deleuze, and Guattari,
and others. In Germany, for example, an
attempt has been made to reconcile the
concept of socialization with the social con-
structionist and ethnographic approaches
(Bühler-Niederberger, 2005), by drawing on
the idea of ‘self-socialization’, initially for-
mulated by Luhmann (1994) as a logical
consequence of the argument in systems
theory that psychic systems (like any other
system) have to be conceived as autopoietic
systems which are not influenced directly by
their environment, but develop in a self-refer-
ential way, according to their own logic of
operation (see also Krappmann, 2002;
Zinnecker, 2000). There are certainly
resources in place for a robustly theoretical
sociology of childhood.
Having said that, we must recognize that
sociological studies of childhood tend to
retain a relatively ‘light’ relationship with the
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RETHINKING THE SOCIOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD
central debates and issues in sociological
theory. Where the work of writers such as
Foucault or Beck is drawn upon or referred
to, it tends to fall into the category of ‘appli-
cation’ or ‘illustration’, rather than engaging
actively with the central issues of theory-
development at stake. Commenting on ‘the
current state of theory on children and of the
sociology of children in general,’ Ann-Marie
Ambert (1995) stresses, despite the presence
of some theoretically-developed work in the
field, the ‘danger that we develop a sociology
of children that avoids some important theo-
retical issues on a larger scale’ (1995: 253). If
one were unkind, one would speak of empir-
ical profligacy, but this argument should not
be pushed too far, since the whole sociology
of childhood project lends itself particularly
well to ethnographic research methods which
do not always sit well with abstract theoreti-
cal constructions. There is nothing intrinsi-
cally wrong with theoretical application or
illustration, and useful things can be said
about particular research topics without nec-
essarily commenting on the broader issues in
sociological theory.
What, then, of the central empirical con-
cerns in sociology studies of childhood
today? Because we know so little about the
reality of children’s lives, there is an enor-
mous amount of knowledge to be gathered.
The possibilities for case studies are exten-
sive; they include, all potentially across
different countries and historical periods:
● Working children, effects of organized interven-
tions to regulate child labour;
● Childhood experiences (school, family, play,
street, etc.);
● Street children (policy, interventions, etc.);
● Migration, ethnicity, integration among children
of varying ethnicities;
● Children’s literature, in different historical periods,
countries, etc.;
● Children’s participation, in organizations, politics,
etc.;
● The changing ideas, institutions and practices
surrounding children’s rights and citizenship;
● Changing relations in family life: between sib-
lings, children and parents or grandparents, etc.;
189
● Schooling (e.g., literacy, gender differences, bully-
ing, etc.);
● Health Issues: HIV/AIDS, obesity, smoking, etc.;
● Impact of war on children in different countries.
It is difficult to navigate one’s way through
such a rich body of research, but the majority
can be grouped roughly into the following
five areas: (1) children’s actual experiences,
particularly their active participation
in family life, the public sphere and school-
ing, children’s play and use of space;
(2) children’s lives beyond family and
school, especially working and on the street,
especially, but not only, in developing coun-
tries; (3) inequality, in terms of gender, class,
race, ethnicity, the rural/urban divide, and
globally; (4) children’s rights, citizenship,
and legal processes and institutions more
broadly, especially in relation to criminal
law; (5) education, welfare, and health – the
different dimensions and effects of particular
institutional contexts such as health, education,
welfare. We make no attempt to provide any
sort of overview or summary of these areas,
but simply highlight a selection of the major
themes and discuss some useful examples.
There are also a range of other fields of study
that we have left out of consideration here, but
which also attract significant research atten-
tion and would also fit within the analysis
here, such as changed forms of parenting,
motherhood, fatherhood, divorce, children’s
experience of war (as child soldiers and as
civilians), children as refugees, the impact of
television and the media, and cultural con-
structions and representations of childhood.
Children’s experience, agency,
and voice
In the dominant generational order, chil-
dren’s contribution and participation as
social actors in everyday interactions tends to
be either ignored or underestimated (Jenks,
1982), despite the obvious centrality of chil-
dren to the everyday operation of institutions
of socialization (Davies, 1983). A central theme
in many sociological studies of childhood,
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190 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
then, is to reveal the agency of children in
such interactions, and it is often shown that
very young children are already able to pro-
duce competently ordered interaction situa-
tions, since they know and apply the basic
rules of social interaction and are even com-
petent searchers for rules that might exist or
be meant by adults; they may also create new
elements for meaningful interaction (Bråten,
1996). Another theme is children’s contribu-
tions as (competent) social actors in relation
to their interaction among themselves, in
which they build friendships, act out con-
flicts, (re-)produce gender categories (Alisch
and Wagner, 2006; Breidenstein and Kelle,
1996, 1998; Corsaro and Eder, 1990; Shiose,
1994, 1995; Strandell, 1997), in what con-
cerns their use of the offerings of consumer
culture (Hengst, 1990, 2000; Olesen, 2000;
Rayou and Henriot-Van Zanten, 2004;
Zinnecker et al., 2002), in using urban spaces
and in modern time management (Behnken,
1990; Behnken et al., 1989; Mayall, 1994;
Rabe-Kleberg and Zeiher, 1984; Zeiher and
Zeiher, 1994). These are just some examples
of a very rich vein of research in the sociol-
ogy of childhood revealing children’s inter-
actions in public and private contexts, which
had been hidden or ignored for a long time.
More recently, several new topics have
become important in researching children’s
agency and ‘voice’. The first is the question
of the precise way children experience and
deal with hardship, poverty, violence, and
difficult neighbourhoods. One might take
this to constitute the limit of the concept of
children’s agency as they appear to passively
endure such adverse conditions, but the
research shows that there is a variety of
strategies children choose to handle such sit-
uations, that they may also be helpful to each
other, among siblings or peers, and that all
such things influence the impact of the situa-
tion and the child’s view of it (Mullender
et al., 2003). Second, the problem of the way
children interact in settings and situations
where they have been encouraged by adults
to actively participate in handling situations,
in decisions and debates, where they are,
therefore, meant to be ‘actors’ as defined by
adult decisions and institutions (Baraldi,
2003; Clark and Percy-Smith, 2006). Third,
and this is still a rather new research ques-
tion, the way in which children perceive and
conceptualize their families, and the extent to
which this depends on the child’s particular
family situation. While the research does not
come to a conclusive position on the latter
question, it does show that, for children,
emotions and contacts are much more impor-
tant to define the family and its boundaries
than biology or formal structures (Morrow,
1998; Rigg and Pryor, 2007).
Children’s work and life on the
street
In Pricing the Priceless Child, Viviana
Zelizer (1985) showed how one can see a
shift in the ideologies surrounding childhood
in Western societies between the 1870s and
1930s, from a conception of children as
‘useful’ to a much more sentimental and
emotional one of the ‘priceless’ child. The
shift was heavily dependent on state
intervention – mainly policing ever-expanding
legislation against children’s employment
and truancy and gradually raising the mini-
mum school-leaving age – which is why
Therborn speaks of modern childhood as ‘a
creation by the nation-state, against the
threatening encroachments of the market (for
child labour) and against the sovereignty of
patria potestas, of paternal power and the
seclusion of the family’ (1996: 30).
One problem with this very influential
account of the changing adult conceptions of
childhood, however, as Zelizer (2002: 377)
herself has written recently, is that it does not
have much to say about ‘children’s own
experiences of economic change’ (see also
Miller, 2005; Zelizer, 2005). The concept of
a ‘normal childhood’ tends to disguise not
only very basic competencies of social
action, but also what has to be considered
as informal or even formal work. Such
children’s work can be of hugely variable
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RETHINKING THE SOCIOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD
quality and quantity, and takes place under
widely differing circumstances, but it is part
of the reality of children’s lives certainly
in the developing world, but also in an
ever-increasing number of parts of the
advanced industrial world (Nieuwenhuys,
1994; Zeiher, 2000).
Zelizer (2002: 377) pleads, accordingly,
for an accompanying consideration of ‘chil-
dren as active economic agents, and adults
as simply one category of persons with
whom children carry on economic activities’.
Arguing against analyzing modern children
merely as consumers, she is in favour of
seeing them as also playing pivotal roles in
production and distribution across three types
of social relations: with (1) other members of
their households, (2) organizations outside
their own families, and (3) other children. She
finds that children’s activities in the spheres
of production, distribution, and consumption
show significant autonomy from those of
adults, although they generally experience
their relationship with adults as one of the
unequal exercise of power (2002: 379).
Children’s contribution to domestic labour,
for example, is now extensively ‘moneta-
rized’ in the form of allowances which gener-
ate complex household economies.
The question of children’s work becomes
still more significant when we look beyond
Western societies. Once the central critique
of the ‘priceless child’ thesis was that most
families across the globe do not have the
luxury of excluding their children from eco-
nomically productive activities. The analysis
was said to account only for developments in
economically highly developed countries,
and that increasing levels of poverty and
inequality endanger the argument even in the
advanced industrial parts of the world.
Zelizer (2002: 393) suggests that social sci-
entific research into children’s economic
activity needs to be developed in the follow-
ing three directions:
... towards the variable and unequal experiences
of children within high-income capitalist
countries; towards the enormous variety of children’s
circumstances in the lower-income regions where
191
most of the world’s kids actually live; towards the
historical changes that are transforming children’s
economic relations in rich and poor countries alike.
This is now one of the most important areas
of research in the sociology of childhood
(Nieuwenhuys, 2005), examining the nature,
structure, and dynamics of children’s eco-
nomic activity in developed as well as devel-
oping countries (Lavalette, 1994, 1996), the
relationship between child labour and the
concept of children’s rights (Myers, 1999)
and broader labour relations standards
(Blagbrough and Glynn, 1999), the role
of organizations such as trades unions
(Myrstad, 1999) and working children them-
selves (Liebel, 2003).
Inequality, poverty, and
globalization
In addition to the general concern to identify
what binds individual children together into a
particular construction of the social category
‘childhood’, there also remains a continuing
interest in the enormous differences between
childhood experiences across class, gender,
race, ethnicity, and time, and in differing
national settings. The varying impacts of
processes of globalization and the government
policies developed in response to them have
also been of interest, particularly in relation to
the distribution of poverty, life-chances, and
well-being. Like many areas of sociology, the
research in the field is heavily weighted
towards studies of childhood in the advanced
industrial countries, but an engagement with
these issues produces greater attention to child-
hood experiences in the developing world.
Attention to the structure and dynamics of
childhood in Latin America, Africa, the Indian
subcontinent, and Asia, as well as the specific
nature of childhood in indigenous communi-
ties, is gradually increasing. We cannot do jus-
tice here to the enormous body of research
done in this area, but it will be useful to high-
light a selection: See Bühler-Niederberger and
van Krieken, 2008, and the other papers in that
special issue of Childhood.
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192 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
In addition to constructing a different
range of opportunities and life-chances,
globalization processes constantly reconfig-
ure relations of power and inequality and
generate new forms of poverty. The extent
and distribution of poverty varies signifi-
cantly according to age, so that a particular
shift in the overall rate of poverty will pro-
duce much greater changes for children and
the elderly than for adults aged 18–50. The
global economy throws up new forms of
work in which children figure prominently,
so that the extent and impact of child labour
is central to the everyday experience of most
of the world’s children, creating a problem-
atic relationship with school and family life.
This is a question which is not confined to
the less economically advanced countries;
for example, in Britain a number of studies
have shown the extent to which children’s
paid work, such as newspaper and milk
delivery, fast-food service, is far more exten-
sive and problematic than is generally
assumed (Hobbs et al., 1992; Lavalette,
1994, 1996).
Another especially important issue is the
effects that global economic forces have on
government policies in relation to children,
which structure their lives in varying ways.
For example, Bradshaw (1993) has argued on
the basis of a study of children’s experiences
in Zambia that the impact of the global debt
crisis, especially cuts to government spend-
ing in health and education, has fallen partic-
ularly heavily on children. More generally, in
countries where welfare provision is weaker,
this also correspondingly increases adults’
dependence on the income generated by
child labour, and decreases their capacity and
willingness to ‘invest’ in their child’s future,
since the needs of the present are too press-
ing. This also underpins phenomena such as
child prostitution, which in turn is interlinked
with global tourism patterns.
Although the spread of new communica-
tions technologies and the internet has the
potential to ‘globalize’ childhood in the sense
of strengthening differing forms of social
interaction across geographical boundaries,
it also generates particular forms of inequality
in relation to the extent and type of access to
such technology. The term ‘digital divide’
(Koss, 2001) has been used to capture the
divisions between those with consistent and
effective access to the new communications
technologies and those with little, poor, or no
access. In her overview of the research in the
field, Sonia Livingstone (2003) has indicated
that the key concerns in relation to children’s
use of the Internet include the changed forms
of identity-construction and leisure activity,
the transformation of processes of learning
and literacy, the question of new dangers and
problems related to expanded access. These
include evolving commercial interests, as
well as children’s access to each other
and adults, the impact of particular kinds of
content, especially in relation to sex and vio-
lence. In all of these areas there are signifi-
cant inequalities closely connected to other,
more familiar, social inequalities to do with
wealth and income across the globe, and this
will become an increasingly important field
of study in the sociology of childhood.
Children’s rights, citizenship,
and the law
The children’s rights movement evolved out
of the orientation towards ‘child-saving’
(Platt, 1969), with the emergence of the
United Nations Convention on the Rights of
the Child in 1989 an important watershed
(Archard, 1993; Eekelaar, 1986, 1992;
Freeman, 1998). Jeremy Roche (1999) has
pointed out that there are two unavoidable
problems characterizing the claims to citi-
zenship and rights made in relation to chil-
dren. The first is that, although every
category of citizenship refers to a variety of
types of personhood, the category ‘child’
covers a particularly diverse range, from a
newborn infant to a 15-year-old. The argu-
ments for citizenship rights are more persua-
sive the older the child is, but like the
question of children’s criminal responsibility,
there will always remain a border zone or a
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RETHINKING THE SOCIOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD
grey area where some decision-making
process will be required, on the basis of inde-
terminate and contested criteria, to determine
where any particular child stands on ques-
tions of comprehension and capacity. One
can see this ambiguity, as Nick Lee (1999)
points out, in Article 12 of the UNRC:
State parties shall assure to the child who is capa-
ble of forming his or her own views the right to
express those views freely in all matters affecting
the child, the views of the child being given due
weight in accordance with the age and maturity of
the child.
‘The child’ does not exist, there are only par-
ticular and individual children, and any con-
struction of children’s rights and capacity for
citizenship will always have to juggle both
the ‘being’ and the ‘becoming’ view of the
child (Lee, 1999: 457).
Second, the variable capacities of children
mean that the question of their representation
will always be an open question. The older
particular children are, the more directly they
will be able to represent themselves in soci-
ety and politics, but at some point, at least
some if not most children will need to be rep-
resented by adults and their citizenship rights
will have to be championed by others. The
forms taken by children’s participation will,
then, remain contested and open to diverse
interpretations as to the extent to which they
are being adequately or appropriately repre-
sented, or simply functioning as proxy for
other interests (Guggenheim, 2005). One of
the key areas where this issue comes to the
surface is the relationship between the
universalism of the concept of ‘rights’ and
the particularity of diverse cultural under-
standings of childhood and adulthood. The
implicit norms built into the UNCRC, for
example, appear to focus on the nuclear
family at the expense of kinship and commu-
nity networks, and they seem to value indi-
vidual over collective rights. This can be
problematic to the extent of seriously
undermining the meaningfulness of the
Convention and the whole idea of children’s
rights in particular cultural settings (Burman,
1996; Burr, 2004). It may be too strong an
193
argument to suggest that the discourse of
children’s rights is a new form of colonial-
ism, but at least some questions are worth
asking about whether an individualized con-
cept of ‘rights’ is in fact necessarily the best
way of advancing children’s participation
in social, political, and economic life as
well as advancing their status as citizens
(Guggenheim, 2005).
One area where the status of citizenship is
granted to children at a relatively early stage
is crime and the allocation of criminal
responsibility in law. The age below which
children cannot be held criminally responsi-
ble for their actions ranges from 7 to
18 across different national jurisdictions, but
in general children are granted this responsi-
bility well before they are able to vote, drive
a car, serve in the army, enter into contracts,
or see particular kinds of films. Normally
there is also a ‘transition zone’ between crim-
inal infancy and adulthood where children
are seen as possessing a conditional criminal
responsibility, where the presumption of
an incapacity to form criminal intent (doli
incapax) is rebuttable, and it is the court’s task
to assess the child’s degree of understanding
and moral capacity (van Krieken, 2005). This
dimension of the social construction of child-
hood shows many of the same instabilities
and volatility of the concepts of children’s
rights and citizenship. In England, for exam-
ple, the 1993 murder of James Bulger triggered
a rejection of this doli incapax presumption,
and since 1998 all English children over the
age of 10 have been considered fully crimi-
nally responsible. In other countries, such as
Germany, the debate is more about raising or
lowering the age of criminal incapacity. Like
questions of children’s rights, the issue of
children’s responsibilities is also caught
between the two conceptions of childhood –
being or becoming.
Education, welfare, and health
Although the more recent sociological
approaches to childhood stress the active role
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194 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
played by children in the construction of
their social world, their lives remain framed
by a number of core institutional settings,
particularly the school, health and welfare
systems, and to this extent the socialization
approach still has much to offer. Here, too,
there is a wide variety of research pro-
grammes in progress, and we can only high-
light a selection of the main issues. In
relation to schooling, the core concerns cur-
rently include literacy, gender differences,
new technologies, children with special
needs, bullying, and the varying impacts of
neo-liberalism and the ‘marketization’ of the
education system around the globe. With
respect to health, they encompass infant mor-
tality, smoking, drugs and alcohol, sexuality
and HIV/AIDS, obesity, suicide and mental
health, and general well-being among chil-
dren. In the field of welfare, research themes
include the operation of institutional and
foster care, the relation between child and
youth welfare and criminal justice, uneven-
ness in service provision across class, ethnic-
ity and the urban/rural divide, the question of
children’s capacity to seek or refuse welfare
intervention independently of their parents or
adult carers, and the role of child welfare
service provision in social and economic
development generally.
Running through the heart of much of this
research is a set of questions concerning the
extent to which children are being conceptu-
alized as social agents in their own right, as
opposed to issues being framed primarily in
terms of the concerns and interests of adults.
For example, in relation to education policy
reforms over recent decades in the developed
countries, Michael Wyness (1999: 354) has
argued that there has been only a little move-
ment towards treating children more as com-
petent social actors. The rhetoric of ‘choice’
which is so central to the subjection of
schooling to the mechanisms of the market
will still treat parents as the social agents or
consumers making the choices, not school
pupils themselves. As he puts it,
There is almost an inverse relationship here
between the changing fortunes of parental and
pupil influence. As parents appear to have become
progressively more influential both as consumers
of education and governors of schools, pupils have
lost the few bargaining powers they once had.
(Wyness, 1999: 358)
Similarly in relation to health, James and
James (2004) point out for the example of
childhood obesity that the policy focus on
this question has reflected more the adult
priorities concerning the longer-term effects
of obesity as children become adults than
those of children themselves, who also have
more immediate concerns, such as mental
and sexual health, which are given dispropor-
tionately less attention (James and James,
2004: 165–6). In general it remains an open
question how much ‘voice’ is given to chil-
dren in relation to medical care, social wel-
fare interventions, and their own schooling.
The exact nature of the relationship between
school, family, leisure, and work, as well as the
power balance between parents, state, and
other organized authorities, and children con-
tinues to constitute a central concern for the
sociological theory and research in these fields.
TOWARDS NEW CONCEPTUAL
FRAMEWORKS?
Although there are now a number of interest-
ing discussions of the theoretical dimensions
of research in the sociology of childhood
(James et al., 1998), there is still only a lim-
ited engagement with sociology’s ‘big’
themes, such as globalization, state formation,
individualization and post- or ‘second’ moder-
nity, citizenship and individualism,
the long-term decline of patriarchy, postmod-
ernization, changing configurations of power
and authority, or shifting constructions of
the nation-state and sovereignty. For example,
the work of Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995)
on family life and individualization has a
range of implications for the sociology of
childhood (Kelley, et al., 1998), and Beck
(1997) has also made a very suggestive
attempt (drawing on the work of Heinz Abels,
1993) to include childhood in his analysis of
the ‘second modernity’ and contemporary
9781412934633-Chap-13 1/10/09 8:49 AM Page 195
RETHINKING THE SOCIOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD
forms of individualization, looking at the
expansion of children’s citizenship rights, the
shifting of the boundaries between public and
private life, the changing relations between
generations (the ‘generational order’). What is
perhaps most important for the sociology of
childhood is that one of the central conceptual
concerns which has dominated the field –
coming to see children as competent social
actors – can itself be seen, following Beck’s
analysis, as a social product, of what he refers
to as ‘second modernity’. His critique of the
concept of socialization, paralleling that of
childhood sociology, is that ‘young people no
longer become individualized. They individu-
alize themselves. ‘Biographization’ of youth
means becoming active, struggling, and
designing one’s own life’, so that ‘socialization
is now only possible as self-socialization’
(Beck, 1997: 163). His analysis of the increas-
ing importance of the ‘self-fashioning’ of
childhood and youth ends with the following
diagnosis:
The different, often extremely disparate sources of
meaning and experience for young people:
school, television, advertising, the values and sym-
bols of the chosen peer group, the strict perform-
ance standards of the world of work, the traffic
jungle (their own car!), not forgetting the well-
meaning precepts of parents, all these force
young people to conceive of and organize them-
selves as tinkerers of their own personalities.
(Beck, 1997: 163–4)
This means that what is meant to be a
conceptual advance on earlier sociological con-
ceptions of childhood is well and truly bound up
with the very processes of social transformation
which affect the contemporary childhood that it
is aiming to describe. Rather than simply having
to assert their status as actors in the face of a
society, and a social science, which arrogantly
refuses to acknowledge it, with only valiant
‘new’ sociologists of childhood as allies; in
many respects children today are increasingly
both socially required to be ‘competent social
actors’, and finding their agency hedged
in more and more by shifting forms of regula-
tion and governance (Bell, 1993; Hultqvist
and Dahlberg, 2001; McGillivray, 1997;
Prout, 2000; more generally, Rose, 1999).
195
The social-structural problem is that the
resources with which children are meant to
assemble their personalities and identities – con-
cepts of self and other, difference, normality,
beauty and attractiveness, desirability, charm,
etc. – are at the same time subjected to
processes of standardization, formation, and
organization; so that the most important ques-
tion facing the sociology of childhood becomes
less ‘are children competent social actors?’ and
more ‘on what basis do children act, with what
resources at their disposal?’; ‘what constitutes
their supposed “freedom” of action?’ (O’Neill,
1994).
The same may also be true of the other con-
ceptual focus of the sociology of childhood,
the identification of childhood as a distinct
social sphere with a logic and dynamics of its
own; this too is a product of particular social
transformations rather than simply a libera-
tion from outdated conceptual restrictions.
The reasons for their being ‘outdated’ go
beyond the perceptiveness of a new genera-
tion of sociologists; they also include a con-
tinuing intensification of the requirements of
adult citizenship, which now requires ‘deeper
roots’ in the individual’s biography, such as
earlier and more nuanced training for the
demands of individual identity in the contem-
porary world. In a sense Cody’s demand in The
West Wing for the ‘right’ to participate in politics
can be understood as driven by a broader
social requirement that Cody begin his self-
construction as a political subject earlier, so as
to increase his flexibility and responsiveness
to the competitive dynamics of his future
political subjectivity.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS: AN
INTEGRATED THEORETICAL
AND RESEARCH AGENDA IN
SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF
CHILDHOOD
We would like to conclude with some
thoughts on possibilities for the restructuring
of theory and research in the sociology of
9781412934633-Chap-13 1/10/09 8:49 AM Page 196
196 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
childhood taking some steps towards the
integration of the concepts competition, con-
flict, and cooperation. One – even if only one
– of the ways in which greater theoretical
coherence and creativity in the sociology of
childhood could be encouraged would be to
turn towards a greater utilization of this con-
ceptual triad, because attention to all three
would encourage a broader range of concep-
tualizations. For example, there is a tendency
in most of the literature to think in terms of
competition and conflict, but with little
explicit attention paid to cooperation, espe-
cially between the generations.
Sociological research into childhood often
shows clearly that the experiences of child-
hood are only possible with significant
degrees of cooperation, even though the con-
cept of ‘generational order’ tends to exclude
such a conceptualization. This includes
cooperation amongst peers as well as cooper-
ation with adults in the sense of real work
contributions and competent social action.
The exact form taken by such arrangements
of generational cooperation are quite diver-
gent across time, national and class contexts,
and cultures. It may consist simply of a mere
calculus to survive for adults and children
(Henderson, 2006; Lareau, 2003; Oleke et al.,
2006) or – at the other extreme – a highly
ambitious arrangement of preparation for
future life, including a self-socialization
allowing tasteful and unique self-presenta-
tion (Bühler-Niederberger, 2005; de Singly,
1996; Sirota, 2002). But both require cooper-
ation between the age groups, either in the
process of the formation of self, where self-
observation, self-reflection, discovery, and
continuous working out of one’s own unique-
ness is needed, or in the pursuit of survival,
which demands the skill and dexterity of the
child and his/her competence to create and
maintain social affiliations.
Nonetheless, the normative impact of the
idea of a ‘proper childhood’ remains and
limits or stigmatizes the range of cooperative
arrangements that may be worked out. To
study childhood as it lies somewhere between
extensive divergence and variety, especially
in terms of cultural differences, on the one
hand, and processes of ‘universalization’
(such as the idea of children’s rights) on the
other, will, particularly in a globalizing
world, remain an important topic of child-
hood sociological theory and research.
NOTES
1 The West Wing, Season Six, Episode 17
‘A Good Day’, 2 March 2005.
2 With the qualification that whether and how
these shifts have been translated into actual changes
in children’s everyday lives is a separate, empirical
question.
3 There are clearly arguments for returning to
Park’s and Burgess’ original four-fold distinction and
giving assimilation more specific attention (van
Krieken, 2005), especially in the twenty-first century
world of global population flows and the instability
of multiculturalism and cultural identity generally;
but there is not the space to explore them here, so
this is another question with which research in the
sociology of childhood could usefully engage.
4 Also influential was Lloyd de Mause’s (1974)
The History of Childhood.
5 For another useful overview, see Alanen (2000).
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Erziehungssoziologie, 16: 26–46.
Zeiher, Helga (2000) ‘Hausarbeit. Zur
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(eds.) Die Arbeit der Kinder. Weinheim:
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9781412934633-Chap-14 1/10/09 8:49 AM Page 201
The Lifecourse of the Social
Mobility Paradigm
Stéphane Moulin and Paul Bernard
INTRODUCTION
How are advantageous and disadvantageous
socio-economic positions transmitted across
generations, and how are they reproduced or
altered over the lifecourse trajectories of
individuals? This question has engaged soci-
ologists in what has come to be identified as
the field of social mobility. It was launched
when Pitirim Sorokin published, in 1927,
Social and Cultural Mobility. Since this first
attempt at providing a systematic theory, a
social mobility paradigm has developed, and
it has also been challenged.
Our intent is not to systematically review
the vast literature in this field, a task that has
been achieved very competently in a number
of places (see below). We rather want to draw
attention to some key conceptual assump-
tions made by most analysts of social stratifi-
cation and social mobility.
According to Kuhn (1970), paradigms
spring from the recognition of anomalies in
previous scientific explanations. Paradigms
propose a new set of methods to search
for new answers to reformulated questions.
The usefulness of a paradigm is established
14
with the offering of some enticing empirical
findings. A paradigm transforms a group of
persons who share the same collection of
beliefs and agreements into a discipline or, at
least, a disciplinary field. After a period of
scientific inquiry and competition among
pre-paradigmatic currents, a period of
normal science follows, characterized by the
creation of specialized journals and a claim
to a special place in academe. One of the
main features of a paradigm is thus its grad-
ual evolution into normal science, until the
advent of the next paradigmatic revolution,
based on the identification of a new set of
anomalies which lead to revisions of meth-
ods, and of empirical findings. We will argue
here that a new paradigm may be emerging in
the field of social mobility, inspired by the
lifecourse perspective.
It is useful to broach the question of the
definition of social mobility from this very
perspective. We have defined it in a fairly
broad sense at the outset: it refers to the
degree and mode of transmission of social
privilege (and underprivilege) over the life of
individuals, and from one generation to the
next. But what paradigms do is, precisely, to
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202 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
suggest and then to impose, though not with-
out some resistance, ways in which a given
phenomenon should be productively
researched. We will argue that this has been
done under a few very powerful assumptions,
some of which may now be put more vigor-
ously in question, especially at the periphery
of the field.
Our chapter will proceed in three stages.
In the first section, we will use several avail-
able reviews of the social mobility literature1
to portray the inception and the evolution of
the social mobility paradigm. We start from
Sorokin’s contribution not only because it
came first, but also, more importantly,
because it offered a number of powerful, and
yet somewhat disparate, insights into social
mobility. We then show how subsequent devel-
opments in this field selected some of these
insights, while others were largely neglected
or marginalized in the emerging literature.
In the second section, we provide empiri-
cal indications for our interpretation of the
evolution of the field, using a review of the
papers published in the specialized journal
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility
(RSSM), from 1981 to 2006. RSSM has
become the most representative specialized
journal in the field and the privileged
medium of publication for members of
RC28.2 We use this material to show that, by
and large, a certain paradigmatic view of
social mobility research became dominant
and turned into normal science. Meritocracy,
especially through education, and a focus on
individual trajectories, rather than institu-
tions, became the central themes, relegating
other issues to the periphery.
In the third section, we point to recent
indications of a broadening of the field of
social mobility: more attention is now paid to
other institutions at play in the transmission
of privilege, such as the characteristics of
labor markets, changes in family composi-
tion, health, and welfare states. We discern in
this evolution the growing influence of the
lifecourse paradigm, which has led to the
exploration of many new research avenues.
This is briefly illustrated with another set of
empirical data: the programs of the scientific
meetings of Research Committee 28 of the
International Sociological Association,
which are usually held a few times a year. In
recent years, many new themes have been
explored, indicating that the social mobility
paradigm may be evolving, or at least that it
is confronted with the challenge of new
anomalies and contending interpretations.
THE SOCIAL MOBILITY PARADIGM
In this section, we analyze the evolution of
the paradigm of social mobility from its cre-
ation in the 1920s to the end of the 1970s.
Sorokin’s creation of the social
mobility paradigm
Sorokin’s Social Mobility (1927), reprinted
in 1959 in the volume Social and Cultural
Mobility, can be considered, as a paradig-
matic revolution in Kuhn’s sense. Recently
arrived in the US from Russia, where both
the Tsarist government and the Communists
jailed him, Sorokin wants to find evidence
for substantial levels of social fluidity in
modern societies; such fluidity he considers
as a scientific ‘anomaly’, which cannot be
explained either by Social Darwinism or by
Marxism. These approaches to social
inequalities were incapable of interpreting
the shift from an ascribed to an achieved
status order. According to Sorokin, ‘neither
the attacks of the radicals against the caste
aristocracy, nor the exaggerated dithyrambs
to the upper classes as the offspring of a long
existing hereditary aristocracy seem to be
warranted by the facts’ (Sorokin, 1959: 457).
Marxism as well as Social Darwinism pre-
supposed a static social structure rather than
the fluid composition of present occupational
groups.
Sorokin uses a simple system of gradation
to describe the social structure: ‘Social strat-
ification means the differentiation of a given
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LIFECOURSE OF THE SOCIAL MOBILITY PARADIGM
population into hierarchically superposed
classes. It is manifested in the existence of
upper and lower social layers’ (Sorokin,
1959: 11). Such schemas had already emerged
under the influence of Social Darwinism in
England at the end of the nineteenth century
(Szreter, 1984).3 Sorokin uses this perspec-
tive to disprove the Marxian analysis of class
struggle; according to him, the proletariat
was both numerically weak compared to the
growing number of middle class people, and
qualitatively deficient compared to the mem-
bers of the ‘upper classes’.4 This is Sorokin’s
first key contribution to shaping the field;
as we will see below, it contributed power-
fully to focusing debates on the functional
aspects of social stratification and social
mobility, which were seen as ways to mobi-
lize talent and effort in rapidly modernizing
societies.
Sorokin made two other key paradigmatic
contributions to the field. At first sight, they
appear as simply logical, if clever, extensions
of his initial insight, one in the direction of
methods, the other offered as an interpretive
framework.
Methodologically, Sorokin proposed to
measure social fluidity using a new tool:
mobility tables, and especially intergenera-
tional tables, which testify to society’s ability
to redistribute talent over the long run. Social
mobility is defined as ‘any transition of an
individual or social object from one position
to another’ (Sorokin, 1959: 133). Sorokin’s
schema of gradation makes it equivalent to
vertical mobility, ‘ascending and descending,
or social climbing and social sinking’
(Sorokin, 1959: 133). He uses an intergenera-
tional mobility table to analyze changes in the
distribution of incomes in a population of 788
fathers and sons from the US, and he infers
from these data that ‘each economic stratum
of Western societies is composed not only of
sons of fathers who belong to this stratum, but
in a considerable proportion of newcomers’
(Sorokin, 1959: 478) and that ‘only an
insignificant part of each economic class
remains in the same class during five or more
generations’ (Sorokin, 1959: 479).
203
Sorokin not only offers empirical evidence
that the composition of the society is fluid
and changing; he also interprets this social
mobility through an original structuralist
view of institutional mediations. According
to him, vertical mobility functions through
‘membranes’, ‘staircases’, ‘elevators’ or
‘channels’ which ‘permit individuals to move
up and down, from stratum to stratum’
(Sorokin, 1959: 164). The most important of
these agencies are the army, churches,
schools, and political, economic, and profes-
sional organizations. This structuralist view
is supported by a functionalist comparison
between the social structure and the human
body: he considers these agencies of vertical
circulation ‘as necessary as channels for
blood circulation in the body’ (Sorokin,
1959: 180). In these channels, there seems to
exist a kind of ‘sieve’ ‘which sifts the indi-
viduals and places them within the society’
(Sorokin, 1959: 182). Cuin (1993) has even
suggested that Sorokin’s theory is ‘hyper-
structuralist’ since individuals are not really
actors: they are educated, tested, selected,
and distributed by these agencies. Given the
inequality of individual abilities, not only
shaped by the environment, but also based on
heredity, social improvement can only
happen if these agencies produce social
mobility by assigning the right persons to the
right positions, according to their physical
and intellectual abilities.
These three elements in Sorokin’s
approach seem to form a unified whole:
modernizing societies need a good measure
of social fluidity, and their major institutions
must certainly be providing it, since mobility
tables reveal significant amounts of move-
ment between vertically arranged positions.
But upon reflection, the components of
Sorokin’s paradigmatic revolution are not
that closely connected; in fact, the tensions
between them prefigure many of the debates
in the field over the following decades, as we
will see in the next few pages.
First, albeit important, gradation schemes
are but one way to examine mobility and the
circulation of individuals between the various
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204 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
social positions and roles. Indeed, most
researchers will subsequently devise and use
complex schemes of socioeconomic cate-
gories, usually based on occupational group-
ings rather than income. Many of these
categories are not easily rank-ordered with
respect to one another in any convincing way,
however. Consequently, exchanges of mem-
bers between them over the lifecourse and
across generations may call for ‘qualitative’
interpretations going beyond the vertical
dimension.
Other researchers will rather closely
adhere to Sorokin’s gradation idea, and try to
devise various one-dimensional indicators of
the vertical social position of various occupa-
tions (occupations have by then become the
almost universal instrument for estimating
social mobility, because they are considered
as rather stable indicators of social position
and social class, contrary to income, which is
more volatile). We will review this source of
tension in Sorokin’s approach, as well as in
the evolving field of social mobility, in the
next section.
A second source of tension originating in
Sorokin’s approach concerns the connection
between mobility tables and interpretations
of fluidity based on the role of social struc-
tures and especially institutions. Sorokin
was, implicitly, inaugurating a comparative
style of analysis, in his case between modern
and more traditional societies. Early on, ana-
lysts of social mobility will adopt this idea,
and start comparing contemporary societies
with respect to their fluidity; the latter is taken
as an index both of modernity and of equity,
in the guise of equality of opportunities.
But these social institutions are considered
as a whole, not in any of their specific influ-
ences.5 Indeed, the analysis usually proceeds
at the macro level, paying scant attention to
the meso level of specific institutions evoked
in Sorokin’s interpretive stance; no connection
is usually suggested, not even ‘qualitatively’,
between what happens to specific occupa-
tional categories and these institutional con-
duits for mobility. The one exception, starting
in the mid-1960s, is the insistence, among
analysts who have devised one-dimensional
indicators of vertical social position, on the
key role of one institutional mediation,
schooling. We will review this debate among
social mobility analysts below, in the section
on ‘The Tension between Individualist and
Structuralist Views’.
The divergence between schemes
of gradation and class schemes
The mobility table has been, for a long
period, the most characteristic tool of the
social mobility paradigm. Many crucial dis-
tinctions have been made and many findings
achieved using mobility tables: horizontal
and vertical mobility, intergenerational and
intra-generational mobility, and then counter-
mobility, inflow and outflow analyses,
forced and pure mobility.6 A shared vocabu-
lary was thus developed from the thirties to
the seventies.
But starting with Blau and Duncan’s very
influential book, The American Occupational
Structure, in 1967, proponents of the grada-
tion approach were given a new and powerful
analytical instrument with the status attain-
ment model, based on regression analyses
involving continuous scales of Socio-
Economic Status (SES) and of schooling.
An explicit distinction between two tradi-
tions among analysts of social mobility
developed thereafter. The social structure can
be regarded as a system of gradation, or as a
system based on social relations of depend-
ence (Ossowski, 1963). According to Weber,
the status order describing ‘the way in which
social honour is distributed’ and ‘represented
by special styles of life’ is quite distinct from
the economic order describing ‘the way
in which economic goods and services are
distributed and used’ (Weber, (1977) [1922]:
chap. 9, part II). This distinction has often
been simplified into an opposition between a
Weberian analysis of social status and a
Marxist class analysis, but it is indeed much
broader. Marxian social classes are ‘qualita-
tive’ and relational, but as we will see later,
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LIFECOURSE OF THE SOCIAL MOBILITY PARADIGM
so are the neo-Weberian social classes pro-
posed by Giddens (1973) and Goldthorpe
(1980).7
The choice between these two ways of
describing social structure appears related to
the influence of particular ideological per-
spectives at different periods of time. We
have already discussed the reasons for the
emergence of a schema of gradation. By con-
trast, many other occupational classifications,
such as the French one, were influenced by
historical class struggles and by political
movements representing the working class
(Desrosières, 2002).
The tradition of analyzing social structure
in terms of a status order has been very pow-
erful in American sociology. In the twentieth
century, the popularity of vertical classifica-
tions by strata was supported by a powerful
cultural representation of American society
as an open society, which provides equality
of opportunities for social achievement
(Cuin, 1993). This literature on social strati-
fication has developed two main method-
ological tools: the classification by strata and
the index of socio-economic status.
Conducting exhaustive interviews and sur-
veys in Newburyport in the thirties, Warner
and his team of researchers, for instance,
found that the social division of the town
should be analyzed as a schema of gradation
and tried to build an index of social prestige
(Warner, 1963; Warner and Lunt, 1942).
These methodologies have been extensively
used in American sociology to reduce the
multidimensional aspects of status to a
unique, continuous, and simple scale. Two of
the main methodological contributors to the
descriptive analysis of stratification, Duncan
(1961) and Treiman (1977), both devised
procedures for hierarchically scaling occupa-
tions.
Many other scholars have rejected this
implied unidimensionality of stratification.
We find explicit critical perspectives in many
important contributions, such as Dumont’s
work on the caste system (1966) or
Bourdieu’s focus on the structure of various
forms of capital (1984) [1979]. While schemas
205
of gradation in the sociology of stratification
see social positions differing in degree rather
than kind, contemporary class schemas
emphasize qualitative differences and rela-
tional dependence.
One of the main contributions to the analy-
sis using class schemas is due to Erikson and
Goldthorpe (1992), with the CASMIN proj-
ect. The purpose of their class schema is to
differentiate occupational positions ‘in terms
of the employment relations that they entail’.
After presenting the classical three-fold
division between employers, employees and
self-employed workers, they make another
distinction, among employees, between two
kinds of employment relations: the ‘labour
contract’ that ‘entails a relatively short-term
and specific exchange of money for effort’
and the ‘service relationship’, which ‘involves
a longer term and generally more diffuse
exchange’. Service relationships are thus
found mostly within bureaucratic organiza-
tions ‘where it is required of employees that
they exercise delegated authority or special-
ized knowledge and expertise’ (Erikson and
Goldthorpe, 1992: 43). This conceptualiza-
tion of class structure takes partial inspiration
from Marxism, the main difference being
that Goldthorpe does not refer to issues of
exploitation and domination (as was done, in
particular, by Wright (1989, 1997)). And the
reference is quite explicit to Weber, since the
service class works in large public or private
bureaucracies.
The class and stratification perspectives on
social structure are quite distinct, and they
profoundly influence the way the social
structure is characterized, and the way social
mobility is analyzed. In conceptualizing ver-
tical mobility in particular, a schema of gra-
dation is needed if one is to qualify mobility
as either ascending or descending. On the
contrary, lines of class demarcation cannot
translate into differences on a single vertical
scale, because they are conceptualized in
relational terms. Many authors following a
class perspective thus focus on permeability
of class boundaries (Goldthorpe, 1987;
Wright, 1997). This being said, hierarchical
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206 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
aspects can be recognized, and certain
authors do look for hierarchical effects in
social mobility patterns.8
The tension between individualist
and structuralist views
Since Sorokin’s pioneering work, theories
of social mobility have faced a tension
between structuralist and individualist views
of institutional mediations. In a strict struc-
turalist perspective, such as Sorokin’s, indi-
viduals are not actors: they are educated,
tested, selected and distributed by agencies
or channels of circulation. According to
strongly individualist views, on the contrary,
the individuals are, to a large extent, all-
powerful actors: their achievements are the
exact rewards accruing to their talents and
efforts.
Most of the American literature on social
mobility puts forward a mixed view, with an
equal interest for structural and motivational
factors: the former correspond to the equilib-
rium between the demands for various abili-
ties and the supply of talents, the latter to
personal qualities and motives. Davis and
Moore’s foundational paper (Davis and
Moore, 1945) about the American function-
alist theory of stratification clearly holds
such an implicit view: ‘as a functioning
mechanism a society must somehow distrib-
ute its members in social positions and
induce them to perform the duties of these
positions’. We owe the first explicit theoreti-
cal formulation of this mixed view to Lipset
and Bendix (1959). According to them, ‘the
amount of social mobility’ is largely deter-
mined by five structural factors: the number
of available vacancies, the rates of fertility,
the rank accorded to occupations, the number
of inheritable status-positions, and legal
restrictions. At the same time, they empha-
size that the ‘consequences of upward
mobility’ are very different from one culture
to another; the existence of ideological
egalitarianism in the US, in particular, facili-
tates the acceptance of upward mobility.
According to Cuin (1993), the ideological
trajectory of American sociology leads from
such structuralist or mixed views of institu-
tional mediations to a dominant individualistic
view, best illustrated in the status attainment
programme proposed by Blau and Duncan
(1967). This programme investigates the
extent to which the present occupational
status of individuals is associated with the
status of their family of origin, or rather
reflects their own achievements, and in par-
ticular their educational attainment. The
question they keep raising is: ‘how and to
what degree do the circumstances of birth
condition subsequent status’ (Blau and
Duncan, 1967: 118). Their results show that
half of the association between father’s edu-
cation and son’s occupation appears to be
mediated by the latter’s educational achieve-
ment. According to this individualistic per-
spective, modernizing societies shift from
ascriptive to achievement criteria, and there
is a movement towards meritocratic selection
through the educational system.
This individualist view was confronted, in
the 1970s, with radical critiques coming
from a number of sociologists of education.
Anderson’s paradox constituted a major
anomaly for the now established individual-
istic paradigm of social mobility research. In
spite of a strong individual correlation
between education and occupation, Anderson
(1961) found that relative occupational posi-
tion seems to be independent of relative edu-
cational position. Boudon (1974) used this
finding to urge a return to the structuralist
point of view, which can readily recognize
that there is a substantial amount of inde-
pendence between changes in the educational
structure and changes in the occupational
structure, potentially leading to ‘educational
inflation’. As Sorokin pointed out five
decades earlier, the function of schools
largely involves certifying children for par-
ticular positions, and not only promoting
each individual’s abilities.
This theoretical tension between individu-
alist and structuralist views has produced
many methodological controversies on the
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LIFECOURSE OF THE SOCIAL MOBILITY PARADIGM
possibility of distinguishing structural and
non-structural sources of mobility. Developing
an overview of the different generations of
these methodologies, Ganzeboom et al.
(1991) propose to distinguish three genera-
tions in mobility studies. The first generation
focused on the degree of ‘openness’ of differ-
ent social structures, as measured by the rate
of occupational mobility between genera-
tions. Some sociologists of this generation
proposed to make a distinction between
structural and circulation (or exchange)
mobility, the former being determined by the
amount of mobility required by the very
structure of the table (changes in the mar-
ginal distributions between one generation
and the next).
Sociologists of the second generation crit-
icized these concepts, arguing that they were
statistical artefacts with no clear substantive
interpretation. The use of multivariate statis-
tical techniques – path analysis or structural
equation modelling – allowed them to go
beyond mobility as such to study status
attainment from an individualistic perspec-
tive, as proposed by Blau and Duncan
(1967). The use of continuous quantitative
variables allowed for the assessment of the
relative importance of various paths to occu-
pational status, involving schooling and the
direct transmission of status across genera-
tions through other mechanisms.
The third generation is characterized by a
return to the analysis of intergenerational
occupational mobility using qualitative cate-
gories. In this generation, new statistical
techniques such as log-linear and log-multi-
plicative analysis allow for a clear distinction
between absolute and relative mobility (see
Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1992). Differences
among countries as to how occupational
structures vary from one generation to the
next largely explain how their mobility
regimes vary; in other words, the basic struc-
ture of mobility chances is common to all
industrial societies.
Treiman and Ganzeboom (2000) have
recently identified a fourth generation of
studies. According to them, the availability
207
of much improved comparative data and
analytical techniques has allowed for new
combinations of quantitative (continuous
variables) and ‘qualitative’ (categorical vari-
ables) approaches, and for a more thorough
examination of the effects of ‘social contexts’
on social mobility. As a consequence, they
say, there now is a convergence of approaches
used in the previous two generations of stud-
ies. While many of the developments they
point out are indeed innovative, we ourselves
interpret them less as an extension of previous
efforts, and more as a shift in paradigm,
towards a lifecourse perspective. Before
we examine these new trends, however, we
should turn to the decades of normal science
which characterized generations two and
three.
A TURN TO NORMAL SCIENCE
An examination of the articles published in
the specialized journal Research in Social
Stratification and Mobility (RSSM)9 allows
us to highlight the major shared assumptions
of this much focused and very productive
field of sociological research. We argue
that most articles share a meritocratic per-
spective as well as an individualist view of
institutional mediations. Again, due to excel-
lent available reviews of the field, we
will focus mainly on the exceptions to the
rule, on the articles that diverge from the
mainstream.
Meritocratic assumptions
Though the social mobility paradigm allows
for a wide range of ways of describing the
social structure and interpreting longitudinal
trajectories, most of the articles published in
RSSM provide a conventional meritocratic
interpretation of social mobility: education is
the main factor in upward mobility, and
occupational positions are the rewards of
individual educational achievements.
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208 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
The social mobility literature at first trans-
lates its interest in longitudinal trajectories
into a narrowly focused interest on the bivari-
ate relationship between the occupational
classes of fathers and sons (and later on of
mothers and daughters) (Treiman and
Ganzeboom, 2000). It then turns to earnings
or income, and to education. Few papers
refer to other aspects and determinants of
social position such as lifestyles (Sobel,
1983), life experiences through social inter-
action, cultural orientations, and political
action (Kingston, 1994), patterns of practices
involving residential selection, children’s
peer groups, volunteer organizations
(Kendall, 2006), or region, housing, and cul-
tural consumption (Ganzeboom et al., 1990).
While Sorokin’s pioneering work evoked
many social mobility agencies such as the
army, the church, the family, political, as
well as economic and professional organiza-
tions, schools appear as the conventional
channel of vertical circulation in RSSM. Most
of the papers try to understand differences in
educational attainment and aspirations, racial
or ethnic inequalities in access to education,
and, in a tacit use of human capital theory,
returns to schooling or training. By contrast,
few articles point to the crucial role of the
family in mediating social mobility through
such mechanisms as inheritance of a business
(Szelenyi and Manchin, 1989; Yonay and
Kraus, 2001), marriage and divorce (Cohen,
1986; Lichter and Landry, 1991; Park and
Smits, 2005; Peterson, 1987), child care
and family responsibilities (Maume and
Dunaway, 1989; Spilerman and Schrank,
1991; Wenk and Rosenfeld, 1992).
A few focus on social networks (Cohen,
1986; Coverdill, 1998), political organiza-
tions (Frankel, 1991; Hanley and Treiman,
2005; Massey et al., 1992; Opper et al., 2002;
Useem, 1984), and community organi
zations (Hoff, 2005; Rubin, 1992). While
army and church have long been traditional
channels of vertical circulation, only
Dronkers (1985) has examined the role of
religious affiliation in mediating mobility
and no article considers the role of the army.
While media stars, gangsters, and famous
sport players often represent archetypical
figures of ascending vertical mobility, no
article is devoted to the crucial role of such
organizations as sports clubs, criminal gangs,
and the arts.
Very few articles criticize such implicit
assumptions as the theory of industrialism
and the normative theory of educational mer-
itocracy. Only Jackson et al. (2005) and Dev
Sharda (2005) have tackled the former, while
Wesolowski (1981) is very much alone in
discussing the theoretical weaknesses and
social dangers of the meritocratic social doc-
trine. According to him, the social mobility
literature largely shares the following assump-
tions: the effort a young person invests in
obtaining higher levels of education should
be adequately rewarded; persons with higher
education contribute more, and therefore are
entitled to obtain more; differential rewards
are necessary for social development.
Individualist views of institutional
mediations
Most authors in RSSM study individual
effects rather than collective identities, beliefs
and attitudes, macro-social contexts, institu-
tions, collective processes, and cultures.
The modelling of mobility is more con-
cerned with ‘effects’ on social stratification
than with social classes, seen as identity
groups shaping their members’ individual
and collective destinies. A small number of
articles analyze the ‘subjective’ aspects of
stratification and mobility, and many of these
exceptions can be found in the Marxist and
neo-Weberian traditions, where studies
examine patterns of class consciousness or
class formation (Colbjornsen, 1988;
Eisenstadt, 1984; Wallace and Jepperson,
1986; Western, 1998). Only a few papers focus
on collective interests (Bills, 1998; Wilson,
2001), socio-economic beliefs (Jackman and
Senter, 1983; Kluegel, 1988), public attitudes
(Sikora, 2005), social perceptions (Ayalon
et al., 1988), or social values (Silver and
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LIFECOURSE OF THE SOCIAL MOBILITY PARADIGM
Muller, 1997). These papers could provide
interesting insights into social mobility
research since they tend to show complex
interactions between ‘objective’ and ‘subjec-
tive’ social classifications.
In particular, only two empirical papers
explore subjective aspects of stratification
as they intersect gender or ethnicity/race
divisions. Jackman and Senter (1983)
explore differences between whites and
blacks, and men and women, in the values
attached to various traits (intelligence, emo-
tion); they analyze how dialogue about per-
ceptions between these groups can range
from consensus to muted conflict. Ayalon et al.
(1988) show that individuals from subordinate
ethnic groups who enjoy high social and eco-
nomic status still perceive discrimination.
This individualist view of social mobility
mediations leads to the neglect of macro-
social contexts and cultures in many respects.
Of course, the focus of social mobility
research has very much been comparative
from its inception. But it was for the most
part without the benefit of macro-variables,
systematically characterizing the different
societies, and without ‘thick descriptions’ of
the macro-social context, and of the meso-
level differences among societies (institu-
tions and organizations shaping people’s
trajectories). Most authors tend to agree with
the conventional idea that cross-national
comparative research needs, first and fore-
most, standardized data (Treiman and
Ganzeboom, 2000).
There are exceptions, though, as illustrated
by some studies published in RSSM which
focus on the role of the welfare state: social
stratification effects of redistributive policies
(Wilson, 2001), affirmative action (Edelman
and Petterson, 1999; Manley and Roos, 1999;
Snipp and Hirschman, 2005), minimum
wages (Volscho, 2005), full employment
proposals (Sheak and Dabelko, 1993).
Valocchi (1986) has proposed a comparison
of the welfare states of Great Britain, West
Germany, and Sweden in the post-WWII
period. Drobnic and Blossfeld (2004) explicitly
discuss the theoretical framework of welfare
209
state regimes. The notion of societal context
is evoked in Zhou and Suhomlinova (2001).
Charles (1998) and Wallace and Jepperson
(1986) propose culturalist interpretations of
international differences with respect to con-
ventional variables.
One of the main reasons explaining the
increasing focus on individual ‘effects’ is the
hegemony of statistical methods. The quanti-
tative approach has partially ‘swallowed up’
the qualitative one, as is apparent in the mod-
elling of mobility tables. The latter is largely
concerned with the ‘effects’ of social origin
on individual destination (net of structural
changes in occupational distributions), rather
than with what the particular flows between
specific categories can tell us about the social
processes involved: for instance inheritance,
strategies with respect to schooling or mar-
riage, and ‘opportunity hoarding’ (Tilly,
1998). This hegemony is even more visible in
the extensive use of multivariate analysis of
continuous, vertical variables.
The growing pressures for the harmoniza-
tion of data and for the sophistication of
methods partially explain the lack of interest
in less easily captured cultural differences.
There are thus relatively few qualitative
papers in RSSM. Most of the time, qualitative
surveys are simply seen as an exploratory
stage before quantitative data collection.
Very few papers rely on the analysis of a lim-
ited number of interviews, among them
Finlay (1988), Finlay and Martin (1994),
Hoff (2005), Spitze and Shaffer-King (1985),
Useem (1984), and Vallas (2001). This has
contributed to a neglect of the ‘subjective’
aspects of mobility and macro-social contexts.
While multilevel analysis has ambitions to
capture social contexts more effectively, it
cannot replace ‘thick’ descriptions of such
contexts.
AN EMERGING PARADIGM
While the question of social mobility continues
to fascinate a large number of sociologists,
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210 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
and while it has given rise to rich debates
over the last six decades, our examination of
articles published in the main journal in the
field since 1981 has shown that a pattern of
normal science has set in. There also appears
an increasing sense of a mismatch between
this mainstream approach and the contempo-
rary reality of the reproduction and transmis-
sion of social inequality over time. This is
why a new paradigm is emerging.
The emergence of the lifecourse
approach
As we saw earlier, the 1991 review of the
succession of three generations of mobility
studies by Ganzeboom, Treiman, and Ultee
was very optimistic: methodological issues
had been tackled, improved answers to clas-
sical questions had been provided, the field
was moving on. The very same first two
authors are more tentative in talking about
the fourth generation of studies in 2000.
There were major advances in comparative
projects, the survey designs and the data
were better, the methods ever more sophisti-
cated. But the changes, while largely posi-
tive, were less easily characterized. There
was a return to ‘the central question of how
the stratification outcomes of individuals are
affected by their social environment’, but the
ways in which it was tackled became much
more diversified, suggesting that a number of
researchers had identified anomalies, aspects
of social mobility that were not adequately
accounted for through the usual approaches.
Treiman and Ganzeboom (2000) thus
praise the completion of the classical
CASMIN project (Erikson and Goldthorpe,
1992), which definitively established that
there is a core mobility pattern common to all
industrialized nations. But they then cite a
number of new avenues being explored. For
instance, Shavit and Blossfeld (1993) exam-
ine the effects of various factors on the odds
of making the transition from each educa-
tional level to the next, while Shavit and
Müller (1998) focus on how variations in the
educational systems of various countries
(especially with respect to vocational training)
affect the transition between school and work,
and in particular the status of the first job.
DiPrete and Grusky (1990) constructed
macro-variables to characterize year to year
changes in employment and personnel poli-
cies and in government job training budgets
in order to systematically compare levels of
occupational attainment. DiPrete and his col-
leagues (1997) also characterized the career
mobility regimes stemming from the organi-
zation of labour markets in four societies
with different political traditions, Germany,
the Netherlands, Sweden, and the US. These
efforts testify to a much finer grained atten-
tion to the variation of institutional arrange-
ments between countries. And while
educational institutions still receive the bulk
of this attention, variations in the organiza-
tion of labour markets are also considered.
This extends Sorokin’s intuitions about the
key role played by a broad variety of institu-
tions in the reproduction, transmission, and
changes of social privilege.
Treiman and Ganzeboom (2000) also rec-
ognize other new avenues. In the Marxist tra-
dition, Wright (1989) has led an ambitious
comparative project on class structure and
class consciousness, paying attention to
national variations in the distribution of indi-
viduals, male and female, into positions of
authority and control over enterprises; he and
his colleagues also broached the issue of the
permeability of class boundaries, and of its
influence on class consciousness. Kelley and
Evans (1993) led an effort to explore percep-
tions regarding social position, and their con-
nection to political attitudes. Szelényi,
Treiman and their colleagues (1995) sparked a
number of research projects, using retrospec-
tive life-history data, about how individual tra-
jectories were transformed in post-communist
Eastern European societies; attention was paid
especially to whether the logic of stratification
was radically altered with these societal
changes, or whether, on the contrary, those
who held privileged positions beforehand were
able to put these advantages to use afterwards.
Mayer also compared different birth
cohorts interviewed in the German Life
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LIFECOURSE OF THE SOCIAL MOBILITY PARADIGM
History Study (see, among others, Brückner
and Mayer, 2005), examining how they
were hit by important historical events at
various ages, with different consequences
on their trajectories and life chances.
Blossfeld led an ambitious project compar-
ing the effects of the globalization process
on the lifecourses of individuals in fourteen
countries, belonging to five different welfare
regimes (Blossfeld et al., 2005). He exam-
ined four groups: young people, males and
females in mid-career, and aging workers, in
order to see how, according to the institu-
tional context of their countries, their trajec-
tories (educational, occupational, and
familial) were impacted by new economic
uncertainties.
While these developments clearly represent
major shifts, and indeed increased sophistica-
tion, in the exploration of the influence of the
social environment on social mobility,
Treiman and Ganzeboom (2000) do not iden-
tify them as providing a basis for the emer-
gence of a new paradigm. In the same vein,
they deal in quite a technical way with one of
the key aspects of the relationship of individ-
uals to institutions, referring to it as the prob-
lem of ‘selection bias’. What they refer to is
the fact that individuals found in particular
social positions are not a representative cross-
section of the overall population. They get an
education to prepare for a specific profession,
they only work if the wages offered are high
enough, and so on. In other words, individuals
make decisions in situations of complexity
and uncertainty; this, as we will see, is a basic
tenet of the lifecourse approach.
We will argue that this portends the emer-
gence of a new paradigm in the field of social
mobility. Attention is paid to new and
intriguing phenomena; this then leads to
innovative results, using new methods (in
particular the new data provided by detailed
retrospective life histories or ambitious
household panel surveys). The development
of these genuinely longitudinal methods rep-
resents a belated response to longstanding
critiques against transversal approaches to
social mobility (Bertaux, 1973). This new
paradigm combines an increasingly rich
211
representation of social contexts with a view
of individuals neither as simply acted upon
by society, nor as free agents; social actors
are influenced by institutions and life cir-
cumstances, but they also make choices
among alternatives in a context of path
dependency (Myles, 1998).
Traditional mobility tables assumed that a
few key milestones (parent’s position when
ego was about 16 years old, and then ego’s
first position and current position) provided
an adequate representation of the whole
trajectory. This assumption has now become
quite problematic. Current jobs do not
adequately represent economic status in a
context of high and increasing levels of job
instability. Social origin is increasingly diffi-
cult to characterize because of changing
levels of homogamy/heterogamy, of family
disruptions, and of gender differences in life
cycles. The complexity of transitions from
school to work, and from there to retirement
also causes difficulties for the proper identifi-
cation of first and final jobs. All of these illus-
trate non-linear features of increasingly
unstable social trajectories. They denote
anomalies in the traditional social mobility
paradigm.
In their own review of the recent work of
Research Committee 28, Hout and DiPrete
(2006) hint at the emergence of such a new
paradigm. They identify recent advances in
five areas: (1) the impact of family structure
beyond the status variables that were the core
of the Blau–Duncan model, (2) the impact of
neighbourhoods, (3) the impact of school
systems, (4) the impact of labour markets,
and (5) the impact of the welfare state.
These areas are clearly more diversified
than those cited in earlier periods; even
more importantly, they are seen as correspon-
ding to rich patterns of institutional influ-
ence. Families evolve as the trajectories
of their members change, and vice versa.
Neighbourhoods affect the lives of individu-
als who live there, but they are also power-
fully shaped by shifts in the composition of
their populations. Schools do not only teach,
they also select, track, certify in ways that vary
from one place to another. Labour markets are
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212 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
not only markets, they are also at the conflu-
ence of numerous collective influences and
institutional interventions, which shape
supply and demand. And welfare states have
precisely been set up to rectify, up to a point
and in a variety of ways, social inequalities
and their reproduction.
According to Hout and DiPrete, a growing
proportion of research in the field of social
mobility focuses on the lifecourse rather than
on the more traditional intergenerational
issues. This is what we want to briefly docu-
ment here. But we first need to circumscribe
the notion of the lifecourse.
What does the notion of lifecourse
mean?
This is a rich and growing research perspec-
tive, going all the way back to Wright Mills’
The Sociological Imagination (1959). It can
be, and has been, summarized in a number of
ways. Marshall and Mueller’s account (2003)
is particularly useful because it identifies
connections initially established by Glen
Elder (1992), a major figure in lifecourse
research, with the social mobility research
agenda. In Blau and Duncan’s work, as well
as in analysis by means of social mobility
tables initiated by Sorokin, time-ordered
variables are crucial, as well as the diversity
both in individual experiences, and in social
environments, especially national environ-
ments. As Marshall and Mueller point out,
this is closely related to the notion of differ-
entiation over time, or cumulative advantage,
which plays an increasingly key role among
lifecourse researchers (Elman and O’Rand,
1995; Ferraro and Kelley-Moore, 2003;
O’Rand, 1996).
We are offering here our own version of the
basic principles of lifecourse analysis, a ver-
sion well suited to identifying the contours of
an emerging paradigm in the social mobility
field. We identify four such principles.
In the first place, life is longitudinal: Indi
viduals, as human agents, build their future on
the basis of the constraints and opportunities
provided by their past. At each stage of their
lives, they examine their circumstances,
using whatever information, ideas, and
beliefs life has made available to them. They
then adopt a course of action in order to
maintain or alter this situation. The process is
iterative, as circumstances change, in part as
a result of the course of action selected ear-
lier. There are of course significant disparities
in the circumstances of individuals, as well as
in the quality of the knowledge available to
make decisions. Moreover, lifecourse research
has shown that initial differences in opportuni-
ties, sometimes relatively limited, tend to be
amplified with the passage of time. The timing
and sequence of events and transitions also
play a key role, and consequences of these
events and transitions unfold in the short, but
also in the middle and the long term.
In the second place, life is multifaceted:
Individuals contribute to, and derive
resources from various institutions with
which they are in contact – the family, com-
munities, markets, the State. Indeed, the life-
course of individuals essentially depends on
the extent to which they enjoy resources such
as good health, a mastery of knowledge, and
a certain level of economic security. These
three basic resources can be seen as both
causes and consequences of one another, as
the lifecourse unfolds: at various junctures,
individuals only fare as well as their health,
literacy, and economic security will allow;
and in turn health, literacy, and income secu-
rity are largely the product of what happens
at these successive junctures. The reference
to various interdependent forms of capital is
useful here: resources are not only used, they
are also accumulated (or depleted) over the
lifecourse, thus affecting life chances and
social conditions in a cumulative and interac-
tive way. Besides economic capital, human
and cultural capital, and health capital, social
capital is increasingly evoked. Through
social networks, individuals can indeed
mobilize other useful resources for them-
selves, their families, and their communities.
In the third place, lives are linked. This
means that the lifecourse of individuals is
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LIFECOURSE OF THE SOCIAL MOBILITY PARADIGM
profoundly affected by what happens in the
lifecourse of their family members, and vice
versa. We are all born to parents, who usually
care for us and expect some form of care and
love as they age. A similar relationship binds
a large proportion of middle-aged individuals
to their own children as well, and indeed it is
experienced in the context of increasingly
diverse families, intact, single parent or
reconstituted. This has critical consequences
for the lifecourse of individuals, not only
when they are young or aged and dependent,
but also when they are middle-aged and shar-
ing the burden of caring for dependents in
their families, in their communities, and in
their society’s institutions (e.g., pension
schemes).
Finally, lives are lived in social contexts.
Individuals are embedded not only in fami-
lies, but also in communities, which can offer
various levels of opportunities (for instance
jobs, quality of schools and childcare serv-
ices, physical security, quality of the environ-
ment, availability of commercial services)
and of support (sociability, community
organizations). These obviously shape the
trajectories of residents, especially in the
case of the more place-bound sub-popula-
tions, such as children, the aged, the handi-
capped, and the poor. States also play a key
role in shaping lifecourses, through their
policies in the fields of health, education,
social assistance, urban affairs, transportation,
the environment, and so on. Research reveals
striking differences even among advanced
societies, which Esping-Andersen (1990,
1999) has characterized as differences in
welfare regimes. Such regimes represent
different global and historically resilient
models of organizing the production and dis-
tribution of welfare by markets, States, fami-
lies, and communities: liberal countries
emphasize markets and residual social pro-
grammes, social-democratic countries offer
universal social protection while emphasizing
widespread participation in the labour market,
and conservative countries tend to rely more
on families and on occupation-based social
insurance schemes. This last element draws
213
the lifecourse perspective away from a rather
individualistic stance, and anchors it in the
comparative analysis of the interplay
between individuals, groups, and institutions.
Explicit and implicit uses of the
lifecourse perspective in recent
social mobility research
These principles are increasingly inspiring
researchers in social mobility, who are asking
new questions and identifying new factors in
implicit reference to Sorokin’s view of the
key role of a variety of institutions.
Hout and DiPrete’s review of the field
(Hout and Diprete, 2006) provides strong
indications in this respect. We cannot do
better than refer the reader to this document,
and briefly paraphrase its summary of recent
developments and findings (mostly using
the paper’s substantial subtitles). According
to them:
● Educational tracking increases the variance of
educational outcomes.
● School-to-work transitions are smoother and
early job mobility is lower in countries where the
school curriculum is oriented towards providing
vocational training and certification for entry into
specific occupations.
● Strong welfare states and institutionalized labour
markets reduce poverty and the growth in wage
inequality.
● Social welfare policies that facilitate the combin-
ing of work and motherhood cause women’s
work careers to be more continuous, and societal
differences in these policies create societal differ-
ences in the structure of women’s careers over
the lifecourse.
● Strong welfare states smooth the dynamics of the
socioeconomic lifecourse by buffering the impact
of mobility events.
● Welfare states and labour markets affect occupa-
tional mobility via their impacts on the process of
vacancy creation in the labour market, and on the
size of the self-employment sector.
● State intervention in the mobility process has cre-
ated historical periods (typically of limited dura-
tion) where particular groups or classes defined
by occupation, employment status, or political
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214 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
party membership were favoured or disfavoured
in the mobility process. These interventions into
the mobility process typically created persisting
differences in the subsequent life chances of the
affected cohorts.
● Family disruption generates downward mobility
both over the lifecourse and across generations.
● Marital homogamy is found in every country, but
there is considerable heterogeneity in its extent.
These recent developments testify to a shift
in paradigm, even though Hout and DiPrete
never claim that there has been such a para-
digm change. We do. With respect to socio-
economic position, and to the transmission of
social privilege, individuals are now increas-
ingly seen as navigating, in the company of
their parents, children, and (successive)
spouses, a complicated world, where the vari-
ous dimensions of life interact. They are at
once workers (in increasingly non-standard
jobs), parents and carers, students or in a life-
long learning trajectory, retired but not neces-
sarily out of employment. To negotiate all of
these dimensions, they enjoy disparate
amounts of various forms of capital, they fit
more or less into institutional contexts, they
have differential access to social networks, and
thus to resources, or they are socially isolated.
This interface with groups and institutions
reflects where they live, in differentially
endowed neighbourhoods (Bernard et al.,
2007), and in welfare regimes which organ-
ize differently the division of labour between
markets, the public sector, families, and com-
munities in the production and distribution of
well-being (Bernard and Boucher, 2007).
And of course, this broadening of the ambit
of social mobility has led researchers to
devote much more of their work to gender
differences and gender issues.
In Research in Social Stratification and
Mobility, three recent papers explicitly refer
to the lifecourse approach to show its heuris-
tic interest compared to the social mobility
paradigm. Palloni and Milesi (2006) show
how social stratification theories ignore
mechanisms originating in early childhood;
they find support for lifecourse theories,
since early childhood health affects later
economic success and adult health status.
Drobnic and Blossfeld (2004) use the life-
course principle of ‘interdependent or linked
lives’ to remedy failures of the traditional
social mobility paradigm in understanding
mechanisms for access to labour market posi-
tions. In their review of the Wisconsin
Longitudinal Study (WLS), Sewell et al.
(2004) show how interest shifted, over
40 years, from the analysis of post-secondary
aspirations and educational attainment to
long-term analysis of the lifecourse and aging.
A brief examination of the activities at the
scientific meetings of ISA’s Research
Committee 28 between 1991 and 200710
confirms the impression that a new paradigm
is emerging. Welfare states, for instance,
were featured in the meeting titles three
times, in Sweden in 1996, in Germany in
2001, and in Norway in 2005 (this list of
countries is not unexpected). And the 2007
meeting, in Montreal, was entitled:
‘Comparative advantage: education, health,
wealth, and institutional contexts’.
The examination of a few key words is
also telling. We have divided the period into
two sequences of almost equivalent lengths:
1991–99, and 2000 to the present. Lifecourse
is mentioned 6 times in paper titles in the first
period, and 13 times in the second one.
Poverty has respective counts of 3 and 7,
wealth of 2 and 5, social capital and networks
2 and 11, welfare states/regimes 2 and 11,
and divorce and separation 2 against 5.
Finally, social inequalities of health, which
are an important and productive field in
social epidemiology (see, for instance,
Marmot and Wilkinson, 2003), are surpris-
ingly absent from the research agenda of
students of social mobility; they may be on
the rise, though, with 3 papers and 13 respec-
tively in the two periods.
These are modest counts, but they seem
to indicate a growing interest, among
researchers, in a new approach to social
mobility. Indeed, quite a few major contem-
porary researchers in the field examine social
mobility from a lifecourse point of view.
Mayer has done extensive work in this
perspective, both conceptually (2001, 2004;
Settersten and Mayer, 1997) and empirically
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LIFECOURSE OF THE SOCIAL MOBILITY PARADIGM
(Brückner and Mayer, 2005). DiPrete (see
DiPrete and McManus, 2001) has turned to
income as a better representation of the long-
term socio-economic position of individuals
in this age of employment volatility. He has
introduced new factors in international com-
parisons besides occupational history, such
as family disruptions and welfare regimes.
He has also contributed to the development
of the crucial notion of cumulative advantage
(DiPrete and Eirich, 2006). Leisering (2002)
has analyzed the interplay of government and
the lifecourse, paying attention to welfare
careers as well as employment careers.
Hout, in collaboration with Beller and
Hout (2006), has examined how cross-
national differences in the association
between origins and destinations correspond
to differences in both welfare regime type
and access to post-secondary education.
Breen (2004) has led an effort to systemati-
cally compare social fluidity in eight
European countries whose policies are quite
different; he has focused on the situation of
young people (Breen, 2002), as well as on
the interplay between social origins, family
structures and events, the characteristics of
educational systems, and social destinations
(Breen and Jonsson, 2005). He and his col-
leagues found a declining association
between class origins and educational attain-
ment in many countries, and raised questions
about which sets of welfare and educational
institutional arrangements, besides the social
democratic ones, can bring about this simi-
larity in achievements. He has also addressed
(with Cooke, 2005) the issue of the persist-
ence of the gendered division of domestic
labour.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
We have proposed a reading of the evolution
of the field of social mobility in terms of
evolving paradigms. Sorokin’s seminal
research launched the field on many promis-
ing avenues. Some of his intuitions were
found at the core of the original social mobility
215
paradigm, which mainly asked, in three
successive ‘generations’ of research under-
takings, whether societies were equally fluid
and whether such fluidity was progressing
with modernization. The mobility table was
much used at first, and then fell into some
disrepute as multivariate status attainment
models, featuring education variables, held
increasing sway. But mobility tables drew
attention again with the availability of more
powerful modelling tools and datasets; the
qualitative categories ceased, however, to serve
as the basis for interpretations of class experi-
ences. As to the third element in Sorokin’s per-
spective, the role of a multiplicity of diverse
institutions in sorting individuals into social
positions, it was more or less abandoned by
mainstream scientific work in the field.
More recently, however, a new paradigm
has arguably become more important. One
key factor had been the neglect of such
phenomena as increasingly volatile careers,
complex institutional arrangements in educa-
tional systems, the changing role and even
nature of families, now often characterized by
dual careers and instability (with attendant
consequences on economic positions), the
influence of welfare regimes (which inter-
vene in very different ways to help individu-
als and families control their trajectories), or
even the role of health as a mediating factor
in the reproduction and transmission of social
inequality. In this context, a growing number
of researchers are turning to the notion of the
lifecourse as a possible way to organize these
new research findings and to shape the future
in this field of sociology. And of course, the
field has kept its international comparative
tradition, which should serve it well as the
interplay of individual trajectories and
diverse institutional arrangements in various
countries is further explored.
NOTES
1 Among others, see for the oldest ones Bendix and
Lipset (1953), Lipset and Bendix (1959), Miller (1960),
or Pease et al. (1970) and for more recent ones
9781412934633-Chap-14 1/10/09 8:49 AM Page 216
216 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
Ganzeboom et al. (1991), Cuin (1993), Treiman and
Ganzeboom (2000), DiPrete (2000), Hout and
DiPrete (2006).
2 The Research Committee of the International
Sociological Association on Social Stratification and
Social Mobility (RC28) was established as far back as
1950, and ever since, it has, been a very active
forum for discussion among a core set of specialists.
3 For instance, the statistician Galton was one of
the first to implement the principle of stratification to
perform a descriptive analysis of social divisions.
Using Booth’s surveys in London, Galton (1909)
wanted to demonstrate that such a division can be
derived from a normal distribution of civic worth.
4 ‘The class of the proletariat is recruited princi-
pally from the failures of the upper strata and from
the less intelligent elements of the lower classes,
incapable of ascent’ (Sorokin, 1959: 457).
5 For instance, for which social classes does the
army play a role as a social mobility conduit? What is
the role of largely intra-class organizations, such as
trade unions or professional organizations, as opposed
to the ones who are, at least in principle, open to
various social classes, such as schools and churches?
6 For a review, see Boudon (1973) and Cuin (1993).
7 These authors even proposed a definition of
social classes which included among its parameters
that a class was relatively impermeable to mobility
from and to other classes.
8 See for example Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992:
123–5).
9 We have reviewed 261 articles, contained in 24
volumes ranging from 1981 to the present.
10 This is the period for which the programs of
the meetings are available on the Web. Thirty-five
meetings were held, and we have the list of papers
for 29 of them.
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PART THREE

Research on Social
Issues - Interweaving
Processes
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9781412934633-Chap-15 1/10/09 8:50 AM Page 223
Health, Illness and Mortality
in Less Developed Countries:
Convergence, Divergence,
and Stagnation
INTRODUCTION
In spite of increasing globalization and inter-
dependence between various parts of the
world over the past three decades, there has
been an increased divergence between more
developed and less developed regions in
terms of socioeconomic development;
although there has been a strong convergence
within the former group and strong diver-
gence within the latter group (Pritchett,
1997). A few developing countries such as
China, India, South Korea, and Indonesia
have made enormous economic gains, while
many including Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina
have continued to stagnate despite large cap-
ital inflows of foreign direct investment. Sub-
Saharan Africa, which historically has lagged
behind most regions, has continued to expe-
rience negative per capita economic growth
over the past two decades. Eastern Europe
and the Russian Federation experienced the
15
Bali Ram and Shefali S. Ram 1
largest declines in their economic growth
during the 1990s, while much of Latin
America and the Caribbean have recovered
after the economic slump of the 1980s. Global
progress on many other indicators of social and
economic development has also been uneven.
Although these regional economic condi-
tions are not necessarily a product of demo-
graphic situations, they are clearly reflected
in demographic behaviours. The purpose of
this chapter is to examine how far social and
economic changes have led to the conver-
gence, divergence, and stagnation in health,
illness, and mortality patterns in less devel-
oped parts of the world, and why some coun-
tries and various subgroups have made
enormous gains while others have been left
behind. (For the sake of analytical conven-
ience, we include in the less developed
regions all countries which are not classified
as ‘developed’ according to the World Bank.
We do not make a distinction between less
9781412934633-Chap-15 1/10/09 8:50 AM Page 224
224 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
developed, least developed, and developing
countries.) Basically, we focus on four factors –
economic development, income inequality,
public spending on health, and maternal
education – that are inextricably linked with
the process of globalization and mortality
patterns. This chapter is largely descriptive
rather than analytical and borrows heavily
from the existing literature on the subject.
Much of the data comes from published
reports of the United Nations, World Bank,
and Demographic and Health Surveys. We
begin with a brief description of the demo-
graphic transition and epidemiological tran-
sition theories, which provide the rationale
for the convergence hypothesis. Then we
examine some selected measures of health, ill-
ness, and mortality. Next, we examine the roles
of the above-mentioned four factors in bringing
about the convergence, divergence, or stagna-
tion in health and mortality patterns.
Essentially, we focus on the conflict and com-
petition between nations and groups for access
to scarce resources for improving health condi-
tions and reducing mortality. This study is
guided by the assumption that there is inherent
duality in all societies and in today’s competi-
tive world, nations, groups, and population seg-
ments which lack the skills, resources, or
opportunity to compete well, fall behind the
more privileged and resourceful nations,
groups, and segments. The basic premise of the
discussion is that people and sections with
better social, economic, and political resources
are better able to exploit the available resources
at the expense of those with poorer resources.
The challenge for governments, donor agen-
cies, and international bodies is how to develop
cooperative strategies – an important ingredient
of convergence – for the efficient allocation of
scarce resources among competing sectors.
Finally, we offer some implications of these
processes for public policies.
THEORETICAL CONTEXT
The demographic transition theory is one of
the best known theories of population change.
Since the early writings of its proponents, this
theory has undergone numerous modifications
and critical appraisals (Caldwell, 1976,
1986a; Friedlander et al., 1999). The theory
has moved from being a descriptive device for
portraying declines in mortality and fertility
in various parts of the world to an explanatory
and predictive device of population change. In
its initial formulations, the theory viewed
societies moving from a stage where mortality
and fertility were high to a stage of transition
where mortality declined first and rapidly, was
then followed by fertility declines, and finally
reached a stage where both fertility and mor-
tality were at a low level. According to this
theory, within a country both mortality and
fertility decline as a result of various struc-
tural changes (urbanization, industrialization,
a rise in women’s status, a rise in education, a
decline in religiosity), commonly subsumed
under the rubric of ‘modernization’.
Building on the theory of demographic
transition, Omran (1971) proposed a theory
of ‘epidemiologic transition’ according to
which the ‘shifts in health and disease pat-
terns ... are closely associated with the demo-
graphic and socioeconomic transitions that
constitute the modernization complex’
(Omran,1971: 527). The focus of the theory
is on ‘the complex changes in patterns of
health and disease and on the interactions
between these patterns and their demo-
graphic, economic, and sociological determi-
nants and consequences’ (Omran, 1971:
510). According to this theory, transition
from high to low levels of mortality typically
accompanies social development, as in the
West, or a combination of medical develop-
ment and social changes as experienced by
many developing countries. The transition
emphasizes the secular and long-term shifts
from high infant mortality, primarily caused
by infectious and communicable diseases, to
low levels of mortality, concentrated among
the elderly, due primarily to chronic, degener-
ative, and man-made diseases.
According to the epidemiologic transition
theory, changes in disease patterns typically
occur in three stages and Omran (1971,
1977) identified each stage by the major
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MORTALITY IN LESS DEVELOPED COUNTRIES
determinant of death prevailing at that time.
The first stage, which occurred in Europe
through the eighteenth century, is the ‘age of
pestilence (infections) and famine’. This
stage was patterned by extremely high and
fluctuating mortality, where life expectancy
varied between 20 and 40 years. Most devel-
oping countries remained in this stage until
the mid-twentieth century and some of them
(several countries in sub-Saharan Africa, for
example) are still struggling to move to the
next stage. The main factors responsible for
high and fluctuating mortality during this
period were infectious and parasitic diseases,
plagues, wars, natural disasters, and famines.
This stage emerged slowly into the second
stage of transition, the ‘age of receding pan-
demics’, when major infections first began to
decline. This stage occurred in Europe during
the nineteenth century and the early part of
the twentieth century and was characterized
by a decline in major infectious diseases and
the frequency of epidemics, which have nearly
disappeared. Life expectancy increased to
between 30 and 50 years. In the early stages
of the transition, the decline in mortality was
mostly due to improved food supply and
overall better living conditions and to a lesser
degree due to medical progress, sanitation
measures, or organized public health activi-
ties (McKeown, 1976; Rockett, 1994). In the
latter half of the nineteenth century, substan-
tial mortality declines were due to improve-
ments in public health and sanitation
measures, such as purification of water,
better sewage disposal, and better food
hygiene. Thus, diseases such as whooping
cough, respiratory tuberculosis, measles,
scarlet fever, and diphtheria were brought
under control long before any medical inter-
ventions. The third stage, ‘the age of degen-
erative and man-made diseases’, was
distinguished by a continued decline in mor-
tality, which eventually reached stability at a
relatively low level, with life expectancy
reaching around 70 years. Typhoid, tubercu-
losis, and cholera were replaced by man-
made degenerative diseases such as cancer,
heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, as the
major causes of death.
225
Essentially, the concept of convergence
lies at the heart of these theories (Goesling
and Firebaugh, 2004; Omran, 1971; Vallin
and Meslé, 2005; Wilson, 2001), and they
implicitly assume that less-developed coun-
tries would follow the experiences of the
West and consequently there will be a demo-
graphic convergence between various
regions. This notion has led most demogra-
phers and statistical agencies to assume a
convergence of mortality patterns in their
population projections, including those
prepared by the UN (2007) periodically for
various countries.
Studies have pointed out a number of lim-
itations of the transition theory (Salomon and
Murray, 2002), the detailed discussion of
which is beyond the scope of this chapter. A
major limitation of the theory is its claim to
be a universal theory of a ‘linear’ and ‘unidi-
rectional change’ (Frenk et al., 1989: 30;
Salomon and Murray, 2002: 205). Most ana-
lysts assume that once mortality starts to con-
verge across countries, the trend does not
reverse (Goesling and Firebaugh, 2004). As
discussed later, a number of countries have
substantially deviated from the path of con-
vergence (McMichael et al., 2004; Moser
et al., 2004; Ruzicka and Hansluwka, 1982;
Vallin and Meslé, 2005), while others have
shown the sign of ‘counter transitions’
(Frenk et al., 1989: 31). Another limitation of
the theory is its lack of emphasis on the
inherent conflict and competition that dis-
courage convergence between various popu-
lation subgroups. When Omran revisited his
theory of epidemiological transition 30 years
after his original publication, he hypothe-
sized that ‘while the transition produces
change in all social classes, it usually starts
earlier and proceeds more quickly among the
more affluent and privileged than among the
poor and disadvantaged sectors of the same
society’ (Omran, 1998: 110). The privileged
are better informed, have better access to the
health care system and make better use of the
available resources, whereas the less privi-
leged lag behind and in certain
instances – particularly in highly segmented
societies – have a hard time catching up.
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226 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
More recently, Vallin and Meslé (2005: 85),
reformulated this hypothesis:
Arguably, each major improvement in the matter
of health is likely to first lead to a divergence in
mortality since the most favoured segments of the
population benefit most from the improvement.
When the rest of the population accesses the ben-
efit of the improvement (through improved social
conditions, behavioural changes, health policies,
etc.), a phase of convergence begins and can lead
to homogenization until a new major advance
occurs. The entire health transition process thus
breaks down into successive stages, each including
a specific divergence-convergence sub-process.
There is a growing body of evidence that
suggests that despite impressive achieve-
ments in reducing mortality and extending
life expectancies, many populations and par-
ticularly those in disadvantaged groups have
remained in the early stages of the epidemio-
logical transition, where communicable and
infectious diseases including pneumonia,
diarrhoeal diseases, malaria, measles, and
tuberculosis are still the major cause of
death. Some analysts argue that under the
forces of globalization, health gains in a
number of developing and less-developed
countries have not been shared equally and
the conflict between needs and resources has
continued to persist. The competition for the
available resources has mainly benefited the
better-off, while certain segments, especially
women, children, and the poor have been left
behind. The less privileged continue to live in
poorer health conditions and when stricken
by a disease or disaster they are more likely
to die than are the more privileged (Cornia,
2001; Ram, 2001; Sen and Bonita, 2000;
Wilkinson, 1996; World Bank, 2003). This
phenomenon could be referred to as ‘epi-
demiological polarization’ as Frenk et al.
(1989: 31) have labelled it.
OVERALL TRENDS IN HEALTH,
ILLNESS, AND MORTALITY
Looking from a long-term perspective, there
has been a worldwide improvement in health
conditions and a decline in mortality. In
1800, the global average life expectancy
at birth was about 28.5 years. Over the next
100 years, it improved very little, reaching
32.0 years in 1900. However, much more
rapid progress occurred in the first half of the
twentieth century, when life expectancy
increased by 14 years and reached 46.4 years
during 1950–1955. Progress was faster
during the latter part of the century when
global life expectancy rose to 66.0 during
2000–2005 (Riley, 2005; UN, 2007). In
Europe, which has led the demographic tran-
sition, the pattern was more pronounced.
During the first half of the century, life
expectancy rose from 42.7 years in 1900 to
65.6 years during the period 1950–1955 and
to 73.8 years during 2000–2005. In Europe,
the largest reductions in mortality occurred
from declines in air-borne and water-borne
infectious and communicable diseases,
resulting from large improvements in public
health provisions such as sewage and water
supply, better availability of food and
improvements in nutrition, and the dissemi-
nation of hygienic knowledge among, popu-
lations, rather than from improvements in
public health technology (McKeown, 1976).
It was only during the latter phases when
medical advancements (such as inoculation
and vaccination for smallpox, cholera, tuber-
culosis) helped reduce mortality further.
In the less developed parts of the world,
progress was much slower, although the
regions exhibit enormous variations in mortal-
ity and socioeconomic development. For
example, for the period of 1950–1955, life
expectancy at birth in Asia was only
41.0 years, and in Africa it was only 38.5 years,
lower than that observed in the Americas
and Europe fifty years before (41.0 and
42.7 years). However, progress was made rather
quickly in several countries, while there was
little change in many others. Between 1950 and
1955 and 2000 and 2005, life expectancy rose
from 41.0 to 67.5 years in Asia and from
51.4 to 72.0 in Latin America and the
Caribbean. China’s experience was exemplary,
where life expectancy rose from 40.8 years
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MORTALITY IN LESS DEVELOPED COUNTRIES
during 1950–1955 to 65.3 years during
1975–80, although the pace of progress has
become slower since then (UN, 2007). Much
of the mortality decline in developing coun-
tries occurred as a result of improved and
imported medical technologies, particularly
those related to the use of vaccines and antibi-
otics for controlling infectious diseases, which
were introduced in the early 1940s (Bloom
and Williamson, 1997). In Europe, it took
almost one and half centuries for life
expectancy to rise from 33.3 years in 1800 to
64.7 years in 1950. China made a similar gain
in less than 25 years. Sri Lanka is a classic
example, where medical technology played an
important role in reducing mortality within a
short period. In this country, life expectancy at
birth rose slowly and steadily from about 32
years during 1920–22 to 46 years during
1945–47, with a gain of 14 years in about 25
years. With the introduction of DDT against
malaria, life expectancy rose to 60 years in
1954, with a gain of an additional 14 years
within just 7 years (Livi-Bacci, 1992; UN,
1963). In sum, less-developed countries were
able to control their level of mortality just by
importing a wide range of cost-effective med-
ical technologies, without much social and
economic development.
These observations are suggestive of the
convergence hypothesis. However, there are
some important exceptions where the mortal-
ity level stagnated or showed signs of rever-
sal. In the 1950s and 1960s, mortality levels
in Eastern Europe and the former communist
states of the Soviet Union used to be closer to
those in the industrialized world. However, in
recent years the patterns changed dramati-
cally. In Eastern Europe, life expectancy rose
from 64.2 years for the period of 1950–55 to
69.6 years during 1965–70, but fluctuated
around the same level until 1985–90 before
declining to 67.8 years during 2000–2005
(UN, 2007). The experience of the Russian
Federation is striking. Its life expectancy
used to be among the world’s highest, but
now it is no better than that of many develop-
ing countries. The Russian life expectancy
rose from 64.5 years during the period of
227
1950–55 to 69.3 years during 1965–70, very
close to that of Europe and North America.
Since then, it has continued to decline and
has reached a level as low as 64.8 years
during 2000–2005, below the levels in Asia
(67.5) and Latin America and the Caribbean
(72.0). This was largely a result of an
increase in adult mortality rather than infant
mortality, which has continued to decline,
albeit at a slower pace (UN, 2000: 33–34).
Increased stress from the transition to a
market economy, abrupt economic transition,
large recessions, and uncertainty may have
been partially responsible for this uneven
pattern, although reasons for this phenome-
non are still unclear (Brainerd and Cutler,
2005; Murrell, 1996).
Slowdowns and reversals in mortality pat-
terns are most apparent in sub-Saharan
Africa, where a number of countries are still
in the first and second stages of epidemio-
logic transition. In this region, life
expectancy rose from 37.6 years during
1950–55 to 49.9 years during 1985–90,
but has declined since then and reached
48.8 years by 2000–2005 (UN, 2007). Once
again, the stagnation and reversal in mortal-
ity in this region have to do primarily with a
rise in adult mortality, particularly that
resulting from the emergence of HIV/AIDS
(UN, 2003b: 11–16). The infant mortality
rate has continued to decline, although at a
slower pace than in early periods. Africa,
China, and India were almost at the same
level in the 1950s. China, however, has made
enormous progress since the 1960s and has
reached a mortality level close to that of
Latin America and the Caribbean. India’s
progress was slower until the early 1980s.
Only recently, has its mortality started to
decline at a rather fast pace, although still at
a much slower pace than China’s. Africa’s
mortality level was not only very high to
begin with, but also its improvement has
been very slow. Tropical geography, slug-
gish economic development, widespread
malnutrition, the emergence of new epi-
demics like AIDS, and other infectious dis-
eases such as endemic malaria and
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228 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
tuberculosis, and to some extent wars and
armed conflicts are known to be responsible
for these mortality conditions (Bloom and
Sachs, 1998; Sachs et al., 2001; UN, 2000:
18–19). Even today, a large segment of the
population in many African and Asian coun-
tries is at the early stages of epidemiological
transition, marred by largely avoidable dis-
eases. Around 2000, 15% of the total popu-
lation in Ghana, 34% in Zambia, and 49% in
Botswana were affected by malaria; the
prevalence of tuberculosis exceeded 500 per
100,000 persons in countries such as
Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Nigeria,
Kenya, and Indonesia; and the maternal mor-
tality rate exceeded 500 per 100,000 live
births in Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, and India
(UN, 2005; WHO, 2005).
In recent years, AIDS has emerged as a
major killer in Africa. The AIDS epidemic on
this continent has been called the ‘most dev-
astating health disaster in human history’
since the Black Death, and sub-Saharan Africa,
the hardest hit region, has been called a
‘dying continent’ (Ezzell, 2000: 96; Lamptey
et al., 2006: 3). According to one estimate, in
2003 there were about 38 million (1.1%)
adults (15–49 years) infected with HIV
globally, of whom 25 million (7.5% of all
adults) were in sub-Saharan Africa alone.
The adult HIV prevalence rate exceeded 25%
in Swaziland, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and
Botswana (World Bank, 2005b). In recent
years, there has been an increase in the preva-
lence of HIV in a number of countries on
other continents, with India, Russia, Brazil,
China, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and
Myanmar in the forefront (Cohen, 2003;
Steinbrook, 2004). The numbers for India are
staggering: about 4.5 million people (0.8% of
all adults) were infected with HIV in 2002,
up from less than half a million ten years ear-
lier (Cohen, 2004). AIDS alone is estimated
to have reduced life expectancy by 4 to 26
years in a number of African countries (US
Bureau of the Census, 1999). Potential years
of life lost due to the AIDS epidemics are
particularly large in Zimbabwe (26 years),
Namibia (24 years), Botswana (21 years),
Swaziland (20 years), Zambia (19 years), and
Kenya (18 years). Although there are some
success stories including those of Zambia,
Kenya, Uganda, Thailand, and Cambodia
where the prevalence rate has declined, there
do not seem to be any signs of significant
change in many other developing countries.
Signs of divergence and stagnation are
apparent when the average annual percent
decline in the infant mortality rate between
1950–1955 and 2000–2005 is plotted against
the initial (i.e., 1950–1955) level of infant mor-
tality (UN, 2007). Countries with a low initial
mortality level (for example, with an infant
mortality rate below 100 during 1950–1955)
are a homogeneous group, which experienced
large declines in their mortality rates over the
45-year period, mostly at a rate above 2.0%
annually and only a few between 1.0 and 2.0%.
However, countries with high initial mortality
(for example, with a rate over 150 during
1950–1955) are a very heterogeneous group.
This has led some analysts to conclude that
while richer countries are converging around
much lower mortality levels, poorer countries
are converging around very high mortality
levels (Goesling and Firebaugh, 2004).
FOUR MAJOR DETERMINANTS OF
CHANGES IN HEALTH AND
MORTALITY PATTERNS
There is a vast literature on the correlates and
determinants of health and mortality change.
Broadly speaking, they can be classified into
two categories. The first category includes
factors such as population size, population
density, geography, climate, and ethnic het-
erogeneity, which facilitate or impede health
improvement programme, but cannot be
manipulated by policy makers. The second
category includes factors which directly or
indirectly influence health and mortality
levels and can be manipulated by policy
makers. In this chapter, we examine the roles
of four factors in the latter category, which
governments, non-governmental organizations,
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MORTALITY IN LESS DEVELOPED COUNTRIES
and international bodies have found relevant
in order to bring about reductions in mortal-
ity in less developed countries.
Economic development
Income is known to be a robust and strong
determinant of mortality. Following the classic
study of Preston (1975, 1976), a number of
studies examined the relationship between
income and mortality at the national level
and found that mortality fell rapidly during
the early stages of economic development
and then levelled-off at later stages (Deaton,
2003). It appears that a small rise in per
capita income results in large reductions in
mortality, especially during the early stages
of epidemiologic transition. Once mortality
has reached a relatively low level (e.g., with
a life expectancy around 70 and an infant
mortality rate around 20), income does not
seem to make much difference.
We also find that there are wide variations
in mortality, suggesting that mortality reduc-
tions can occur without significant economic
development (World Bank, 2003). An exam-
ination of the correlation between annual
growth rate in the gross domestic product
and the annual change in the infant mortality
rate reveals that there is a weak relationship
between changes in per capita income and
changes in infant mortality. The most impres-
sive declines in infant mortality occurred in
countries with improved economic situation,
albeit only slightly. However, mortality
declined even in countries which have not
experienced much improvement in their eco-
nomic conditions or have experienced a
decline, whereas it declined with varying
rates for countries with similar rates of
economic growth. As Preston (1975, 1976)
argued, factors exogenous to a country’s cur-
rent level of income, such as the import of
health and medical technologies, anti-malarial
programme, and mass immunization may
have played a far greater role than economic
development per se in explaining mortality
declines in many less developed countries.
229
Economic inequality
Some researchers question the utility of eco-
nomic development in explaining health and
mortality without taking economic inequality
into account (Anand and Ravallion, 1993;
Flegg, 1982; Houweling et al., 2005; Rodgers,
2002; Sen, 1998; Wilkinson, 1996), although
there is a body of literature that is sceptical of
the inequality–mortality hypothesis (for a
review, see Lynch et al., 2004). Considerable
evidence has accumulated to show that
despite impressive economic growth in many
countries over the past 50 years or so, large
masses of their population have remained in
poverty. Economic growth has not benefited
a vast segment of their populations. It is
argued that the effect of economic develop-
ment on mortality depends on how its bene-
fits are distributed between various segments
of a population and the mechanisms through
which it operates to reach the poor and disad-
vantaged who are most vulnerable to high
morbidity and mortality. Inequality tends to
reduce access to health services and medical
facilities even when they are available.
Studies have shown time and again that a
somewhat similar socioeconomic gradient in
disease and mortality, with lower rates
among the rich and higher among the poor,
exists in every country, developed or
less developed. The gradient remains largely
unaltered even when socioeconomic differ-
ences in medical care or life style factors,
such as smoking, unhealthy eating, or risk-
taking behaviours are accounted for
(Marmot, 2001). The essence of this argu-
ment is that the problems associated with ill
health that affect the poor, less educated, and
underprivileged disproportionately are not
necessarily a consequence of their different
life style. Rather, their disadvantaged social
status, deprived neighbourhoods, and work
environment translate directly or indirectly
into poorer health in several major
ways. Data collected by the Demographic
and Health Surveys on infant mortality rates
by asset quintile for various less devel-
oped countries, around 2000 are revealing
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230 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
(World Bank, 2005a, Table A3). Generally,
there is a decline in the infant mortality rate
with the decline in inequality. However, the
gradient differs widely by country. The gra-
dient is steepest in India, followed by that in
Peru, Egypt, Bangladesh, and Uganda. It is
not as steep in Nepal, Zambia, Zimbabwe,
and Colombia, while it is somewhat curvilin-
ear in Ethiopia and sporadic in Mali and
Tanzania. In sum, there is no systematic
pattern of relationship between the gradient
and the countries’ levels of economic devel-
opment and economic inequality, implying
that other factors must explain this variability.
It is well known that these global aggre-
gate statistics can obscure large disparities
between and within nations, particularly
when they are not examined in a multivariate
manner. However, they are not completely
out of line with various in-depth analyses
(Braveman and Tarimo, 2002). By analyzing
access to health care, prevalence of specific
diseases, and mortality patterns for about 100
districts and counties in China, Zhao (2006)
found that growing economic inequality
impeded progress in mortality decline in
poor areas and among disadvantaged social
groups despite globalization and impressive
overall economic growth over the last
25 years. By analyzing child mortality data
in 11 countries in sub-Saharan Africa,
Brockerhoff and Hewett (2000) found that by
and large ethnic mortality differences were
linked to economic inequality and differential
use of child health services.
A major reason for socioeconomic dispar-
ity in mortality is differential access to health
care facilities by social class. Studies show
that mothers from lower socioeconomic
backgrounds are less familiar with basic
health care practices and are less likely to
visit health personnel or hospitals (Caldwell,
1986b). Also, children from lower socioeco-
nomic backgrounds are less likely to receive
vaccinations. In almost every less developed
country for which reliable data are available,
the immunization rate is higher among the
rich than among the poor (World Bank,
2005b, Table 2.6). The gap is much wider in
the least developed countries and it tends to
shrink with a rise in per capita income. This
implies that economic development does
help to reduce the gap between the rich and
the poor at least in terms of getting children
immunized.
According to some research, it is poverty
and not economic inequality that is responsi-
ble for high mortality in less developed
countries. Inequality is usually to the disad-
vantage of the poor and therefore it is likely
to result in high overall mortality in countries
where the poor form a large segment of the
population. As Deaton (2003: 115) argues,
‘individuals are more likely to be sick or to
die if they live in places or in periods where
income inequality is higher. The raw correla-
tions that exist in (some of the) data are
most likely the result of factors other than
income inequality, some of which is ulti-
mately linked to broader notions of inequal-
ity or unfairness’ rather than income
inequality per se. This hypothesis has
received support in a number of recent stud-
ies (Deaton, 2003; Gravelle et al., 2002;
Lynch et al., 2004; Mackenbach, 2002;
Wagstaff and Doorslaer, 2000).
To some scholars, the socioeconomic gra-
dient in mortality in a country is a reflection
of conditions which are difficult to gauge by
objective measures such as per capita
income, Gini index, and so on. Wilkinson
(1996), a most well-known advocate of the
‘inequality–mortality’ hypothesis, finds that
income inequality, like air pollution or toxic
radiation, is itself a health hazard. Some
scholars (Daniels et al., 1999; Sapolsky,
2005a, 2005b) argue, it is not just the lack of
absolute deprivation associated with low eco-
nomic development (such as the lack of
access to basic material conditions necessary
for health such as clean water, adequate
nutrition and housing, and general sanitary
living conditions) that explains health and
mortality differences between and within
countries, but rather a ‘lack of sources of
self-respect that are deemed essential for full
participation in society’ (Daniels et al., 1999:
221). They argue further that ‘feeling poor
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MORTALITY IN LESS DEVELOPED COUNTRIES
may be at the core of why being poor predicts
poor health.… The disease consequences of
feeling poor are often rooted in the psycho-
logical consequences of being made to feel
poor by one’s surroundings’ (Sapolsky,
2005b: 652). In sum, the greater the inequal-
ity in a society, the greater is the likelihood
for the poor to be psychosocially stressed and
consequently in poorer health.
Public spending on health
Another variable that has often been linked to
economic development and inequality as
a determinant of high mortality in less-
developed countries is the low per capita public
health expenditure (Anand and Ravallion, 1993;
Houweling et al., 2005; World Bank, 2003:
35–42). Poor and unequal societies not only
spend less on health on a per capita basis, but
also poor people in those societies do not have
equal access to knowledge and health facili-
ties. There exists an intense conflict and com-
petition between various groups for the access
to scarce resources for improving their well-
being, including health conditions. Moreover,
the less privileged are not able to make better
use of the available resources, due largely to
lower education, remote residential locations,
and poorer social and political networks. In
most developing countries the poorest fifth of
the population receives less than a fifth of the
health expenditures, while the richest fifth
receives much more (World Bank, 2003,
Table 3). Even in a country such as India
which is one of the fastest growing economies
and among the largest beneficiaries of global-
ization in recent years, the poorest fifth of the
population received about 10% of public
health expenditures during 1991–2001,
whereas the richest fifth received 32%. The
situation was much worse in countries such as
Ecuador, Armenia, and Guinea, although
other poor countries such as Kenya,
Bangladesh, Indonesia, or Vietnam have done
better. In countries such as South Africa,
Nicaragua, and Sri Lanka, there was no such
imbalance between the rich and the poor.
231
In Latin American countries, the situation was
reversed, where poorer people were in an
advantageous position as far as the share of
public health expenditure was concerned.
However, several studies do not find public
spending on health to be an important predic-
tor of mortality. The oft-cited study by Filmer
and Prichett (1999) found public spending on
health to be a poor predictor of child mortal-
ity, once variables such as per capita income,
female education, and access to safe water
were held constant. This is a contentious issue
that needs further research.
Maternal education
Mother’s education is known to be an impor-
tant determinant of infant mortality. In a
number of studies, Caldwell (1986b) showed
that in less-developed countries educated
mothers were more likely than illiterate
mothers to be sensitive about the risks of
health problems among infants and children,
and more knowledgeable about the available
health care facilities. Also, they were more
likely to bring sick children to hospitals and
health practitioners, and to follow the sug-
gested treatment. Thus, for every country
where data are available, the infant mortality
rate for children born to illiterate women is
higher than for those born to women with a
secondary school or higher level of education
(World Bank, 2005a: Table A3). In general,
the effect of education on mortality does not
vary with the level of economic development.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Over the past fifty years, the progress in
morbidity and mortality declines in the
less-developed world has been highly
uneven. While mortality in developed coun-
tries, particularly that which occurs during
infancy and childhood, has been reduced to
extremely low levels (for example, an infant
mortality rate of 3 per 1000 live births in
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232 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
2003 in Finland, Norway, Sweden, Japan,
and Singapore), in many less-developed
countries it has remained at extraordinarily
high levels (for example, an infant mortality
rate of over 150 in Angola, Niger, and Sierra
Leone). Even in less-developed regions enor-
mous heterogeneity exists, with infant mor-
tality varying between a rate as low as 8 in
Costa Rica and 13 in Sri Lanka to the high
levels mentioned above. Not only have health
and mortality levels in less-developed coun-
tries been slow to converge, but also the dif-
ferences between the various subgroups
within countries do not show significant
signs of diminution. Ironically, much of this
divergence has become apparent during
times when the world has become more
interconnected and interdependent and when
medical technologies have become more
readily available.
People in every society want to live longer
and save their children from death, and will
do whatever is necessary to reduce mortality.
Then why should there be such slow progress
in the convergence in health, illness, and
mortality patterns between and within coun-
tries? This chapter focused on four major
factors to address this question: economic
development, income inequality, public
spending on health, and maternal education.
By far, economic development is the most
important and robust predictor of mortality
decline in the less-developed world. It brings
reductions in mortality among the rich and
the poor, and the well educated and the illit-
erate via high expenditures on health and
widespread availability of medical and health
care facilities. However, many countries
(e.g., Bangladesh, Ecuador, and Egypt) have
reduced their mortality levels without signif-
icant economic progress (Croghan et al.,
2006), while others (e.g., China and India)
have experienced increased divergence in mor-
tality patterns despite rapid economic develop-
ment (Braveman and Tarimo, 2002; Zhao,
2006). Moreover, some others are so poor
that they cannot afford to buy enough food
and medicine in the world markets or spend
enough on the improvement of technologies
such as water purification and delivering
treated water to rural homes (Mosk and
Johansson, 1986; Sachs et al., 2001). It is
true that the availability of medical and
health facilities is an important proximate
determinant of mortality decline and interna-
tional bodies and donor agencies can cooper-
ate in providing guidance and assistance to
national governments (Croghan et al., 2006).
However, outcomes depend heavily on
whether the assistance reaches the needy seg-
ments of the population.
Apparently, there is inherent conflict and
competition between nations and groups for
the access to scarce resources that are
required to improve health conditions and
reduce mortality. During the course of glob-
alization and economic development over the
past 30 years or so, this conflict has intensi-
fied in many countries, including China and
India and people with the fewest needs have
succeeded in getting better access to maxi-
mum resources. Considerable evidence has
accumulated to suggest that the gap between
various segments of the populations within
some countries has widened in recent years,
with those in greater need falling behind. The
less privileged and more disadvantaged indi-
viduals and groups who are more likely than
the privileged to be exposed to higher risks of
illness and early death are finding it difficult
to get easy access to health care services and
to make adequate use of the available
resources. In good economic times, the poor
and the disadvantaged simply cannot com-
pete with the rich and resourceful, and in bad
economic times, they are the ones who are hit
hardest. Widening social and economic
inequality has encouraged conflict and com-
petition between various segments of the
population and has intensified the maldistrib-
ution of health care facilities.
Economic development is certainly the
real answer to reducing morbidity and mor-
tality and to improving health conditions in
less-developed countries. However, it is well
known that inducing economic prosperity is
not only complicated, but it is a long-term proj-
ect. Despite great strides in industrialization,
9781412934633-Chap-15 1/10/09 8:50 AM Page 233
MORTALITY IN LESS DEVELOPED COUNTRIES
globalization, and efforts of international
organizations over the past half century, less-
developed countries have not been able to
catch up to the more developed part of the
world, and in fact, a number of countries,
particularly in Africa, have been showing
negative economic growth and stagnation in
health, illness, and mortality. Also, as men-
tioned above disparities in health among
more and less privileged social groups have
widened in recent years. Thus, an increase in
public spending on health and maternal edu-
cation is the most viable public policy option.
Small spending on health can bring large
reductions in mortality in high mortality
countries, where most of the deaths still
occur among women, infants, and children
from diseases that are largely avoidable (e.g.,
maternal mortality, diarrhoeal disease) based
on the existing knowledge and through cost-
effective means. Women, even those with
little education, will be able to make better
use of existing health care facilities in order
to save themselves and their children. It is
possible, indeed likely, that such expenditure
will reach the urban, affluent, and privileged
groups first, particularly in very poor coun-
tries; but then it will slowly ‘trickle down’ to
all. This is where state efficacy, good gover-
nance, and strong political will for good
health will be of utmost importance
(Caldwell, 1986b; Mosk and Johansson,
1986; Ruzicka and Hansluwka, 1982).
International bodies, donor agencies, and
national governments need to play greater
cooperative roles in guiding globalization for
the benefit of the vast segments of the popu-
lation, particularly the poor and the less
advantaged.
NOTE
1 This chapter was prepared by Bali Ram in his
capacity as Adjunct Research Professor, Department
of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University,
Ottawa, Canada and Shefali S. Ram when she was a
graduate student with the Department of
Community Health and Epidemiology, Queen’s
233
University, Kingston, Canada. It draws heavily on our
earlier presentations at World Congress of Sociology,
Durban, South Africa, July 23–30, 2006 and
International Sociological Association (ISA) Research
Council Conference, at the University of Ottawa,
May 28–30, 2004. The views expressed in this chap-
ter are the authors’ own and do not reflect those of
the institutions where they are currently employed.
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9781412934633-Chap-16 1/10/09 9:23 AM Page 236
Conflict, Competition, and
Cooperation in Twenty-First
Century Military
Peacekeeping Operations1
David R. Segal, Christopher Dandeker, and
BACKGROUND
The nature of military conflict, the strategies
used by the international community to con-
trol such conflicts, and the norms guiding
that control have changed since the end of the
Cold War in Europe in the late 1980s. In par-
ticular, new patterns of cooperation have
evolved among nations forming coalitions
for the purpose of conflict control, while at
the same time competition has evolved
among potential peacekeeping coalition part-
ners as new participants in peacekeeping
operations have required that traditional par-
ticipants in multinational peacekeeping re-
evaluate their roles in the process. This
chapter is concerned with these patterns.
It has been common to refer to the period
since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in the
late 1980s as the post-Cold War period. We
regard this characterization as too compre-
hensive. While tension between communism
16
Yuko K. Whitestone
and political democracy ended almost three
decades ago in the North Atlantic region,
continuing nuclear threats from North Korea,
as well as manifestations of China’s attempt
to maintain a communist political system
even as it attempts to join the global market
economy, reflect a Cold War that is still being
waged on the Pacific Rim (Kurashina
and Segal, 2007). In a set of comparative
analyses of military forces after the collapse
of the Warsaw Pact, which postulated a shift
in military missions toward peacekeeping,
Downes (2000: 188–9) noted with regard
to Australia and New Zealand that territorial
defense, regional security, and alliance
security all were currently higher priorities
than peace support and enforcement. Thus
our analysis deals with a transition period,
in which new forms of conflict, cooperation,
and competition are evolving in some areas,
while more traditional forms persist
in others.
9781412934633-Chap-16 1/10/09 9:23 AM Page 237
MILITARY PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS
The major military conflicts of the twenti-
eth century were conventional wars between
nations or coalitions of nations, represented
on the battlefield by military forces acting as
agents of their states. Military forces of other
nations, primarily drawn from the ‘middle
powers’, such as Canada, the Netherlands,
and the Nordic nations (Moskos, 1976), have
been involved in trying to control these
inter-state conflicts through participation in
multinational peacekeeping operations for
over a half-century, first under the auspices
of the League of Nations, then of the United
Nations, and for the past two decades, under
the auspices of new international entities,
such as the Multinational Force and
Observers (MFO) in the Sinai (Segal and
Gravino, 1985).
The first recorded multinational peace oper-
ation under the auspices of an international
organization was a ‘peace force’ of over 3,000
military personnel from the United Kingdom,
Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands, formed by
the post-World War I League of Nations to
maintain regional security for a plebiscite in
the Saar Basin in 1934 (Lewis, 1992). The
League subsequently used other multinational
forces to mediate disputes upon request of
member nations. The constraints under which
this model of peacekeeping was applied con-
tributed to the League’s inability to prevent
World War II.
After World War II, the United Nations
developed a new peacekeeping system that
was constrained by the Cold War. The antag-
onisms of the bipolar international system,
dominated by the tensions between NATO
and the Warsaw Pact, and represented among
the permanent members of the UN Security
Council by the United States and the Soviet
Union, made it unlikely that consensus and
cooperation on peacekeeping could be
achieved in the Security Council. The UN
Charter contains no reference to peacekeep-
ing, let alone a formula for its performance.
Former UN Secretary-General Dag
Hammerskjold described peacekeeping as
‘chapter six and a half’ in the UN charter:
chapter six calls for peaceful resolution of
237
conflicts, while Chapter VII allows the
Security Council to take military action to
intervene in conflicts if diplomatic efforts
fail. The UN did develop a system for deal-
ing with international conflict that began
with the deployment of unarmed military
observers to the United Nations Truce
Supervision Organization (UNTSO) in 1948
(Fabian, 1971). From that point until
December 2004, there were a total of 60 UN
peacekeeping operations, two-thirds of
which were initiated in 1991 or later, after
the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the
Security Council was no longer constrained
by the Cold War bipolarity.
THE CHANGING NATURE OF
CONFLICT
Much of classical sociological theory, such
as the writings of Comte and Spencer, ideal-
istically postulated a social evolution from
societies characterized by warfare to peace-
ful societies characterized by industrial and
economic relations (Gobbicchi, 2002). This
evolution did not take place. On the contrary,
while the nature of war has varied greatly
over the course of human history, social
change has brought us to a stage in which
‘war has tended to spread more rapidly, to
destroy larger proportions of life and prop-
erty, and to disorganize the economy of states
more than ever before’ (Wright, 1965: 7).
Armed conflict remains a serious social
problem (Gleditsch et al., 2002).
War existed among primitive people, but at
low levels of lethality given primitive tech-
nologies. Economic development did not
eliminate war, but rather produced a congru-
ence between civilian and military facts of
material life (Keegan, 1976), such that as
society became industrialized, so too did mil-
itary technology, increasing its lethality.
Battle progressed from using agricultural
implements (axes and knives) in hand-to-hand
combat, through single use weapons that
could be used at a distance (arrows, spears),
9781412934633-Chap-16 1/10/09 9:23 AM Page 238
238 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
through line-of-sight firearms after the devel-
opment of gunpowder (first single shot and
later repeating), to weapons that could be
used from ‘stand-off’ distances that did not
require direct visual contact between com-
batants (artillery, bombs), to weapons of
mass destruction (chemical, biological, and
nuclear).
One consequence of this increasing lethality,
even in pre-nuclear war days, was an increas-
ing reluctance on the part of European mili-
tary leaders to go to war, which would
decimate their profession and destroy their
social base (Vagts, 1959). At the same time,
there was also a growing recognition that the
limited wars of the late twentieth century
were no longer clashes between the conven-
tional military forces of nations, but rather
involved conflicts within a given nation,
including armed revolts, insurrections,
paramilitary formations, terrorism, and other
forms of internal or non-state warfare
(Janowitz, 1968: 16). Franco et al. (2005)
report that the vast majority of conflicts since
World War II have been within states. Some
have suggested that war, in the strict sense of
inter-state conflict, has been in decline since
1945 (Smith, 2005; Van Creveld, 1991).
With the advent of nuclear weapons, two
competing perspectives on war emerged
among military leaders. The absolutists
reflected assumptions made by the military
as it emerged as a profession in the nine-
teenth century. They assumed that the out-
break of war was inevitable, rooted in the
nature of man. They emphasized the histori-
cal continuity of military solutions to politi-
cal problems, the permanency of war as a
social form, the quest for victory as the
desired end, and the likelihood that nuclear
wars would be short. The pragmatists, by
contrast, emphasized the discontinuity of the
nuclear age from the past, the length of time
that would be required for the international
system to recover from a nuclear war, and the
absence of certainty that such a war would
produce peace (Janowitz, 1960: 264). Janowitz
reported that between 1945 and 1960 there
was a decline in the influence of the pragmatic
school on the officer corps. Most impor-
tantly, by 1970, he saw the military being
transformed into a constabulary force,
grounded in pragmatic doctrine (Janowitz,
1971). Historically, the concept of the
military was rooted in absolute doctrine. The
absolutist military engages in war as an
inevitable means and a form of punishment
and retaliation to pursue total supremacy. In
contrast, a constabulary force is ‘continu-
ously prepared to act, committed to the
minimum use of force, and seeks viable
international relations rather than victory’
(Janowitz, 1960: 418). The social organiza-
tion of peacekeeping, along with strategies of
deterrence, did help to control inter-state war
during the second half of the twentieth
century. However, at the same time, the
attention of the world increasingly turned to
the persistence of intra-state conflicts based
on religious, racial, and ethnic differences.
CHANGES IN THE PEACEKEEPING
RESPONSE
Evolving as a military mission, the nature of
peacekeeping changed. Early ‘first-generation’
peacekeeping missions starting in the mid-
twentieth century involved the interposition
of lightly armed (or unarmed) impartial mili-
tary personnel as observers between the
forces of two conflicting nations that had
sought an end to their conflict and agreed to
the presence of third-party peacekeepers to
help negotiate or verify a cease-fire or a
treaty. These missions included the United
Nations Special Committee on the Balkans
(UNSCOB), to ascertain whether communist
nations in the north of Greece were infiltrat-
ing her borders (1947), the United Nations
Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO),
to monitor cease-fires after the first Arab-
Israeli war in 1948, and the United Nations
Military Observer Group in India and
Pakistan (UNMOGIP), stationed in Kashmir
in 1949 to monitor the status of cease-fires
(Segal, 1995). By the 1990s, new more muscular
9781412934633-Chap-16 1/10/09 9:23 AM Page 239
MILITARY PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS
forms of peacekeeping were initiated to deal
with conflicts still ongoing. These conflicts
did not always involve conventional military
forces acting as agents of states, and some-
times were internal to states or reflected
states in the process of failing. These
‘second-generation’ (Mackinley and Chopra,
1993), or ‘strategic’ (Dandeker and Gow,
1997) peacekeeping operations involved
larger peacekeeping forces, and more exten-
sive use of force in achieving or keeping the
peace. In addition, they involved national
participants that had previously been
excluded by the bipolar tensions of the Cold
War and the UN peacekeeping norms of min-
imum use of force, impartiality, and host
country consent, or had been limited by con-
stitutional constraints against out-of-area
operations or by the tendency to exclude the
armed forces of less developed nations. The
United States and the Soviet Union had not
been perceived as disinterested third parties
in international conflicts, and had demon-
strated their resistance to the principle of
minimum use of force in favor of doctrines
that varied between proportional use of force
and overwhelming use of force.
CHANGING NORMS OF
PEACEKEEPING
The changes that have taken place in the
twenty-first century with regard to the norms
of use of force, impartiality, and host nation
consent have implications for theories
regarding whether armed forces have a role
in the pursuit of world peace, as well as
implications for theories regarding what that
role might be. Wright (1965: 1310), in the
idealistic tradition of Comte and Spencer,
suggested that military attempts to prevent
war would not be successful, but rather that
simultaneous attacks on war would have to
be made on educational, social, political, and
legal fronts. Janowitz (1968: 30) argued that
such a model of controlling conflict recognized
the basic issues of economic development,
239
international communications, and political
arrangements that were necessary for the
development of a world community, but
failed to incorporate a realistic understanding
of the role of the military in constructive
international relations, with the military
moving in the direction of becoming a police-
type organization, eventually becoming
smaller, and changing its pattern of activity in
a constabulary direction, with the United
Nations (first-generation) peacekeeping oper-
ations serving as an example of constabulary
military forces (Janowitz, 1968: 32–3).
Janowitz had not postulated that constabu-
lary operations would be limited to first-
generation peacekeeping, and in fact sug-
gested that the pragmatic constabulary orien-
tation was appropriate across the entire
spectrum of conflict intensity. Recent theoriz-
ing has in fact focused on a differentiation of
types of second-generation missions.
Dandeker (1999) in particular has built upon
and modified Dobbie’s (1994) critique of the
failure of twentieth century peacekeeping
doctrine, which distinguishes between peace-
keeping and peace enforcement. The former
includes first-generation type interposition
missions, as well as strategic peacekeeping
which may involve the use of force, but in
Dobbie’s view abides by the traditional peace-
keeping norm of consent. The latter, for
Dobbie, dispenses with the consent norm, and
more closely resembles traditional military
operations, including the identification of an
enemy. In first-generation missions, the con-
flict is the enemy, and the peacekeepers are
allied with the principal parties to the conflict
in defeating it. Operation Desert Storm (the
first Gulf War) after the invasion of Kuwait by
Iraq would be an example of peace enforce-
ment. Dandeker and Gow (1997) suggest that
strategic peacekeeping need not have the con-
sent of the conflicting parties, but must be
regarded as legitimate in terms of the legal and
normative basis of the mission, the support of
a wide range of parties, and the degree to
which performance of the mission generates
further support for the mission, as well as
for its perceived legal and normative basis.
9781412934633-Chap-16 1/10/09 9:23 AM Page 240
240 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
The military forces of the intervening nations
play a major role in this legitimation process.
In this conceptualization, in comparison to
first-generation peacekeeping, strategic
peacekeeping in Dobbie’s formulation may
have the consent of the conflicting parties,
although the level of consent may be lower
than that found in first-generation operations,
and in Dandeker and Gow’s formulation,
may abandon the first-generation norm of
consent in favor of broader legitimacy.
The political objective that characterizes
first-generation missions, such as a treaty, is
absent, although agreement on a solution to
the conflict rests with the conflicting parties.
The mission is likely to be more coercive
than first-generation operations, with the
strategic initiative being taken by the inter-
vening nations, rather than the parties to that
conflict even though the whole point is for
the parties themselves to settle their dispute
under the strategic ‘prodding’ of the interven-
ing military and political forces. The need for
the use of force is likely to be greater. These
missions will be complex, with a number of
actors, and the pressures on the force com-
mander – both military and political – are
likely to be great.
If the robustness of the mission progresses
to peace enforcement, not only does the initia-
tive reside with the intervening parties, but so
too does the definition of the solution to the con-
flict. Thus, in peace enforcement, not only is the
norm of consent not necessarily operational but
neither is the first-generation norm of impartial-
ity, particularly as it has been equated to neutral-
ity in first-generation missions (Donald, 2003).
As Donald (2003: 435) notes, ‘it is impossible
to use force and be always perceived to be
impartial’. The peace enforcers explicitly
become parties to the conflict.
CHANGES IN PEACEKEEPING
PARTICIPATION
One of the enduring questions in international
peacekeeping has been who should do it.
As noted above, the standard assumption in
UN first-generation peacekeeping missions
had been that military personnel from the
neutral middle powers would be the best
peacekeepers. Moskos’s (1976) research on
the United Nations Force in Cyprus (UNFI-
CYP), which included a military contingent
from the United Kingdom, challenged this
assumption. Moskos showed that military
professionalism contributed strongly to the
ability of soldiers to adapt to the norms of
peacekeeping. The finding was subsequently
replicated with American combat troops
(Segal and Meeker, 1985).
Nonetheless, the superpowers were gener-
ally excluded and other major powers were
minimally represented in first-generation
missions. In the early 1980s, when a pro-
posed UN force in support of the Camp
David Accords between Egypt and Israel,
which was to have no major power military
presence, failed to gain UN sponsorship, an
alternative proposal was put forward to use
American troops to guarantee the peace in
lieu of the moral suasion of the UN. That
presence, while accepted, was a matter of
some concern (Segal and Segal, 1993: 56).
In the long run, the successful participation
of the United States, Great Britain, and
France in that mission contributed to a
change in norms.
In the post-Cold War period, peacekeeping
participation became an option for US policy,
and Russia became a cooperative Security
Council member with regard to the authoriza-
tion of peacekeeping operations (Kurashina
and Segal, 2007). International expectations
regarding the peacekeeping role of the
UN expanded in the late 1980s, reaching a
peak with the Gulf War, in which the
Security Council made a series of decisions
to carry out sanctions against Iraq after the
invasion of Kuwait. The United States and
major European powers participated in mili-
tary operations in the Gulf, reflecting a
change in the nature of peace missions and in
a first wave of changes in the nature of the
participants in these missions. The major
nations also dismissed attempts by other
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MILITARY PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS
nations that sought to support the mission
through means other than sending troops.
Germany and Japan, despite their contribu-
tions of billions of dollars, were held
accountable for their failure to fulfill the
norm of burden sharing by sending military
personnel. This was the dawning of a second
wave of new actors in peace operations,
producing a renewal of discussion on what
sorts of personnel should be involved in
peacekeeping.
CHANGING ROLES IN PEACEKEEPING
The changing patterns of conflict to which
the global community attended yielded new
patterns of competition and cooperation
among states involved in the control and res-
olution of conflict, and between states and
international organizations involved in that
endeavor. Patterns of sovereignty were
changing and new participants appeared on
the peacekeeping field. Some of these new
participants were major powers whose par-
ticipation had previously been constrained by
the norms of first-generation peacekeeping.
Others were nations that had been aggressors
in World War II, whose military participa-
tion, particularly outside their national terri-
tories, had been constrained by post-War
‘peace’ constitutions (Germany and Japan),
but who found themselves cross-pressured
by newly emerging norms of burden sharing
in support of international peace and security
at the end of the twentieth century.
In the early 1990s, there was a concern
about the overwhelmingly white and Western
dominance of peacekeeping. Although the
adequate geographic representation of troop
contributions was one of the basic principles
of international peacekeeping missions, 46%
of UN soldiers were military personnel of
European nations (Blechman and Vaccaro,
1994). By the late 1990s, as many as three
quarters of the UN troops consisted of con-
tingents from developing countries (Weerts
et al., 2001). These new entrants into the
241
process of military participation in peace-
keeping had to define their appropriate roles
in the conflict management process.
As their presence in peacekeeping opera-
tions became more visible, developing coun-
tries started voicing concerns about the
dominance of Western nations in UN peace-
keeping and violation of the norm of impar-
tiality, by favoring their interests and relying
on their sources of intelligence information
(Alley, 1998). In a study of burden sharing
for peacekeeping operations between 1994
and 2000, Shimizu and Sandler (2002)
reported that the financing of peacekeeping
operations in the post-Cold War period
increasingly relied on a handful of NATO
allied countries with advanced technological
capabilities and economic power. The
authors suggest that this disproportionate
burden-sharing is a cause for concern
because the political agenda of a few power-
ful shareholders would undermine public
acceptance of UN-led peacekeeping opera-
tions. However, Shimizu and Sandler (2002)
cautioned that what countries participate in
missions and how many troops they send are
not good indicators of burden-sharing. The
burden for some developing nations that send
their troops to peacekeeping missions is neg-
ative. For example, Pakistan, Bangladesh,
Malaysia, and Egypt are willing to partici-
pate in missions because the payment they
receive from the UN is a source of additional
income for their underpaid soldiers and of
foreign currencies.
Some researchers and critics are con-
cerned that this practice causes a decline in
mission effectiveness as developing coun-
tries are allowed to send poorly trained and
underequipped soldiers to missions (Bobrow
and Boyer, 1997; Brooks, 2003; Diehl, 1993;
Mackinlay and Chopra, 1993; Shimizu and
Sandler, 2002). In addition, some new
entrants have special arrangements with the
UN, and they participate in a very limited
range of peacekeeping functions and require
protection from troops of other nations
(Brooks, 2003). Despite these new issues, the
UN has welcomed new entrants to manage
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242 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
the soaring numbers and intensity of peace-
keeping operations in the post-Cold War
period (Lebovic, 2004). As peace-keeping
operations increasingly opened to wider
participation, traditional participants in peace-
keeping, in turn, were required to assert, and
in some cases change, their own roles in the
context of changing peacekeeping norms.
An additional dimension of ‘new partici-
pation’ in peacekeeping has emerged as a
result of the downsizing of military forces
around the world (Segal and Babin, 2000).
Activities that were previously performed by
regular military personnel are increasingly
turned over to supplementary personnel.
Sometimes these are reserve military person-
nel mobilized for peacekeeping missions
(e.g., Segal and Tiggle, 1997), and some-
times they are civilians, some of whom serve
under contract to perform activities that had
previously been performed by military per-
sonnel, but are now outsourced by the mili-
tary (Moskos, 2003: 6–7), and others as civil
servants employed by military forces. Thus,
the groups involved in twenty-first century
peace operations include military personnel
from the middle powers that were the
traditional ‘first-generation’ peacekeepers;
non-governmental organizations (NGOs),
such as the International Red Cross and
Doctors without Borders, that have been regu-
lar participants in humanitarian operations;
military forces from major powers whose par-
ticipation was limited by the norms of first-
generation peacekeeping; and military forces
from nations that had previously restricted
their roles to homeland or regional alliance
defense, but who now are expected by
the international community to make a
burden-sharing contribution to collective
security. Moreover, these various military
forces may be comprised of regular soldiers
or reservists, with widely varying levels of
training and preparation for peace opera-
tions, and they are likely to be supported
in the field by civilian employees and
contracted civilian personnel. Our current
analysis focuses on nations represented by
regular armed forces in peacekeeping.
Dandeker (1999) suggests that adaptability
to peacekeeping missions varies as a function
of national histories and military ethos.
He proposed two types of societies: ‘soci-
eties with a pronounced war-fighting ethos’
(e.g., the United States), and ‘societies with a
moderate war-fighting/national defense-
centered ethos’ (e.g., Sweden). We now sug-
gest that there should be a third type: soci-
eties with a pacifist/national defense-centered
ethos (e.g., Japan). These three types raise
different issues with regard to peacekeeping
participation, and the issues change as a func-
tion of the differences between first-genera-
tion peacekeeping, strategic peacekeeping,
and peace enforcement.
After the end of the Cold War in Europe,
major Western powers increasingly came to
participate in peace operations, as Cold
War era peacekeeping doctrines that restricted
their involvement disappeared. Those states
whose military cultures are built upon a
warrior ethos find they have to shift to a more
constabulary orientation in order to effec-
tively execute traditional peacekeeping or
lower-end strategic peacekeeping missions,
and they encounter organizational resistance
along the way. For example, Dandeker
(2000: 32–3) notes that participating in UN
peace and stability operations is a third mis-
sion option for the British forces, after ensur-
ing the peace and protection of the United
Kingdom and ensuring against threats to the
Kingdom. Similarly, Boene and Martin
(2000: 59) note that the Chirac administra-
tion’s defense policy made the French mili-
tary more similar to the British or US model,
although they note that ‘Paradoxically, this ...
has caused an enlargement and deepening of
the constabulary trends that emerged in the
late phase of the East–West standoff’.
The United States, like the United
Kingdom, especially since the late 1990s, is
one of the relatively few nations in the world
with an expeditionary military culture. While
most nations regard their armed forces as
supporting homeland defense, contributing
to domestic social control, and symbolizing
sovereignty, the United States and the
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MILITARY PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS
United Kingdom have expected much of their
militaries to be stationed, and more recently
deployed, outside the country. Upon removal
of the Cold War exclusionary doctrine, the
United States started participating in UN
peacekeeping operations, although it has
tended to regard these missions as distractions
from the primary mission of fighting and win-
ning wars. It has nonetheless participated in
missions across the peacekeeping spectrum,
ranging from the interposition mission of the
Sinai MFO to very forceful peace enforce-
ment on the Arabian Peninsula. Indeed,
Moskos (2000: 15) postulates that since 1990,
the major mission definition of the American
military has shifted from alliance support to
peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.
Those nations whose military cultures are
built upon a moderate war-fighting/national
defense ethos, and which have a long history
of peacekeeping participation that dates to
the Cold War era, are expected to continue
their participation. However, the increased
involvement of major powers threatens their
established role in the international commu-
nity as the major source of peacekeeping
personnel to some degree. This challenge to
their traditional role, the more martial stance
of the major powers with regard to peace-
keeping, the relative increase in peace opera-
tions at the more forceful end of the peace
operations spectrum, and the relative ambi-
guity of peacekeeping norms during this
period of transition may produce a change in
their peacekeeping behavior.
One example of traditional peacekeepers
moving in a more assertive direction comes
from Canada, which has learned from long
peacekeeping experience that sometimes the
use of force is necessary. This change in
posture involves liabilities. While on peace-
keeping duty in Somalia in 1994, members
of the Canadian Airborne Regiment tortured
and killed a Somali youth. This incident shook
the Canadian Forces and Canadian society,
and the regiment was deactivated (Winslow,
1998). Pinch (2000: 158–9) notes that as
the Cold War ended, Canada had already
‘increased its participation in peacekeeping,
243
humanitarian, and related UN-sponsored
missions’, which involved more instability
and risk than previously, but also notes that
defense policy stated in 1991 and reiterated
in 1994 placed the highest priority on
defense of sovereignty and civil defense, and
alliance responsibilities, with peacekeeping
accorded a lower priority.
Another form of maladaptation of tradi-
tional peacekeepers is passivity. The
Netherlands, like Canada, has also been an
effective participant in UN peace operations
for decades. However, in 1995, while respon-
sible for maintaining the security of a safe
UN refugee enclave in Srebrenica, a battalion
of Dutch peacekeepers assisted Serbs in
removing 8,000 Muslim men and boys from
the enclave. The Serbs then killed 7,000
of these refugees – the worst massacre
in post-World War II Europe. The Dutch
Cabinet resigned. The Dutch soldiers who
were deployed to Srebrenica continue to
suffer psychological difficulties due to their
experience. Van der Meulen (2000: 104)
reports that in the wake of Srebrenica, the
Dutch have been ‘more prudent’ in their will-
ingness to join UN missions, and have been
more consciously balancing the ideal of safe-
guarding a peaceful international order
against their own national security interests.
The societies that are heavily oriented
toward territorial defense and have recently
had relatively pacifist cultures include
Germany and Japan. Despite the role that
Germany played in NATO during the Cold
War era, these nations had low profiles in
global military affairs, and did not operate
outside of their own territories. These roles
had been imposed on them by the victorious
powers at the end of World War II. The new
norms of burden-sharing in support of inter-
national security are now requiring a shift in
their military cultures in a more assertive or
aggressive direction, with an expectation that
they will participate militarily in operations
outside their own national areas.
Germany and Japan have different military
cultures, and have followed different strate-
gies in moving into the current era, although
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244 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
both nations place international organizations
and their policies at the core of their own
national security policies. The main mission
of the German military during the Cold War
was area-specific: to contribute to the
common defense of NATO. The German
armed forces were not authorized to partici-
pate in out-of-area operations. Fleckenstein
(2000: 86) reports that with the end of the
Cold War in Europe, the mission of the
Bundeswehr has undergone a fundamental
change, and that while the defense of Germany
and fulfillment of alliance obligations remain
primary missions, contemporary assignments
will embrace ‘all types of peace-support
operations’. In 1996, the Bundeswehr estab-
lished a crisis reaction force, which can be
used for peacekeeping. It consists of more than
50,000 troops: about 16% of the German
armed forces.
Japan, like Germany, values the United
Nations and its policies. However, social and
legal norms are the primary determinants of
Japanese national security policy (Katzenstein,
1996). Japan developed a strong anti-military
culture in the post-World War II period, and
isolation of the armed forces from the larger
society facilitated the growth of a pacifist
ideology in society. Japanese national secu-
rity policy is an exclusively defense-oriented
one, derived from the spirit of Article 9 of the
new Constitution. Article 9 sets forth the
renunciation of war and possession of war
potential, and denies the state the right of
belligerence. As early as in 1958, the United
Nations asked Japan to send troops to a
peacekeeping operation in Lebanon. Japan
could not comply because the legality of the
newly established Japan Self-Defense Force
(JSDF) was called into question. Although
the JSDF is regarded as a military force in the
global community, it has never been regarded
as ‘the military’ within Japanese society.
Started as a police auxiliary, the JSDF does
not have some of the fundamental character-
istics of a military organization, such as a
court-martial system. Unlike Germany,
Japan’s security relationship with neighbor-
ing nations is distant, and the US–Japan
security alliance is the only bilateral military
alliance.
The Gulf War was a turning point from the
self-imposed exclusion from international
peacekeeping for Japan. In 1990, the original
UN Peace Cooperation Bill did not pass the
Japanese Diet because a majority of lawmakers
felt that sending JSDF troops overseas was a
violation of the Constitution and would
not receive public support. Instead, the
Japanese government made a 13 billion
dollar contribution to the Gulf War coalition.
This ‘checkbook diplomacy’ was criticized
by the press in the Western democracies,
and Japanese society realized that UN poli-
cies were not always compatible with
national norms.
Japan has subsequently sent troops to
Cambodia, the Golan Heights, and to East
Timor, and authorized sending ground troops
for post-War reconstruction assistance in Iraq
in December 2003. This military reinvolve-
ment has costs to Japan, as reflected in ten-
sions between Japan and China over natural
resources, and over security issues such as
those regarding the straits between China and
Taiwan; all rooted in the history of Japan’s
role in World War II.
Italy was the third member of the World
War II axis to be largely confined to home-
land defense in the post-War period. The cur-
rent Italian Republic was founded in 1946,
and joined NATO in 1949, although ‘Italy
tried for forty years to avoid direct military
involvement of its troops, even while empha-
sizing its willingness to participate in human-
itarian and peace operations’ (Nuciari, 2000:
144). The adoption of a New Defense Model
in 1991 made peacekeeping and humanitarian
assistance the prevailing mission, particu-
larly for volunteers in the Italian military.
Germany, Japan, and Italy are not the only
nations that have been drawn into cooperative
burden-sharing in peace operations by
changes in the structure of the international
community and in the nature of conflict.
Since the nineteenth century, for example,
Denmark prior to 1990 had avoided deploy-
ment of its military personnel outside its own
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MILITARY PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS
borders, except for NATO exercises or first-
generation UN peacekeeping missions. By
contrast, since 1990, Danish soldiers have
been deployed out of area repeatedly, includ-
ing operations in the Gulf War and in the
former Yugoslavia (Sorensen, 2000). During
this period, the number of Danish soldiers
assigned to UN missions has tripled to 1,500,
and a new Danish International Brigade of
4,500 soldiers was established to support UN
actions. Current Danish deployments for
peace operations are also less dependent on
host country consent than was previously the
case.
DISCUSSION
The nature of conflict has changed through
human history. There were wars, or at least
battles, long before there were nations.
Familial groups, clans, and tribes warred
against each other with stones, clubs, agricul-
tural implements, darts, arrows, and spears.
As states evolved, so too did the technol-
ogy of warfare, with wheeled vehicles, such
as chariots, horses, and armor becoming
instruments of conflict. The introduction of
gunpowder displaced the mounted warrior
(or knight) from the central place on the
battlefield.
While some early sociologists had expected
warfare to disappear, it did not. Through to
World War II in the middle of the twentieth
century, social groups sought to develop
increasingly lethal military technologies,
and were willing to use them in war. The
mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century
was a period of total war in this regard,
accompanied by the development of a pro-
fession of arms, which acted as the instru-
ment of organized legitimate violence on
behalf of the state.
With the advent of weapons of mass
destruction, both military forces and the
states they represented became less willing to
wage total war. The international community
increasingly sought strategies to contain,
245
control, and resolve conflicts between states.
The establishment of stable alliances, the
maintenance of sufficient strength to deter
aggression, and the evolution of military forces
oriented toward controlling and reducing
conflict – constabulary forces – were part of
the repertoire developed for these purposes.
During the twentieth century, the major
alliances were themselves in competition for
influence and this competition both limited
the set of nations that could credibly partici-
pate in constabulary, or peacekeeping, opera-
tions, and the level of force that could be
used in these operations. With the end of the
Cold War in Europe, these constraints were
lifted. The range of nations that could or
were expected to cooperate in peacekeeping
operations, and who now have to negotiate
their appropriate roles in this cooperation,
balancing their national interests against
those of supra-national bodies, increased.
As we have moved beyond first-generation
peacekeeping, the level of force used in
peace operations has also increased. Peace
enforcement increasingly resembles war. In
its most frequent incarnations, it pits trained
military forces of modern nations, using
modern military technologies that do not
include the most lethal weapons in their arse-
nals, in conflicts with irregular forces repre-
senting tribal, ethnic, or religious interests,
and using whatever weaponry they can
acquire. Such asymmetric conflict is evolv-
ing as the dominant form of the twenty-first
century. However, it would be a brave person
who predicted the end of major inter-state
war as developed and less developed nations
watch with concern the competition for
resources such as oil and water, and look to
the military, as before, as a prudent means of
being able to prevail over rivals in any con-
text. As before, peace operations will have to
compete with war fighting in the budgetary,
political, and doctrinal tensions over priori-
ties that bedevil any military – no matter how
strong and well resourced.
Even assuming the future dominance of
asymmetric conflict, one must consider the
question of how effective the different kinds
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246 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
of peacekeeping operations reviewed above
are likely to be as a response. In this regard,
ongoing operations in Iraq as well as
Afghanistan will influence the United States
and others in their perceptions of the ‘utility
of force’ to use Rupert Smith’s phrase
(Smith, 2005). Iraq, in particular, provides a
challenging case of an attempted military-
induced process of regime change and democ-
ratization, beginning with a short military
invasion and then a protracted and complex
period of – simultaneous–counter-insurgency
and reconstruction, where the political risks
of failure and the costs already accumulated
are substantial.
Although one must be cautious in making
anything other than preliminary observations
about the implications of current operations
in Iraq, some points are clear. First, while
there continues to be a debate about the legal-
ity, legitimacy, and prudence of the invasion
of Iraq in pursuit of regime change, as well as
about the extent to which the post-conflict
phase of reconstruction could have been
resourced and managed better than it was by
the military and by the United States
Department of Defense and State Department,
the – some would say reckless – optimism of
2003 has now faded away. This is likely to
lead the United States (and perhaps its allies
such as the United Kingdom) to adopt a much
more cautious approach to complex and long-
lasting military engagements of this kind in
the future. Even accepting the strategic need
to prosecute a ‘Long War’ against terror, this
is likely to lead to a preference for using the
military in ‘strategic raiding’ – based on a
swift application of force to clearly identified
and restricted targets and then a withdrawal –
where and when it feels this is imperative. (On
the idea, of raiding, see Prins, 2002.)
A second point is that the current difficul-
ties and perceived lack of genuine progress in
the operations against counter-insurgency in
parts of Iraq are likely to lead to a wider and
more profound realism, if not pessimism, in
political and military circles as well as among
wider publics about the utility of force in
achieving the goals of nation building, peace,
and democracy in war-torn and unstable parts
of the world, and not just in the Middle East.
A case in point is the widely discussed book
by General Sir Rupert Smith (Smith, 2005),
which encompasses not only Iraq but also
Bosnia in the 1990s, where he was force
commander.
Third, this outcome would be unfortunate,
especially if it led to a lack of interest in par-
ticipating in peace missions not least among
those countries whose expertise is particu-
larly valuable, especially in peace operations
of the more ‘strategic’ kind. Actually, what
these events should provoke is a continuing
debate on how armed force, as one of the
instruments of a state’s policy tool box, can be
conjoined with other instruments – political,
diplomatic, economic, and cultural – to achieve
success (not in the absolutist sense of military
victory) in terms of the above goals. In this
regard, we know from the experience of the
varieties of peace operations discussed ear-
lier that, in the end, peace has to be built by
the warring parties themselves, no matter
how much ‘strategic pushing’ is provided by
outsiders. To be sure, any such pushing has to
be backed by a political will and an under-
standing of what force can and cannot be
expected to achieve; this is an especially
important point for those contemplating
engaging in a war-torn country where the
prospects for an early peace and withdrawal
of intervening forces are remote (note that
such forces still remain in Bosnia and
Kosovo for example) or seeking to democra-
tize a state through a policy of military-led
regime change. Again, we know from earlier
experiences of peace operations that these
are multinational enterprises for reasons of
both financial cost and international political
legitimacy. Yet different countries are likely
to have varying degrees of political will,
and this often extends to their political agen-
das, attitudes toward risk, including casual-
ties, and thus to policies on force protection
and rules of engagement. Some contributors,
to be frank, are likely to be a burden as
much as an asset for a force commander,
although the political context normally prevents
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MILITARY PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS
such officers from being candid about this
observation.
Fourth, we also know that the manner in
which that ‘strategic pushing’ is provided on
the ground by the military forces of different
nations working with other non-military
actors has a bearing on the outcome. While
some national forces take well to peacekeep-
ing, others find it more difficult or at least
have rather different attitudes toward the use
of force, as in recent discussions of the con-
duct of the US and UK armed forces in Iraq
(Aylwin-Foster, 2005). As Janowitz pointed
out long ago, the military needs to be acutely
aware of the political context in which they
operate. That is to say, force should be used
to produce a political effect: in particular to
influence warring parties, who are warring
not only with each other but also with those
from outside, seeking to provide the momen-
tum for a political framework in which they
can co-exist, to settle a dispute, and to ensure
that those who wish to continue to fight –
indeed to perceive the forces of intervening
parties as hostile invaders – are isolated from
the mainstream of civilian politics. As they
face this challenging task, the armed services
of different nations need to digest the key
lesson of the past fifty years or so: that there
is no purely military battlefield any more
(Smith, 2005). How they deal with this fact
and indeed how their behavior is increasingly
monitored not only by local populations but
also by a wider global audience will occupy
a good deal of their time in the future
(Aylwin-Foster, 2005; Dandeker, 2006;
Shaw, 2005).
Finally, it is interesting to note that in
addressing the challenges of twenty-first
century military operations, armed forces
have been drawing on sociological knowl-
edge to a level unprecedented since World
War II. This has ranged from drawing on
sociological theory to understand the struc-
ture of unconventional forces involved in
conflicts (e.g., Reed and Segal, 2007) to car-
rying out research about the impact of
involvement in these conflicts on soldiers
and their families (e.g., Hotopf et al, 2006).
247
NOTE
1 Revision of a paper prepared for presentation at
the International Sociological Association 2004
Research Council Conference, University of Ottawa,
May 28–30. This research was supported in part by
the US Army Research Institute for the Behavioral
and Social Sciences under contract W74V8H-05-
K-0007, and by the Canadian Forces Leadership
Institute under contract DND 2002/0603. We are
grateful to the editors and to three anonymous
reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of
this chapter.
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Conflict, Competition and
Cooperation in the Social
Division of Health Care
Health care in contemporary societies
encompasses a vast and complex set of prac-
tices, organizations and institutions. As
inescapable as birth, illness and death, it rep-
resents on average about one-tenth of the
GDP of Western European and North
American states today, and is thus a very sig-
nificant source of employment, innovation
and economic competitiveness. It has also
become an ever more central field of political
conflict, as welfare states in transition
are torn between competing social forces,
values and models. As engines of economic
redistribution (Evans, 1999), public health
insurance systems have been the target of
campaigns warning of the fiscal crisis of the
state and promoting tax cuts and privatization
(Browne, 2000; Sen, 2003). Major industries
in fields, such as construction, manufactur-
ing, information technologies, biotechnol-
ogy, pharmaceuticals, financial services and
personal services have grown up in and
around health care and compete for the enor-
mous profits to be realized therein. These
economic and political changes impinge ever
17
Paul Leduc Browne
more heavily on the institutions, organizations
and practices in health care. The question
arises: in systems of health care dominated
by ideological conflict, centralized command
structures and economic competition, what is
the place and fate of care, as a cooperative
form of practice and organization?
Care has become ever more salient in
recent years as a key concept of sociological
and political theory (Armstrong, 2004; Daly
and Lewis, 2000; Fink, 2004; Hankivsky,
2004; Kittay, 1999). There has been much
attention to aspects of care (e.g., emotional
labour) in fields relevant to the sociology of
health care, such as management studies,
gerontology or women’s studies. But it
seems marginal – or at the very least taken
for granted, not discussed – in debates about
the political economy of health care (as
pointed out also by Daly and Lewis, 2000).
A basic idea in much of the literature
on care is that the latter is the first and
foremost work (e.g., Armstrong and Kits,
2003; Bolton, 2000; Bolton, 2005; Browne,
2003; Daly and Lewis, 2000; Fink, 2004;
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SOCIAL DIVISION OF HEALTH CARE
Himmelweit, 1999; James, 1989, 1992;
Maheu and Bien-Aimé, 1996; Twigg, 2000).
A rich and expanding body of research has
shown how understanding care as labour,
and labour as care, sheds light on the com-
plexity, fertility and specificity of both
concepts, broadening and deepening their
understanding.
How does health care as a set of public and
private enterprises relate to health services as
care? The answer resides first in the concep-
tualization of care as complex, collective
labour, in which the building of specific
types of cooperative and dialogical relation-
ships is both a condition and a desired out-
come; and second in an analysis of the ways
in which forms of conflict and competition
generated by the social division of health
care today reify care and lead to the exploita-
tion of care work.1
This chapter carries forward the discussion
of care as labour by highlighting the key role
of this concept in bridging the various litera-
tures on care – those which deal with conflict
and competition over power, status and
resources in a political economy perspective,
and those which stress cooperation, emotion
and giving in an anthropological or social
work approach. In developing this analysis,
this chapter draws mainly on North
American, British and French sources from a
variety of disciplines and relies mostly on
empirical studies conducted in Canada and
Québec. It contributes to the literature on
care in its effort to mediate analyses of care
at different spatial scales and different levels
of abstraction. In seeking thus to generate a
more totalizing concept of care, the chapter
moves from the abstract to the concrete, from
care in general to the dynamics of the social
relations of health care stemming from the
division of labour. The most abstract level
specifies the nature of care as a process of
physical, emotional and intellectual work,
but does not yet explicate the relations of
production under which this work takes
place. That is done at subsequent levels of the
analysis. The reader will note that the meaning
of the concept of care shifts as the argument
251
moves from the abstract to the concrete and
factors in the distinctions established by the
social division of labour. The initial discus-
sion of care may at first strike the reader as
too general; however, subsequent stages of
the argument will disclose the value of this
approach from the standpoint of analysis and
critique.
My argument will unfold in four sections.
Health care today resembles a vast and hetero-
geneous collection of services and practices,
such as surgery, laboratory work and insur-
ance. In my view, it is possible to subsume
them all under the concept of care, but this
means departing from common-sense under-
standings of what it is. My first section will
abstract from the relations of production and
situations in which care occurs in order to
construct a concept of care as a specific com-
plex, collective form of labour. This will set
the stage for a second section discussing
some general aspects of today’s social divi-
sion of care, in particular the relationship
between the logics of exchange, redistribu-
tion and reciprocity. In the third section, my
attention will bear on the fragmentation and
reification of care work, and on the segmen-
tation of those who care by gender, class,
status (notably professional status) and by
economic logic (exchange, redistribution,
reciprocity). In today’s world, care is gen-
dered in a number of ways. Several aspects
of care (body work, emotion work) tend to be
socially constructed as ‘women’s work’, not
just in the sense that the majority of care-
givers (including remunerated professional
and non-professional workers in the health
care system) are women, not just in the sense
that these activities are construed as of lesser
value because women do them, and not just
in the sense that men who do them may con-
sequently lose status, but also in the sense
that it is believed to be in the nature of
women to do them, to the point that these
activities are no longer really counted
as work, but simply as the way women are.
A certain kind of gendering in practice and
ideology results in the reification, devalua-
tion and occlusion of care (Hochschild,
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252 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
1983; James, 1989). A fourth section will
extend the argument of the second by dis-
cussing the situations in which care work
becomes exploitation. This will revolve
around an analysis of necessary and surplus
labour in care work.
CARE AND LABOUR
Care is labour in the sense that in pursuit of a
goal it sets in motion natural forces in order
to act upon nature and realize a new objectiv-
ity (Browne, 1990; Lukács, 1980). A particu-
larity of care as labour is that the human
body as a social objectivity is its instrument,
its material substrate and its product. This is
even more evident in health care, where the
purpose of labour is the prevention and cure
of illness, the realization of wellness. The
work is inescapably material, dealing as it
does with dirt, disease and death. This activ-
ity is multidimensional, combining physical,
intellectual and emotional aspects (James,
1989, 1992). The multidimensional nature of
care is illustrated by the way other languages,
such as French and German, require several
words to convey its various dimensions:
Liebe, Sorge and Pflege in German; amour,
souci and soin in French.
While care work is first and foremost body
work (Twigg, 2000: 137ff.), it is a specific
form of it. As Susan Himmelweit puts it: ‘the
process of caring is itself the development of a
relationship. The care a carer provides is basi-
cally inseparable from the relationship that is
being developed with the person she is caring
for’ (Himmelweit, 1999: 29). Its hallmark is
co-production by ‘caregivers’ and ‘users’, for
it is a process in which production is not sep-
arate from consumption. As Julia Twigg
points out: ‘It is in the dynamics of the care
encounter that the nature of what is produced
is defined; production and consumption col-
lapse into one another. [...] [U]sers and work-
ers are co–producers of care’ (Twigg, 2000: 1,
121; also see Baldock, 1997: 83). Dialogue is
an essential dimension of care.
In recent years, a considerable and bur-
geoning literature on emotion work has
appeared (for a recent survey, see Bolton,
2005, as well as Hochschild, 2003: after-
wards; Rastetter, 1999; Steinberg and Figart,
1999). The founding text of this tradition,
The Managed Heart by Arlie Hochschild
(1983), shows how social life is regulated by
the countless acts of work performed by indi-
viduals in order to shape their own and
others’ emotions within the context of ‘feel-
ing rules’. Just as acting in the theatre creates
an effect (suspension of disbelief, etc.), so
emotion work in everyday life is performa-
tive activity that achieves a given effect,
shaping subjects’ mutual attitudes and rela-
tionships. The effect is a joint production, for
feeling is usually a collective activity, bound
up with the exchange of ‘gestures or signs of
feeling with others’: ‘We bow to each other
not only from the waist but from the heart.
Feeling rules set out what is owed in gestures
of exchange between people’ (Hochschild,
1983: 76). Hochschild speaks of the ‘pay-
ment of latent dues’, but regards this basi-
cally as an essential part of the gift
relationship in everyday life: ‘The deeper the
bond, the more central and latent the gifts
exchanged, and the more often a person com-
pensates in one arena for what is lacking in
another. One way that such compensations
are achieved is through the medium of
emotional gift exchange’ (Hochschild, 1983:
83–4).2
Emotion work as a joint work of produc-
tion is at the heart of the production of the
care effect. One could perform a colonoscopy
on someone in the same way that one investi-
gated the pipes in a house. But it would
scarcely count as care. At the same time,
caring for is not the same as caring about.
Care does not necessarily take place within
relationships of love or friendship. Indeed,
recipients of care interviewed by Francine
Saillant described their professional care-
givers as ‘friends’, but ‘not friends like their
other friends’ (Saillant, 2001). Often, the
relationship of care brings together strangers
in situations of great intimacy, in which
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SOCIAL DIVISION OF HEALTH CARE
emotions and bodies are laid bare (indeed, it
is frequently easier for the acts of care to take
place between strangers, than between
friends or kin where issues of taboo or loss of
status arise – see Twigg, 2000: 73–4). Care
work is the production of the trust without
which the other aspects of care as process
and outcome could not happen.
As the production of trust, in the context of
which intimate and even painful practices
may be performed in order to restore health
or reduce pain, care is also tied to consent.
For example, states have enacted laws and
professional bodies have created protocols
governing consent by care recipients or those
who represent them. Consent is based on trust,
and also on information and understanding,
on a sharing of objectives and values. Care is
thus reflexive work, ‘entailing loops in which
recursive knowledges, emotions, and value-
judgements can be reinvested in the relation-
ship between producer and user’ (Maheu and
Bien-Aimé, 1996: 190 [my translation –
PLB]; Offe, 1985).
Care in the abstract cannot be an adequate
description of every concrete example of care
work; nor will every specific task abstracted
from the whole display every feature of
labour. Taken singly, in isolation, the vast
number of practices, organizations and insti-
tutions that make up health care, from hospi-
tals to the home, from surgery to sitting with
Alzheimer’s sufferers, from dialysis to diag-
nostic tests, might seem to involve little or no
intervention in the body (psychological
counselling) or emotional work (analyzing a
blood sample). It is essential, however, to
bear in mind that such specific examples are
the product of a given division of labour. As
such they may display at best some aspect of,
and some connection to, care in general, not
care as such. It is only when they are taken as
a whole that we can grasp their interrelations
and commonalities. Does health care occur
on the micro-sociological level of individual
practices and interactions or on the
macro-sociological level of collective pro-
ductive processes and institutions? Is it, for
example, performed between a nurse and a
253
patient in a hospital, or is it something that
the hospital as a whole accomplishes? Or
again, is it the rich totality of the many rela-
tions and processes constituted by a society’s
health care ‘system’ as a whole? The answer
is all of the above. As Pat Armstrong (2004)
puts it, one needs both to lump and to slice,
that is., to try to deploy concepts dialectically
as a way of seizing phenomena in their
unity-within-difference.
THE RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION
IN/OF CARE – SOME INITIAL
CONSIDERATIONS
The key question to be addressed is: who
cares and under what circumstances do (can)
they do so (Armstrong and Kits, 2003)? If
care is work, then it can be the object of a
labour process analysis, that is., an analysis of
the relations of production (classic contribu-
tions include Braverman, 1974, Burawoy,
1979, 1985; Hales, 1980; recent ones include
O’Doherty and Willmot, 2001; Smith and
Thompson, 1998). Such an analysis can be
summed up in three questions. Who decides
what is to be done? Who performs the work
needed to execute what has been decided
upon? Who enjoys the fruits of this work?
Imagine an abstract model of care in
which all parties to the care relationship
shared in the positing of its goals, made an
equal effort to execute the tasks required to
achieve those goals, and enjoyed the fruits of
that work, the bodies of all involved being
the objects of labour. In such a situation of
perfect co-production, in which all parties
actively built the relationship with each
other, engaging in emotion work in order to
enhance each other’s well-being, there would
be a virtuous circle of reciprocity, a spiral of
giving in which each party, rather than seek-
ing to abolish the debt through payment of its
equivalent, instead perpetuated the mutual
indebtedness by continual giving to the other
(Godbout, 2000). The wealth produced
by care would consist, to be sure, of the
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254 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
use-values required to look after the body’s
needs; but care work would more signifi-
cantly mean the production of relationships,
capacities, mutual well-being – the production
of values that go well beyond immediate
utility, the drive to accumulate or the will to
power.
This is of course an ideal type, a sort of
identical subject-object (Lukács, 1971),
which treats the temporally distinct moments
of care as simultaneous. Its usefulness
resides in the means it affords to judge the
power asymmetry in care and the strength of
the care effect.
In the absence of perfect co-production,
the three questions addressed to the labour
process (who decides? who executes? who
benefits?) may point to different subjects
(i.e., signify a split between intellectual and
manual labour, between coordinators and
workers, between owners and hired hands,
between producers and consumers). The
relations of production are then likely to
entail asymmetrical power over the labour
process, uneven participation in the actual
work, and unequal enjoyment of the fruits of
labour. In the context of care, this can mean
unequal sharing of its burdens, of its condi-
tions, of its rewards, incomplete realization
of the right to care – both to care for another
(‘to give care’) and to be cared for (‘to
receive care’).
Miriam Glucksmann’s emphasis on the
total social organization of labour reminds
us of the need to include in the analysis all
work – intellectual and manual, male and
female, waged and unwaged, forced and
voluntary (Glucksmann, 1995). Taking inspi-
ration from Polanyi, we can think of health
care as embedded in a plurality of economic
forms: market exchange (capitalist relations
of production), redistribution (state alloca-
tion of resources), reciprocity (gift exchange),
domestic administration (economic relations
rooted in the relations of kinship). (On reci-
procity, redistribution, exchange and domes-
tic administration, see Laville et al., 1993;
Laville, 1994, 2001; Polanyi, 1957.)
Jean-Louis Laville has written extensively
about the social or solidarity-based economy
(l’économie solidaire) as a hybrid of
exchange, redistribution and reciprocity.
I believe that these logics are present well
beyond the social economy,3 notably in
health care (although a good case could be
made for defining public health care systems
as ‘solidarity-based economies’). However,
I believe that the metaphor of ‘hybridization’
downplays the elements of conflict and com-
petition too much. I wish to go a step further,
by arguing that these different formations are
not merely juxtaposed, but mediated as
aspects of a dialectical whole.
Supposing that kin are even available (not
a self-evident assumption in North America
today), the combined pressures associated
with the physical and emotional aspects of
care may prove overwhelming within the
bounds of kinship. Faced with demanding
situations with which they cannot fully deal
within the existing boundaries of their rela-
tionship, one or both of the parties may
prefer to turn to a stranger, to resort to a rela-
tionship based on giving (e.g., the help of
volunteers in formal and informal contexts),
redistribution (state assistance) or exchange
(purchasing health services on the market).
This is true of situations in which taboos and
the threat of loss of status preclude certain
forms of intimacy (see above). But it is obvi-
ously also true of situations in which the
labour power and means of production are
not available, that is, all those situations call-
ing for the application of knowledges and
techniques (e.g., surgery, pharmacology) that
only arise on the basis of significant develop-
ment of the productive forces of society and
an elaborate division of labour.
In relations of reciprocity, the creation of
debt through giving is a key way of forging
social relationships; but it is also an affirma-
tion of power. Both parties may welcome the
expression of this power, because they wish
to be ever more bound to each other. It may
also be possible to achieve the virtuous circle
of giving by ‘giving back’ to someone else
than the original giver. This is often the motive
expressed by volunteers. However, because
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SOCIAL DIVISION OF HEALTH CARE
the creation of debt in the gift relationship or
in kinship may be bound up with asymme-
tries of power, redistribution and exchange
can seem to offer advantages over reciproc-
ity. State redistribution governed by a
citizen’s right to public services incurs no
debt. Market purchase of a service liquidates
debt in the very instant that it occurs. This
may offer the greatest freedom to consumers
with purchasing power and many options
among which to choose (Godbout, 1987).
For those who need care, either the state or
the market routes may restore balance and
some semblance of symmetry to a relation-
ship made intolerable by one-sided indebted-
ness. The parties to a care relationship must
constantly maintain a delicate and precarious
balance, in order to avoid the Scylla of
oppression and the Charybdis of dependency
(Gagnon et al., 2000). A public-sector
agency acting as a third party can provide a
framework of rules and expectations that
provides stability and a measure of protec-
tion to all involved. The state and market are
conducive also to the development of capital-
intensive curative systems predicated on a
high volume and intensity of specialized
activities (e.g., surgeries).
Unfortunately, the market and the state
offer no panaceas. One may simply escape
the frying pan of personal dependency by
falling into the fire of alienation. Himmelweit
(1999) suggests that care ceases to be itself
and becomes a mere service when it is com-
pletely commodified. Following Radin
(1996), she posits a process of ‘incomplete
commodification’ in care, where workers do
not exhaust their effort in the tasks they are
contracted to perform, but give time beyond
these tasks, out of love for their work and
pride in what they do.
‘Work’ contrasts with ‘labour’ in Radin’s
and Himmelweit’s usage of those terms.
Labour to them means an activity which is
completely commodified and consists only
of the contracted tasks; work differs, because
money does not ‘exhaust’ its value and it ‘is
understood not as separate from life and self,
but rather as part of the worker and indeed
255
constitutive of her’ (Radin, 1996, cited by
Himmelweit, 1999: 36). In Marxist terms,
one could speak of this as objectification and
alienation, understanding that ‘labour’ in
Radin’s usage (or alienation as presented by
Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts) is an ideal
type, since the separation between work and
life, and the instrumentalization of the
former, are rarely so absolute. Bolton (2005)
stresses this point as well, criticizing
Hochschild (unfairly, in my view) for having
too reductionist and pessimistic understand-
ing of the alienation of emotion work in the
modern economy. Bolton argues that workers
as social actors have much greater latitude
than Hochschild recognizes in determining
the emotional dimensions of the relation-
ships within which they work.
The notion of incomplete commodifica-
tion implies that remunerated service only
truly becomes care within hybrid relations of
production, in which the logics of exchange
and/or redistribution combine with the logic
of reciprocity. To be sure, in a situation of
complete commodification, the worker might
perform the emotional labour required to
produce feelings of trust and ease within the
care recipient. But this hardly qualifies as co-
production, as I have defined it here, for the
worker’s relationship to the work and to the
person needing care is purely instrumental.
In the light of the previous section, of course,
one might regard ‘full’ and ‘incomplete’
commodification as different levels of
abstraction, that is, a moment of analysis
that strips away layers of complexity to show
the pure workings of the commodity form,
and a moment that more closely represents
the concrete phenomena.
THE TOTAL SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
OF LABOUR IN CANADIAN HEALTH
CARE
A vast array and diverse range of practices
and organizations exist within the total social
organization of care work. What appeared in
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256 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
the first stage of the argument as a simple
labour process can now be regarded as a vast
number of distinct activities, which may
often appear not to be part of care at all, as
immediate emotional and body work is
divided off from other activities, such as lab-
oratory work, food preparation or adminis-
tration. All of these activities are part of the
overall production of health care, but the
division of labour causes some to be regarded
as care and others as distinct from care.
How could the administration of a hospital
be regarded as care? Yet, try to imagine how
care could take place in a hospital without
forms of coordination of activities and
resources. Seen in isolation, the work of an
accountant or of a member of the cleaning
staff in the hospital does not look like care,
which one associates rather with the work of
nurses, for example. But all of these activities
are part of a larger process, which gives them
their overall purpose, meaning and definition.
Health care at this level of the analysis
comprises different spaces, temporalities,
hierarchies and networks. Hospitals are cure-
oriented, heavily unionized (at least in the
case of public hospitals in Canada/
Québec), dominated by centralized manage-
ment and a hierarchy of professionals; at the
opposite end of the spectrum, volunteers
bring warm meals to housebound people and
individuals care for their kin. The social divi-
sion of care is the basis of multiple, intersect-
ing relations of class, status and power within
the state, between the state and its citizens,
employers and employees, producers and con-
sumers, professionals and non-professionals,
regulated and non-regulated workers, waged
and unwaged workers, as well as between
regions, sectors and institutions. The dynam-
ics of conflict, competition and cooperation,
which were merely latent at the earlier level
of analysis, now occupy a central place in the
discussion. Gender runs through all of this as
an omnipresent faultline.
In Esping-Andersen’s terms, publicly
insured health care is an instance of decom-
modification (Esping-Andersen, 1990). In
Canada, for example, it protects access to
care by physicians and hospitals from market
forces, making it universally and freely avail-
able as an attribute of citizenship, rather than
as a commodity. However, drug and equip-
ment costs outside of hospital, long-term
institutional and community care, dental and
vision care, physiotherapy, and a whole
range of other mainstream and alternative
treatments and therapies are covered only
partly or not at all. They must therefore be
purchased directly or indirectly via private
insurance, by the individual. Health care is
thus only incompletely decommodified as an
object of personal consumption. Health care
also costs states tens of billions of dollars,
which are spent on buildings, equipment,
vehicles, pharmaceutical products, and espe-
cially on wages, benefits and professional
fees. Labour power and means of production
are largely, but certainly not entirely, com-
modified in health care. In an era of fiscal
restraint, there have been enormous incen-
tives for governments to cut back on the
areas that are fully insured, by shifting care
to ‘extended health services’, for example, by
moving patients out of hospitals and provid-
ing them with community care. In the words
of Nona Glazer, there has been a massive
work transfer from professionals to non-pro-
fessionals, from regulated to unregulated
workers from waged to unwaged workers
and from hospitals to the home (Glazer,
1988, 1993). Several studies have shown the
negative impact of this cascading process on
women who bear the lion’s share of the
burden of unwaged care work (e.g., Aronson
and Neysmith, 1996; Gagnon et al., 2001;
Guberman et al., 2005).
Under the pressure of cost containment,
the health care system can be seen to have
gone through stages analogous to those of
service industries in general. With the rise of
mass public and private health insurance sys-
tems that strove to bend the professionals and
major equipment and drug suppliers to their
will in the creation of mass produced serv-
ices at the lowest cost (‘fordism’), the health
care system underwent change from the rule
of a somewhat paternalistic elite of mostly
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SOCIAL DIVISION OF HEALTH CARE
male medical professionals. The domination
of professional elites and bureaucratic proce-
dures provoked a grassroots backlash that
took the form of interest in alternative
medicine and therapies, as well as of community-
based movements to bring workers and users
together in egalitarian, cooperative or asso-
ciational organizations (see the radical grass-
roots initiatives that were at the origins of
Québec’s Centres locaux de services commu-
nautaires – CLSCs). More recently, the intro-
duction of the new public management in
health care (Browne, 2000) has brought with
it an emphasis on the use of market mecha-
nisms – in particular competition – to effect
efficiencies: separating purchaser from
provider; contracting out; introducing fees;
enhancing efficiency through the standardi-
zation of practices; improving relations with
the ‘customer’ through the ‘personalization’
of services, that is., the introduction of care-
like elements, such as aspects of co-production,
emotional labour and so on (Bellemare,
1999; Ughetto et al., 2002).
Standardization of many aspects of care is
quite another matter, however, because of their
‘product complexity’ and ‘consumer complex-
ity’, as John Baldock (1997: 82) has suggested.
Because emotion and body work is often
inseparable from the concrete relationship
between the individuals it joins (Himmelweit,
1999: 29), care is inextricably bound up with
‘individual differences, varying from person to
person and across time and space’ (Baldock,
1997: 83), making it poorly suited to standard-
ization (Laville and Nyssens, 2001: 11–12;
Leys, 2001). In the rationalization of the mass
production of health services, whether in the
hospital or the home, those aspects of care
which are most easily standardized, which
have greatest prestige or which have greatest
clout have been given priority (Campbell,
2000). The emotion work of building care rela-
tionships has tended to be marginalized and
occluded, because it is not standardizable,
because it is time-consuming and expensive,
and because of its gendered nature.
Because care consists in the collective
work of building relationships, its essential
257
condition is time for body work, emotion
work, dialogue – for listening. ‘Time is a gift
of self, even when it is remunerated; it blazes
the path of reflexivity (between care givers
and recipients and each for her/himself) and
of the space to be taken’ (Gagnon et al.,
2000: 155). Because the building of trust is
such an essential part of care, continuity is
one of its key features (Himmelweit, 1999:
35). Time is money, according to the old
cliché. Private wealth can purchase time –
and therefore the opportunity for ‘labour’ to
become ‘work’ in Radin’s and Himmelweit’s
terms – for a price. (On time and care, see
Browne, 2003; Gagnon et al., 2000; Twigg,
2000.) Few people can afford this, though. In
the public sector, time has grown scarce and
expensive, as cutbacks have become the
imperative of every ministry and program.
Although there are considerable expenditures
on supplies and equipment in health care (for
figures see Browne, 2000), wages make up a
significant portion of the costs. Reducing the
latter has therefore meant finding ways of
economizing on the expenditure of labour
power, that is, reducing the time available to
health care users. The clock time of capital
and the state is in contradiction with the
process time of care. As Julia Twigg puts it,
the ‘needs of the body cannot be saved up and
dealt with once a week’ (Twigg, 2000:
100–101; also Davies, 1994).
The time of care can be related to the kind
of social relationship it is. David Graeber
(2001) usefully shows how giving can take
different forms, which may themselves be
highly gendered, pulling either in the direc-
tion of open-ended or closed relationships.
In the latter, actors weigh their gifts much
more carefully and tend to await reciprocal
gifts before giving again. In the former,
actors give continually without expectation
of reciprocal gestures and without any
thought as to whether such gestures have
been forthcoming – behaviour characteristic
of a relationship of care. Each of these forms
of giving can become corrupted. Closed rela-
tionships can ‘degenerate into outright com-
petition’ or barter; open-ended giving, of the
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258 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
kind one finds in care, exposes givers to the
danger of ‘patronage and exploitation’, of
personal dependency on the recipient. ‘As
structures of action, one is concerned with
maintaining the value of a timeless human
commitment; the other, that of a more
ephemeral autonomy’ (Graeber, 2001: 225).
In the health care professions, curative
activities (e.g., surgery) were traditionally
identified as male while caring activities
were regarded as female. Curative acts are
punctual and often singular events. They lend
themselves to closed relationships of gift or
commodity exchange, and indeed to compet-
itive displays of power, skill or wealth. (I
recall my endodontist some years ago calling
his colleague into the room to boast of the
difficult root-canal operation he had just
conducted on my tooth and to bask in the
ensuing praise and admiration.) Caring acts,
by contrast, are fluid and plural, in constant
need of repetition (James, 1989; Neysmith,
1998; Twigg, 2000), entail open-ended
giving, and are prone to lead to patterns of
dependency.
Not only are the vast majority of those
who occupy caring (as opposed to curing)
profession’s women, but the perception and
response to caregiving varies as a function of
the gendered construction of each profes-
sional category (care by physicians and
nurses is not perceived in the same light)
(Twigg, 2000) and as a function of whether it
is occupied by a man or a woman (patients
and other professionals may not relate the
same way to a male or female physician or
surgeon, for example) (Molinier, 2003).
More broadly, men’s and women’s respective
relations to caring, in its physical, emotional
and intellectual aspects, are differently con-
structed, as are (correlatively) their respec-
tive relations to giving. Where men’s giving
and caring may be the object of praise as the
manifestation of virtue, women’s caring and
giving is more likely to be reified as an
expression of women’s nature, and as such is
more likely to be socially invisible.
‘Emotional labor is recognized not when the
outcome is right, but on those occasions
when it goes wrong. The product itself is
invisible. The value of the labour is only rec-
ognized in negative forms, in disorder, rather
than in its positive form of “adjustment”’
(James, 1989: 28). Looking after others’
bodies and emotions has traditionally been
regarded as ‘women’s work’ and, as such, as
‘natural’. In fact, this is so much the case that
it has often not been seen as work at all and
certainly not as something on which one
would put a price (Hochschild, 1983: 163,
165; James, 1989).
Different aspects of care have been
abstracted from each other and made to
appear quite independent of the other aspects.
Professionals perform work which involves
specialized knowledge and technical skills.
Other tasks are left to poorly paid, unregulated
workers, disproportionately women of colour,
often immigrants. Some professionals, who
have been engaged in a decades-long struggle
for increasing status, recognition and auton-
omy, seek to dissociate themselves from such
subaltern tasks. In fact, the emotional labour
that is thought to be an unskilled and sponta-
neous extension of women’s nature is subtle
and demanding, requiring not only reserves of
patience, empathy and tact, but powers of psy-
chological analysis. Emotional labour is not
easily quantified, is difficult to account for, is
often regarded as an unskilled activity accom-
plished by people of a lower social status, and
can expose its practitioners to the risk of
dependency; body work is associated with
dirt, waste and decay (Twigg, 2000). The
social division of care work, and thus the dif-
ferent constructions of the nature of care, are
key issues in the competition between profes-
sions for status, salaries and power.
In a context of ‘lean production’, non-
standardizable tasks, such as emotion work,
still need to be done – only they often have to
be done on the side, because they are no
longer considered ‘value-added’ and are
therefore no longer remunerated, or because
increasingly rationed time makes them more
and more difficult to accomplish. Workers
continue to perform them as ‘extras’, as gifts
– transforming ‘labour’ into ‘work’ – and are
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SOCIAL DIVISION OF HEALTH CARE
understood as doing so out of their own
goodness as people. Management may or
may not tolerate these deviations from work-
ing to rule. The fact remains that the ‘extras’
are not remunerated and are seen as a ‘labour
of love’ that workers do as a result of being
intrinsically good people (Aronson and
Neysmith, 1996; Hochschild, 1983: 167;
Twigg, 2000: 121).
Fully commodified labour is a sum of dis-
crete, identifiable tasks; incompletely com-
modified work is greater than the sum of its
parts, never reducible to a set of operations
prescribed in a contract. In a holistic concept
of care, ‘extras’ would be recognized as an
integral part of the work and be part of the
overall work plan, not left to personal whim.
By splitting the labour process asunder,
rationalization reduces formal care to a set of
rationalized, costed services, making much
of care on the ‘supply side’ not only informal
and invisible, but also, in a sense, an ‘irra-
tional residue’, like weeds growing in a man-
icured garden.
On the ‘demand side’, those in need of
care are constructed – either as passive
patients and clients or as active, empowered
consumers of products and services. As pas-
sive clients, they are no longer conceived as
co-producers; as active consumers, they may
be, but in the context of a contractual, market
relation, in which they may act as employers.
In many cases, however, those in need of
care, and their kin, are mobilized as agents of
their own care and made to act as substitutes
for paid workers who are no longer present
or no longer have time. As the home increas-
ingly becomes the site of post-acute care,
patients and their kin are trained by time-
crunched professionals to effect a range of
technical tasks. This work transfer, driven by
the financial imperatives of the public sector,
remains largely invisible and unrecognized.
What were identified in the first section as
essential aspects of care, namely its co-
production by ‘workers’ and ‘users’, and its
union of physical, emotional and intellectual
work, are eclipsed by the working of the
social division of care.
259
These are the classic features of reification
(Lukács, 1971): the fragmentation of the
unity of human action by a division of labour
driven by a will to impose an instrumental
rationality of control; the consequent
replacement of that unity in the consciousness
of the agents by a series of binary categories
(rational–irrational, objective–subjective,
social–natural, etc.); the reduction of the rela-
tions produced by complex collective labour
either to aspects of an objective, bureaucrati-
cally imposed, process or to aspects of the
subjective nature of the individual workers;
the opposition between active producers and
passive consumers, between those who do
and those who receive. As a result of reifica-
tion, there is conflict between care as a dia-
logical, reciprocal process of co-production,
and as a service distributed or sold to individ-
ual recipients.
‘NECESSARY’ AND ‘SURPLUS’
LABOUR
What seems like exploitation, waste or
superfluity in the logic of commodity
exchange, and like irrationality in the logic
of redistribution – doing more than was
demanded, giving more than was expected,
donating without expectation of a return – is
the epitome of sensible behaviour in the logic
of reciprocity. Furthermore, while the person
who gives without receiving the equivalent
appears as the loser in the logic of the
market, the opposite would tend to be the
case in the logic of giving: the person who
does not give back remains in debt and thus,
potentially, in a position of inferiority. As an
employee, the worker’s relationship with the
employer is governed by the logic of the
market; as a caregiver, her relationship with
the person for whom she cares is governed by
the logic of reciprocity.
This juxtaposition of the commodity and
gift forms makes it possible for the worker to
be subject to the dual imperatives of the
employer’s will and the complex requirements
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260 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
of the care relationship. Where caregiving
takes the form of wage labour in a formal or
institutional setting (hospital, long-term care
facility, community care), the care relation-
ship is subordinate to, and limited by, the
employment relationship. This means that
the institutional goals may come into conflict
with the right to care (both to give and to
receive care) and the development of care as
reciprocity. It also means that when such
relations of reciprocity develop, they may
either be regarded as a nuisance by the
employer or as a source of profit in the form
of work done for free by the employees,
which might otherwise need to be remuner-
ated. The caregiver’s gifts to the person for
whom she is caring may end up constituting
a gift to the employer, work done for free.
Thus relations of giving mediate relations of
exchange, making it possible for managers in
the public and private sectors to get more
work out of the workers than they need to
pay for. Workers are owed debts for their
labour which are never repaid, because the
existence of these debts is concealed and
denied. The gift relationship functions as a
mediation of workers’ exploitation in the
health care system.4
From the standpoint of those who have
designed the labour process, the separation
between formal, rational and visible care on
the one hand, and informal, ‘irrational’ and
invisible care on the other, is in a sense a dis-
tinction between necessary and surplus
labour, understood respectively as work that
must be accomplished because it is mandated
by the employment contract and additional
work that the workers may do on their own
time and out of their own will. From the stand-
point of the gift relationship, this so-called
‘surplus’ is in fact necessary, the indispensable
giving back and creation of debt.
A feminist analysis would reject the notion
that giving this ‘surplus’ is a matter of indi-
vidual choice, and would point to the habitus
shaped by patriarchal relations of oppression,
as well as the pressures to which caregivers
are subject in precarious, low-wage employ-
ment. To the extent that women pass through
a ‘long apprenticeship’ (James, 1989: 37)
which predisposes them both to enter into
open-ended relations of giving and to under-
take the emotional and physical labour of
care, then gender mediates giving and
exchange, and hence mediates the class rela-
tion between employer and employee. In
Twigg’s words, care is seen as stemming
from women’s nature: ‘It is not what they do
but who they are. Extras thus represent work
that is extracted on the basis of the traditional
gender contract, but not officially recognized
or recompensed in the formal one’ (Twigg,
2000: 171). In the picture presented here, the
‘traditional gender contract’ is not so much a
contract as a particular form of habitus.
A Marxist analysis would suggest that the
workers perform both ‘necessary’ and ‘sur-
plus’ labour even when they work to rule,
because the value of their labour power is
less than the value that their labour produces.
It would also recall that the problem does not
reside in the gift relationship as such, but in
the division of labour which separates out
men’s from women’s work, wage relations
from gift relations, formal from informal
work, and so on, giving rise to the reification
of specific social practices and relationships
as women’s nature, as superfluous and so on.
CONCLUSION
To sum up, a trend in the institutional and
professional side of health care today is to
compress the time of work in formal health
services, reducing the possibility of building
the relations of care. Meanwhile, the work of
forging deeper, more open-ended relation-
ships of reciprocity is increasingly trans-
ferred to volunteers and family members,
because paid health care workers do not have
time for such work (except in the form of
‘extras’) or because it is no longer considered
appropriate for them to do it – except in
the context of high-priced private services.
One result of this trend has been the grow-
ing exploitation by private entrepreneurs and
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SOCIAL DIVISION OF HEALTH CARE
privatization advocates of public anxiety
over the time of care, that is, both its timeli-
ness and duration, as waiting for treatment
appears to lengthen, while hospital stays and
contact time with healt hcare professionals
seem to get ever shorter. Another conse-
quence has been the enormous pressure felt
by physicians, nurses and other caregivers in
recent years as a result of budget cuts, mas-
sive restructuring, work speed-ups, and the
introduction of new management strategies.
In Canada, nurses responded with unprece-
dented union militancy (Briskin, 2006). At
the same time, many have left the profession,
while recruitment of new nurses has been
insufficient. A huge labour shortage threatens
Canada’s health care system. The popular and
ideological perception is of health care sys-
tems in crisis because of soaring costs. The
analysis here suggests that health care sys-
tems are experiencing a deeper crisis rooted
in the way their societies allocate and
manage time – a process increasingly dictated
by the imperatives of capital accumulation –
and in the way this fragments the cooperative
relations of care by pitting caregivers and
users, producers and consumers, employers
and employees, managers and workers, pro-
fessionals and patients, waged workers and
volunteers against each other in relations of
competition and conflict.
NOTES
1 It was only as I was finishing this chapter that I
came across Daly and Lewis’s article, ‘The Concept of
Social Care and the Analysis of Contemporary
Welfare States’ (2000). Daly and Lewis also make the
case for analyzing care as labour, viewing it holisti-
cally beyond the fragmentation brought about by the
division of labour, examining the social relations of
wealth and power entailed by the social division
of care, and taking into account not only the public
and private sectors, but also the third sector, as well
as the informal and domestic economies. Although
my starting point is Marxist theory and my object
health care, while their starting point is feminist
theory and their object what they call social care,
there is much in common between their approach
and mine.
261
2 To be sure, emotion work is also an instrument
of manipulation in the private and public spheres. The
Managed Heart analyzes two extreme examples of
the colonization of this faculty in the capitalist econ-
omy, in one case (flight attendants) with a view to
seducing customers, in the other (bill collectors) with
a view to bullying them. However, I shall reserve dis-
cussion of these dynamics for the following section.
3 In Quebec, and increasingly in Canada, the
social economy is defined as those forms of non-
statutory collective enterprise (e.g., associations and
cooperatives), which exist primarily to serve their
members or the community, rather than simply to
maximize profits or generate financial returns; which
are governed democratically by their members, with
involvement by their workers and the users of their
services; which stand for the primacy of persons and
labour over capital in the distribution of their sur-
pluses and revenues; and which promote the values
of participation, empowerment and collective
responsibility. (This definition is adapted from those
used by the Canadian Social Economy Hub
(www.socialeconomynetwork.ca) and Québec’s
Chantier de l’économie sociale (www.chantier.qc.ca).)
4 Sharon Bolton (2005) usefully distinguishes
between different aspects of emotion management in
the workplace. Pecuniary emotion management, as
the type of emotional labour required of employees in
commercial settings (e.g., Hochschild’s flight atten-
dants who must always appear cheerful and pleasant),
differs in her view from prescriptive emotion manage-
ment, the sort of emotion work that professionals
such as lawyers, physicians and nurses are trained to
accomplish in order to cope with the stresses of their
jobs. These both differ from philanthropic emotion
management, which Bolton defines as the gift of emo-
tion work with no expectation of a return. Bolton
(2000) shows that nurses take pride and pleasure in
this kind of emotion work; therefore, she does not
view it as alienating. My point here is not that it is
alienating as such, for it is not, but rather that the
specific character of the gift relationship must be ana-
lyzed, both as it appears in itself in a given situation
and as it is mediated with other forms of relations of
production. Bolton presents the different aspects of
emotion management as though they could coexist as
separate things, without exploring their mediations.
Labour process theory, which Bolton commends,
would suggest, however, that one form is likely to be
hegemonic and the others subordinate.
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264 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

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9781412934633-Chap-18 1/10/09 8:52 AM Page 265
Markets Against Society:
Labor’s Predicament in the
Second Great Transformation
Edward Webster and Robert Lambert
Sociology had its beginnings in the attempts
by classical social thinkers, such as Marx,
Durkheim and Weber, to interpret the first
‘great transformation’ to the market econ-
omy. Its emergence was connected to the
widespread concern with the economic,
social, cultural and moral effects of moving
from a non-industrial to an industrializing
society. This concern reflected the major
fault line of politics at the time between the
proponents of economic liberalism and their
advocacy of the self-regulating market and,
on the other side, those who favored inter-
vention to ‘protect society’.
The rapid growth of economic liberalism
over the past 20 years has led sociologists to
define the current period of world history as
the Second Great Transformation (Munck,
2002). The theoretical work of Karl Polanyi
has emerged as the most influential in the
construction of a sociology of the Second
Great Transformation (Burawoy, 2000: 693;
2003a; Munck, 2004). In Karl Polanyi’s clas-
sic study of the industrial revolution, in what
he called the Great Transformation, he
18
showed how society took measures to protect
itself against the disruptive impact of the
unregulated market. This he called the
‘double movement’ whereby ever-wider
extensions of free market principles gener-
ated counter-movements to protect society.
Against an economic system that dislocates
the very fabric of society, the social counter-
movement, he argued, is based on the
‘principle of social protection aiming at the
conservation of man and nature’ (Polanyi,
2001: 33).
What implications does the Second Great
Transformation have for the labor movement?
A ‘triple tension’, Richard Hyman writes, lies
at the heart of union identity (2001: 3). Trade
unions, he says, are drawn in three directions
as they engage market, class and society. Put
differently, unions, as institutions, engage in
competitive relations (through the market),
conflictual relations (through class-based
conflict) and cooperative relations (through
society). In European trade union history this
gave rise to a ‘triple polarization of trade
union identities’ (2001: 4). As associations of
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266 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
workers, unions attempt to regulate the
wage-labor relationship and thus cannot
ignore the market. As organizations repre-
senting the interests of workers confronting
employers’ interests, they are class agencies.
Unions are also part of society, coexisting
with other institutions and other constella-
tions of interests.
Hyman presents market, class and society
as a ‘geometry of trade unionism’, connected
in an unstable balance in the three points of a
triangle. Thus business unionism (market
focus), integrative unionism (social focus)
and radical unionism (class focus) never exist
in a pure form. He concludes that in practice,
‘actually existing unions have tended to
incline toward a contradictory admixture of
two of the three ideal types’ (2001: 4).
The aim of this chapter, through drawing
on the work of Karl Polanyi, is three-fold:
first, to deepen our understanding of
globalization from a Southern perspective;
second, to identify the predicament facing
trade unions where they are drawn into the
efficiency discourse of economic liberalism,
leading them into becoming agents of
restructuring rather than instruments of
social justice; third, to examine the emer-
gence of an alternative response, what we call
social movement unionism, to this predica-
ment. This alternative tendency attempts to
link the workplace to social and political
issues. It is a form of union organization that
facilitates an active engagement in workplace
issues and the community. It engages in
alliances in order to establish relationships
on a systematic basis (Lambert and Webster,
1988: 21).
The chapter is divided into two parts;
in part 1, we locate the Second Great
Transformation in the context of the South.
We define ‘South’ politically rather than geo-
graphically as those zones of the global econ-
omy that have historically been subject to
colonialism and struggle to break from their
subordinate past. We have chosen to focus on
Brazil and South Africa as they have experi-
enced similar patterns of industrialization. Both
countries underwent a rapid transformation of
the labor process, a despotic system of labor
control, a lack of social infrastructure in the
community and restricted access to political
power. This is the pattern of industrialization
that creates the conditions for the rise and
rapid growth of social movement unionism
(Seidman, 1990). We argue that the successful
construction of a welfare state never occurred
in the South in countries such as Brazil and
South Africa. Instead, what is emerging in
the South is a counter-movement for the
construction of an integrated society and of
a public domain against the market for the
first time.
In part 2, through a reflection on earlier
experiences of social movement unionism in
Brazil and South Africa, we examine the pos-
sibilities of trade unions emerging as key
actors in a broad Polanyian type of counter-
movement consisting of a coalition between
labor and the global social justice movement
(Munck, 2002; Waterman, 2001). The sustain-
ability of such a social movement approach
under the impact of political transition is a
crucial question which has been discussed
elsewhere (Sitas, 2005).
PART ONE: A SOCIOLOGY OF THE
SECOND GREAT TRANSFORMATION
For Polanyi the First Great Transformation of
the nineteenth century led to counter-move-
ments which, over a number of decades, led
to a class compromise between capital and
labor resting on full employment, strong
trade unions and democratic societies. The
trade union discourse during this period was
that of class mobilization, a discourse that
emphasized the importance of working
people having an institutionalized voice in
the market and society. This ‘Northern class
compromise’, it has been argued, is being
undermined by the current phase of liberal-
ization, the Second Great Transformation
(Webster and Adler, 1999). At the center of
this transformation are market-driven politics
that have led to ‘a remarkably rapid erosion
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MARKETS AGAINST SOCIETY
of democratically determined collective
values and institutions’, as state sovereignty
is increasingly surrendered to large global
corporations (Leys, 2001: 4). In this shift,
market ideology (competition and individu-
alism) has penetrated every facet of society.
Trade unions have not been immune. As a
consequence, some trade unions have
assumed an expanded role: they are now the
advocates of market-driven politics. They are
instruments of ‘best practice’; they are a
driver of competition and efficiency.
Australia is a good illustration of this rad-
ical shift. Over the past two decades, the role
and purpose of trade unionism has been
defined in these expanded, marketized terms:
many have become partners in corporate
restructuring. The Australian Council of
Trade Unions (ACTU), following the lead of
the newly elected Hawke/Keating govern-
ment in the 1980s, embraced a positive con-
ception of restructuring – the process created
efficient, competitive corporations that were
integrated into the global economy, seizing
the opportunities of global market access.
This vision flowed from the ACTU’s in prin-
ciple support for the economic liberalization
agenda of the Hawke/Keating Labour
Government and their unambiguous commit-
ment to neo-liberal globalization, to an open
economy and to market-driven politics. This
strategic shift signaled ‘an historic water-
shed’ heralding a new era of partnership, of
‘cooperative industrial relations’ that would
dissolve ‘ingrained distrust’ between employ-
ers and unions, improve productivity and
‘minimize traditional conflict’, thereby ener-
gizing market-driven politics (Ogden, 1992:
11). Many unions, as agents of class interests,
dissolved before this new orientation.
Ironically, this embrace of restructuring by
the ACTU did not signal a new era of union
growth. Rather, the steady decline of trade
unionism in Australia is a feature of the
1990s, as the Labour government opened the
door to non-union employment relations, for
if flexibility is the essence of market efficiency,
industrial laws need to be reformed accord-
ingly. The Labour government’s reforms were
267
further advanced through the Liberal/
National government’s 1996 Workplace
Relations Act, which introduced individual
bargaining and a variety of measures that
consolidated managerial prerogative, giving
corporations virtually unlimited scope in
driving restructuring. During the period of
these changes, union membership in Australia
has declined steeply. The Australian unions
seem to be in free fall, with membership
down to a mere 23.1% of the workforce in
August 2002. This slide needs to be viewed
against the backdrop of their relative histori-
cal strength, which had remained above 50%
for all but 13 years (11 of those years following
the Great Depression: 1931–1941) between
1920 and 1980 (Peetz, 1998).
These developments reflect a key feature
of the Second Great Transformation – the
declining power and influence of trade
unionism, deemed necessary to secure flexi-
ble markets and the construction of unequal
worlds of work. The restructuring flowing
from rapid liberalization in the North is lead-
ing to what Burawoy (1985) calls ‘hege-
monic despotism’. This erosion of the
workplace power of trade unions and of the
benefits they had won for their members is
matched by the erosion of the welfare state
and the rights to a social wage, which had
been accumulated through decades of work-
ing class struggle. The sphere of the public
and the social, which had been established by
the counter-movement in response to the
domination of the market during the First
Great Transformation, is being rolled back by
the forces of neo-liberal globalization
unleashed in the Second Great Transformation.
The impact of the two Great Trans-
formations in the North is illustrated
schematically in Figure 18.1.
Much of the literature on transformation
has been written from the perspective of the
advanced industrialized countries of the
North. These studies have taken the Northern
model, the particular, and made it universal.
When Africa is discussed in this literature it
is treated as ‘a black hole’, a marginal part of
the world described by Castells (1996) as the
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268 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
Figure 18.1 The northern compromise
Form of state
The First Great Democratic
Transformation welfare state
The Second Great Democratic,
Transformation ‘hollowed-out’ state
*
Social citizenship is the right to income security and other forms of welfare such as education and health, a right to share
to the full one’s social heritage and the right to a safe, healthy and peaceful environment.
Fourth World. However, countries of the
South have followed a historical trajectory
that differed markedly from the First Great
Transformation of northern industrialized
nations. The history of the South is marked
by the colonial experience of political and
economic subordination to the needs of the
northern capitalist economies. As Barchiesi
(2006) argues, at the core of the welfare state
of advanced capitalist society was a link
between wage labor and social citizenship.
The ‘social question’ was solved and work-
ers’ demands were met by the introduction
of the welfare state that began a process of
redistribution through state transfers.
However, in the South, he suggests, colonial-
ism could not deal with the ‘social question’.
These countries lacked the preconditions for
a successful resolution of the social question,
a political coalition made of strong unions,
well-organized employers and a government
that considers industrial citizens its core
constituency (Moene and Wallerstein, 2002).
In Polanyian terms, they skipped a stage.
These societies never secured a welfare state,
high-waged employment and social citizen-
ship as their own democratic transition
occurred at the very moment of the Second
Great Transformation. Political liberation
was secured within the global environment
of market-driven politics and restructuring of
work and society.
To understand the growing informalization
of work and the attendant social crisis in the
South, it is necessary to locate the Second
Great Transformation in the context of the
colonial legacy of social underdevelopment.
Let us illustrate our argument through one
southern country, South Africa.
Page 268
Work restructuring Social development
Hegemonic – high wages, Social citizenship*
high employment
Hegemonic despotism – Erosion of the
flexible firm welfare state
During the First Great Transformations,
rapid accumulation in South Africa was
based on cheap non-free labor, benefiting
specific sectors of white settler society as
well as Northern capital. These economic
ends were secured by the formation of a state
based on the white settler population, which
was able to ensure the domination and sup-
pression of the colonized black population.
In contrast to the counter-movement in the
North through which society was able suc-
cessfully to challenge the destructive tenden-
cies of the market by constructing the
welfare state, South Africa saw the forging of
a despotic racial order based on migrant
labor and the brutalities of racial segregation,
and the ruthless suppression of political dis-
sent. Counter-movement took the form of a
national liberation movement which first
became powerful in the 1950s and was only
able to achieve a political breakthrough with
negotiated transition in the early 1990s –
ironically (as the last apartheid President so
astutely observed) at the same time as the
forceful reassertion of market forces tri-
umphed over communism.
Thus, in contrast to the North, countries of
the South such as South Africa have never
experienced the successful construction of a
welfare state through the counter-movement
of society in response to the market forces of
the First Great Transformation. The task facing
society is not the defense or strengthening of
society and the public domain, but rather to
form a counter-movement for the construction
of an integrated society and of a public domain
against the market for the first time – and in
the face of the even more powerful market
forces of the Second Great Transformation.
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MARKETS AGAINST SOCIETY
The impact of the two Great Transformations
in the South is illustrated schematically in
Figure 18.2.
Restructuring flowing from economic lib-
eralization has resulted in a growing differen-
tiation within the worlds of work, producing
three major zones of work. First, there are the
core formal sector workplaces, with workers
in more or less stable employment relations
with wages, benefits and access to demo-
cratic worker and trade union rights. Second,
there is the zone of casualized and external-
ized work where non-core workers are com-
pelled into less stable employment relations,
sometimes with temporary or part-time con-
tracts with the core enterprise, at other times
in more precarious contracts with intermedi-
aries, such as labor brokers, informal facto-
ries or subcontractors. Then there is the third
zone, or periphery, where people are ‘unem-
ployed’ and ‘make a living’ in informal
sector activities, ranging from lucrative crim-
inal activities and those that permit a degree
of petty accumulation through to subsistence
activities (Webster and von Holdt, 2005)
The resulting social crisis experienced in
poor households and poor communities is
exacerbated by the underfunding of public
services, as well as the privatization of essen-
tial services – both of which are economic
and social policies fostered by the Second
Great Transformation. Instead of extending
social rights to all citizens, restructuring in
South Africa is transferring the responsibility
of social protection to the household and to
the poor, threatening the very sustainability of
communities and the reproduction of society.
This emerged in the United Nations
Human Development Report 2003. About
48.5% of the South African population (21.9
million people) currently falls below the
Figure 18.2 The global south: the case of South Africa
Form of state
The First Great Settler colonial/
Transformation apartheid state
The Second Great Democratic post-colonial
Transformation state
269
national poverty line (UNDP, 2003: 41, Table
2.20). Income distribution remains highly
unequal and has deteriorated in recent years.
This is reflected in the high Gini-coefficient,
which rose from 0.596 in 1995 to 0.635 in
2001 (UNDP, 2003: 44, Figure 2.11). The
Human Development Index (HDI) for South
Africa moved from 0.72 in 1995 to 0.67 in
2003 (UNDP, 2003: 45, Figure 2.13). Indeed
the life expectancy index declined to 51.8
years in 2002 (UNDP, 2003: 44).
PART TWO: AN ALTERNATIVE
DIRECTION – SOCIAL MOVEMENT
UNIONISM
Discourse is power and the transformation in
union discourse we have identified reflects
the power of the forces of neo-liberalism
over organized labor, epitomized in the way
unions have become imprisoned within lib-
eral economic values. Discourse is a moment
of communication and persuasion regarding
lines of action and belief. The discursive
moment is a ‘form of power, it is a mode of
formation of ideas and beliefs’ (Harvey,
1996: 83). The general failure of unions to
present an alternative discourse on restruc-
turing is an indication of the success of the
neo-liberal political project in this regard.
Deeply held beliefs and values of organized
labor are mocked as reflecting those of a
bygone era. They are barriers to progress.
They undermine the economy.
In absorbing these beliefs and values and
in becoming market agents, business unionism
signaled a profound political transformation
that undermines class consciousness. This
orientation has reinforced the notion of
Work restructuring Social development
Colonial despotism – Colonialism excluded
low wages, migrant labor the majority
Growing differentiation Crisis of social reproduction –
and informalization of work legacy of colonial
underdevelopment
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270 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
market necessity and in so doing has asserted
that the foundational values of trade union-
ism are now market values: individualism,
competition, efficiency, profit, shareholder
enrichment. This model’s social vision is of a
society of individual opportunity and upward
mobility. This is a politics that stimulates
individual aspirations, assuaging the desire
to climb the social ladder. Such a value shift
is radical, corroding the essential driving
power of unionism – the culture of solidarity.
Touraine (1987: 112) has highlighted the
implications of this value shift. He noted:
Beliefs and convictions have been lost, with the
result that militant workers lack certainty and
sometimes even feel that they no longer know
what their action means... it is impossible not to
notice how much weaker ideas of a desirable
future have become.
A worker explained, ‘We are at the end of our
tether because there is no prospect of a more
just, amicable society’ (Touraine, 1987: 115).
Others observed that ‘the trade union move-
ment is less and less ethically identified ... trade
unionism must rediscover these values in
order to give meaning to its activities’
(Touraine, 1987: 118).
In the context of this decline, Harvey
(2000: 49) asks, ‘... in a time when the class
struggle has receded ..., is this not also a time
when the painting of fantastic pictures of a
future society has some role to play?’ Such a
shift in discourse lies at the heart of the
union’s predicament. The question of what
kind of society unions are fighting for cap-
tures the fact that imaginative strategy
embraces both the vision (what is being
fought for) and the present predicament
(what is being fought against). Both dimen-
sions are shaped by ethics, by ‘foundational
beliefs’ that could make ‘political action
meaningful, creative, and possible’ (Harvey,
1996: 2). Justice (the justness of social rela-
tions) is the core, foundational value that
inspires a social movement alternative to
business unionism. Market necessity is
undermined through highlighting how
market-driven politics functions as a mecha-
nism of injustice. Pessimism and inaction
that derives from the notion of the ironclad
nature of markets is transformed into anger at
the injustice and inequity of market restruc-
turing. Shifting the discourse from efficiency
and competitiveness to exploitation and jus-
tice re-ignites the need for solidarity, the
vision of a desirable future and the optimism
of social agency.
Business unionism and its embrace of
market ideology represent but one union ori-
entation. Here we identify a historically
grounded alternative – social movement
unionism (SMU) – that is driven by a differ-
ent set of core values. A justice discourse
inspired the fight against racial oppression in
South Africa and military dictatorship and
extreme inequality in Brazil, giving rise to
SMU as a key facet of the resistance. In both
nations the strategic orientation was articu-
lated by the union leadership: these were not
struggles for limited, sectional gains in
wages and conditions, important though
these might be. This was a much wider resist-
ance for human emancipation, recognition
and dignity. To secure such a vision, the
injustice of these regimes had to be fought
against. The social movement pathway gen-
erated by this strategic value choice provides
a model for unions consumed by restructur-
ing. If a counter-movement is to emerge, a
global social movement for emancipation,
equality, meaning, security and against the
insecurity, inequity and restructuring’s
destruction of meaning will need to be imag-
ined and constructed through the power of
movement. The first signs of such a move-
ment are evident in the rise of the World
Social Forum process and the global social
justice movement.
Unions face a critical strategic choice, cap-
tured in Figure 18.3.
Let us illustrate the choices facing labor
through an analysis of the emergence of social
movement unionism in South Africa and in
Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s. Our con-
tribution is part of the renaissance of scholarly
interest in SMU in recent years led by Peter
Waterman. His ‘SMU adventures’ situates the
question of alternatives in ‘the new global
9781412934633-Chap-18 1/10/09 8:52 AM Page 271
MARKETS AGAINST SOCIETY
Figure 18.3 The critical strategic choice for trade unionism
Political orientation Market
Market-driven politics Re-regulation to
empower corporations
in the guise of
market freedom.
Privatization and the
transformation of the state
Societal-driven politics New forms of social
regulation;
Asserting social and
democratic control
over corporations
justice and solidarity movement’ and the need
for ‘a new labor internationalism’ (Waterman,
2001, 2002, 2003a, 2003b, 2004).
This resurgent scholarly debate is a
response to the crisis of business unionism.
The experience of South Africa and Brazil
provides fertile ground for reflection on the
alternative needed to engage restructuring
because the state regimes in both countries,
backed by corporate interests, appeared all
powerful. The possibility of challenging the
state looked like a pipe dream just as today
the notion that corporate restructuring can be
halted seems like a fantasy, like desire. From
the outset, in these countries it was clear that
collective bargaining in and of itself could
never challenge political oppression.
Powerlessness was the focus of the trade
union debate in South Africa in the early
1970s. Analysis of the 50-year history of non-
racial unions revealed phases of expansion
followed by decline. Labor historians con-
cluded that there were two fundamental
flaws: mass mobilization was not consoli-
dated into workplace organization; structures
of leadership accountability were weak,
resulting in instances of corruption that
divided the new unions. This led to the
advancement of a concept of internal democ-
racy centered on worker control that was con-
sciously anti-bureaucratic in its thrust.
Workers would form a majority on all struc-
tures and elected, paid officials would have
no vote. An open organizational culture of
accountability and mandates was stressed.
271
Class Society
Promoting the flexible Markets as the engine
worlds of work; of the social;
Lean production; Transforming social programs;
Work intensification, Welfare to workfare
casualization
Limiting casualization; Social citizenship;
Social benchmarking Expanding the public domain.
Re-centering the local
This created a high level of participation,
which gave workers a sense of empowerment
that stimulated the rapid growth of strong
workplace-based unionism throughout the
1970s and 1980s (Baskin, 1991; Friedman,
1987; Maree, 1986). Above all, this radical
internal democracy generated a depth of lead-
ership forged in the cut and thrust of building
solidarity and engaging in collective action.
There was a similar trajectory in Brazil where
the clandestine work of activists developed a
workplace militancy that undermined the mil-
itary controls established in the 1960s. A
1978 metal sector strike wave overcame ‘a
sense of powerlessness’ that had prevailed
(Seidman, 1994: 154).
A social movement orientation is what dis-
tinguishes this form of unionism from busi-
ness unionism. Seidman (1994: 199), in
considering the extension of factory-based
demands into the political arena, concludes:
[T]hat question – what led unions and communities
to interpret their interests in parallel terms and to
participate in joint campaigns against both employ-
ers and the state – is perhaps the key to understand-
ing the meaning of social-movement unionism.
Referring to Castells’ City and the Grass Roots,
she notes that this workplace-community
interface ‘is hardly a straightforward process’
(Seidman, 1994: 199). Labor movements
generally avoid direct involvement in com-
munity campaigns, focusing instead on the
workplace, while urban social movements
tend to avoid a class-based rhetoric that
might alienate the middle class.
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272 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
Seidman stressed the significance of
agency in resolving this divide. She argued
that SMU emerged in South Africa and
Brazil during this period of democratic union
growth because of the activist leadership that
prevailed. Activists formulated ideologies
that were based on the lived experiences of
workers and linked the workplace to the
communities from which workers came. In
both countries, state policies impoverished
workers and communities through adopting
an industrialization strategy that combined
low wages with urban spoliation. ‘Class
struggles in the “sphere of production”
spilled over into the “sphere of reproduction”
as workers sought to raise the historically
defined level of the cost of reproduction of
labor’ (1994: 203).
Brazil of the 1970s and 1980s was charac-
terized by intense community mobilization
around domestic needs. These included cam-
paigns to fight cost of living increases,
improve public transport, regularize title
deeds and provide health clinics and day-care
facilities for working mothers. Catholic
activists from the Christian base communi-
ties1 sought to strengthen the links between
the emerging urban social movements mobi-
lizing on these issues and the labor move-
ment. The Christian base communities
encouraged their members to participate in
the new unions, arguing that these were one
of the few forces available to empower com-
munity struggles. The new unionists encour-
aged their members to participate in
community campaigns because they consid-
ered that these issues impacted on the erosion
of real wages and the declining conditions
of working class communities. Such a rela-
tionship was mutually reinforcing. The
growth of the new unions after 1978 stimu-
lated community activism, whilst in turn the
new urban social movements strengthened
the labor movement through supporting
striking workers.
A similar process was at work in South
Africa during the 1980s, with the emergence
of community organizations in the black
townships mobilizing on issues, such as bus
fares, rents and municipal governance. Civic
associations, student groups and street com-
mittees organized rent and consumer boy-
cotts and protest marches. Between 1984 and
1987, the new unions became increasingly
prominent in the anti-Apartheid struggle,
organizing stay-away protest strikes and
engaging with community movements in a
range of campaigns. Township-based Shop
Steward Councils became a forum for debate
and the forging of linkages between work-
place and community (Lambert and Webster,
1988; Webster, 1988).
Initially, the emergence of SMU was
viewed as a Southern phenomenon appropri-
ate only to unions involved in struggles
against repressive, anti-democratic regimes.
However, over the past decade, the notion of
SMU has entered into the discussion on
union revitalization in the United States
(Johnston, 2001; Lopez, 2004; Moody, 1997;
Turner et al., 2001; Voss and Sherman,
2000). The most recent contribution is that of
Clawson (2003), who argues that we may
well be on the brink of ‘a new upsurge’ of
SMU that will challenge restructuring. The
book has created widespread interest because
it appears to fulfill a deep felt need – he pres-
ents a clear case for a new form of unionism.
In an age of profound pessimism regarding
the possibility of challenging restructuring,
Clawson’s unabashed optimism is enticing.
Movements are built and driven by optimism.
Pessimism erodes the will to challenge injus-
tice. Clawson argues that society has the
ability to challenge the overwhelming power
of corporate forces and the weakening of the
labor movement. Indeed, he identifies a
range of innovative strategies and new
alliances that provide possible models for a
societal response to the market. He is opti-
mistic about the possibilities of an upsurge of
social movements that would lead such a
challenge to market liberalization. A new
upsurge, he argues, ‘will fuse the unions of
today with the issues and the styles of the
social movements of the 1960s, producing
new forms and taking up new issues’
(Clawson, 2003: ix–x).
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MARKETS AGAINST SOCIETY
In an illuminating opening chapter to the
book, Clawson captures the basic building
block of SMU, identified in the analysis of
South Africa and Brazil in the 1970s and
1980s, namely, that the organizational form
of SMU is radically democratic. This is the
key to developing a sense of empowerment
and optimism that change can be wrought.
The chapter identifies a significant feature
of the market era: in spite of the fact that cor-
porations are hostile to unionism and as a
consequence, workers are fearful and hesi-
tant, the beginnings of a counter-movement
can be identified. The chapter begins with an
example of factory workers who are exposed
to hazardous substances. They are afraid to
form a union, but eventually take various
forms of action as an expression of their dis-
content. They were ‘crushed’ by manage-
ment. ‘Workers were demoralized, convinced
that people like them could never get their
rights; the best thing to do was to swallow
their anger and keep their heads down’. Even
though the leader of the workers in the fac-
tory was courageous, ‘he and his co-workers
were left feeling demoralized and defeated,
that it was useless to stand up for themselves,
or worse than useless because it led to humil-
iation and grief’ (Clawson, 2003: 2–3).
Clawson contrasts this defeat with the case of
Rhode Island Hospital, where a union was
successfully organized and a struggle over
conditions won.
The hospital is a classic example of the
ethos of market rationalism where constant
cost cutting is in vogue, regardless of the
impact on workers and their families. As part
of cost cutting, the hospital raised the health
insurance rates of their employees by as
much as 400%. Such an intervention is not
simply a rational cost issue; it is a justice
issue. What is fascinating in Clawson’s
description of the hospital is the way that the
union was formed and the type of campaign
that developed. Crucially, the union organ-
izer stressed that ‘the union is not the organ-
izers or staff ... the union is you ... the union
is going to be whatever we make it when we
organize it’ (Clawson 2003: 10). The union
273
was built through identifying natural leaders
in every shift and work area, forming an
organizing committee, organizing small
group meetings at workers’ homes, building
a strong majority who supported the union in
the hospital; then organizing ‘a walk into the
CEO’s office unannounced’. There was a
feeling throughout the hospital that we ‘are
finally going to take control of the situation’
(Clawson, 2003: 11). Despite management
hostility and attempts to intimidate individ-
ual workers, the union won recognition.
Clawson concluded that whereas the factory
workers were ‘defeated and humiliated’, the
nurses were ‘exhilarated and empowered’.
This democratic, participatory and action-
orientated unionism contrasts with business
unionism, whose goal ‘is to increase the
number of dues-paying members, not to
empower workers ... the organizing staff is
“the union” in their own minds and in the
minds of workers. Paid staff make all the key
decisions, and do things for the workers
instead of helping workers to develop their
own power’. At meetings, ‘paid staff do
almost all the talking’. Hence workers ‘may
not feel that they have the capacity – or the
right – to democratically make decisions
about their priorities. Certainly they don’t
feel that workers have the power to stand
up to management; at best they hope “the
union” (meaning the paid staff) will do so for
them’. In contrast ‘the union building
approach’ is about ‘empowering workers ...
giving them the confidence, the solidarity, and
the tools needed to stand up for what they
believe in and win it’ (Clawson 2003: 10).
The Clawson book provides telling evi-
dence that the fearful passivity of workers
can be transformed through democratic
union organizing. The crucial point is that the
potential for union growth has not been real-
ized because the top-down organizing strat-
egy of business unionism has failed to draw
on the grievances that workers have.
However, democratic unionism in and of
itself will be unable to confront corporate
restructuring, ‘Unless there is a new period
of mass social movements, labor is likely to
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274 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
continue to lose ground’ (Clawson, 2003:
20). He concludes, ‘But if unions are able to
combine the new style and tactics with the
mass mobilization characteristic of unions at
their best, this would create an awesome
political force whose potential is only now
being explored’ (Clawson, 2003: 23).
Clawson argues that successful social move-
ments have always been preceded by a string
of failures. These ‘failures’ were testing the
limits and vulnerabilities of existing struc-
tures, making possible a paradigm shift from
one system to another. Current struggles are
‘the prehistory of the upsurge’ of mass civil
disobedience against the injustice of neo-
liberal restructuring (Clawson, 2003: 26).
In this age of market politics and corporate
dominance, to imagine an alternative mode of
organizing the economy and society is also an
ethical choice, for this is not a condition that
only affects employed workers who might be
union members. Restructuring affects youth
in search of their first job, who discover the
nature of the casualized job market; it affects
the families of the retrenched and the families
whose well-being is affected by corporate
cost cutting; it affects farmers and owners of
small businesses whose life work is under-
mined through cheap imports. Despite their
decline, unions remain the largest and strate-
gically best organized of civil society actors.
Their location in the economy provides them
with bargaining power that is greater than any
other civil society organization. Increasingly,
unions are also drawing on communities to
support their demands for social justice. They
therefore have the capacity to assume a new
historical role; that of building a new social
movement against corporate restructuring and
of visioning, debating and formulating a dem-
ocratic and humane alternative to unregulated
liberalization.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
As we have shown, there is an unstable bal-
ance among the bases of trade union identi-
ties – business unionism, with its focus on
competition in the market, class-based
unionism, with its emphasis on conflict, and
social movement unionism, with its empha-
sis on cooperation between the workplace
and society. We suggested that in the First
Great Transformation in the North, the iden-
tity of unions was class-based, while in the
Second Great Transformation it has increas-
ingly become market-based. In the second
part of the chapter we identified an alterna-
tive union identity, social movement union-
ism which emerged in South Africa and
Brazil in the 1970s and the 1980s.
However, social movement unions proved
quite ephemeral. Seidman (1994: 274) con-
cludes her study by noting:
Over time, as states and employers recognize trade
unions and engage in collective bargaining, such
labour movements may become institutionalized,
part of the regular pattern of labour relations in
their countries; social-movement unionism may
well be a transitory phase, as relatively privileged
workers create channels through which to articu-
late interests.
In the cases of South Africa and Brazil,
SMU was indeed a transitory phase.
Following political change in both countries,
unions resumed their traditional collective
bargaining form, revealing that these unions
momentarily engaged social movements in
civil society for short-term advantage with-
out any change in the mode of workplace
organizing.
Von Holdt (2003: 147) makes a similar
point when he argues that one of the weak-
nesses of SMU analysis is to assume that its
distinctiveness ‘lay in its political and com-
munity alliances’ thereby neglecting ‘to
investigate whether it might also demonstrate
distinctive workplace practices’. In relation
to South Africa, this analysis had ‘placed the
building of alliances with other social move-
ments and community organizations at the
center of the concept’ and had tended to
regard this as ‘an external alliance between
autonomous organizations and movements
and therefore did not investigate the impact
of alliance politics on the union movement
itself’ (Von Holdt 2003: 148). In his careful
analysis of a single workplace, Highveld Steel
9781412934633-Chap-18 1/10/09 8:52 AM Page 275
MARKETS AGAINST SOCIETY
in South Africa, Von Holdt demonstrates the
complexity of this interface – how move-
ments interpenetrate through complex and
dynamic networks.
Beverly Silver distinguishes between two
types of worker resistance; what she calls the
‘Polanyi-type’ and the ‘Marx-type’ unrest
(Silver, 2003: 20–4). However as Burawoy
notes, although Silver makes this distinction,
her book is largely about ‘Marx-type’ strug-
gles. Today, he suggests, ‘one might argue
that the neo-liberal dispensation struggles
against capitalism are taking a sea change
from Marxian-type struggles based on power
in production to Polanyian-type struggles
based on resistance to the commodification of
land, labor and money’ (2003b: 4).
To what extent is such a ‘sea-change’
taking place in South Africa? There are sig-
nificant signs that the South African govern-
ment is shifting from its narrow focus on
global integration and competitiveness to
acknowledge that the state will have to redis-
tribute resources actively in an effort to over-
come the social crisis caused by poverty.
This new thinking is organized around the
concept of ‘two economies’. In his February
2003 State of the Nation address, President
Thabo Mbeki described the division between
these as a ‘structural fault’ (Mbeki, 2003).
However, our case studies of working life
in the periphery demonstrate that the dis-
course of two economies can be misleading
(Webster and von Holdt, 2005). Most of the
economic activities in the periphery are
dependent on markets created by formal
economy activities. The three zones of work
we identified earlier are, we suggest, asym-
metrically interdependent. It is likely that
such activities in the periphery will only be
able to expand to the extent that the formal
economy itself expands. Generally speaking,
the ‘second economy’ has very little prospect
of expanding independently and thereby
stimulating the formal economy – indeed, it
can hardly be described as an economy.
In place of conceptualizing South African
society as divided into two economies, we
prefer an analysis that highlights dynamic,
variable and complex processes of social
275
inclusion and social exclusion. Indeed,
expansion and diversification of the formal
economy is necessary for overcoming the
socio-economic exclusion of masses of citi-
zens, and the role of the state will be critical.
Unless budget cutbacks are reversed and
there is significant investment in manage-
ment and human resources in public institu-
tions, as well as adequate staffing, the decline
of the public sector will continue.
A plethora of new social movements – the
Anti-Privatization Forum (APF), the Soweto
Electricity Forum (SEF), the Landless
People’s Movement (LPM), Gun Free South
Africa (GFSA), the Treatment Action
Committee (TAC) – have emerged in response
to the social crisis in communities, mobilizing
around a wide variety of issues, including the
commoditization of essential services, such as
electricity, access to land, gun violence and
treatment for those with AIDS.
Some of the social movements are small
but others, such as TAC and GFSA, have
already made a significant impact on govern-
ment policy. We have suggested that the
restructuring of work has displaced much of
the contestation and disorder of South
Africa’s ‘chaotic’ workplace transition into
households and communities, deepening
social crisis, conflict and disorder there. The
significance of social movements located
in the community is their potential to
re-socialize this crisis – which is experienced as
a private crisis, distress and conflict in house-
holds and communities – by building social
solidarity around it, projecting it into the
public arena, mobilizing support and action,
and influencing the state and public policy.
For such a counter-movement to be truly
effective, it should link struggles over work-
place restructuring to campaigns over the
social crisis in communities – in other words,
uniting the trade union movement and social
movements in a broad coalition against the
destructive impact of the market on society.
This is already evident in the alliance
between the Congress of South African Trade
Unions (COSATU) and the TAC, and in the
People’s Budget campaign, which is based
on a coalition of COSATU, the South African
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276 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
NGO Coalition (SANGOCO) and the South
African Council of Churches. The combina-
tion of social reconstruction and pressure
from below with a responsive state that is
beginning to rethink the certainties of neo-
liberal economic policy may provide the best
hope for extending the public domain and,
for the first time, building an inclusive soci-
ety in this part of the Global South. Instead of
the successful integration of economies into
the new global work order, there is a growing
challenge to the subordinate position of the
South within the new global order through
such movements as the World Social Forum,
to which several of these new social move-
ments are linked (Taylor, 2004).
What is clear from our analysis is that
Polanyi’s notion of a counter-movement
cannot be transferred mechanically to the
Global South; social context and history
account for a different trajectory to that of the
North. But a counter-movement is emerging
to construct, for the first time, an integrated
society against powerful market forces. In
this process, trade unions, in alliance with
social movements, are playing a central role
in protecting society against the disruptive
effects of the unregulated market.
NOTE
1 Christian communities in Latin America are
based in the lives of working people. They provide
the space for Christian communities to express their
culture within the structures of the church. They form
part of a Christian movement linked to economic and
political liberation.
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Global Movement Challenges International
Unionism’, Journal of World–Systems
Research, X(1): 271–53.
Webster, Edward (1988) ‘The Rise of Social
Movement Unionism: The Two Faces of
the Black Trade Union Movement in
South Africa’, in T. Frankel, N. Pines and D.
Swilling (eds.) State Resistance and Change
in South Africa. London: Croom Helm. pp.
174–96.
Webster, Edward and Adler, Glenn (1999)
‘Towards a Class Compromise in South
Africa’s “Double Transition”: Bargained
Liberalization and the Consolidation of
Democracy’, Politics and Society, 27(3):
347–54.
Webster, Edward and von Holdt, Karl (eds.)
(2005) Beyond the Apartheid Workplaces:
Studies in Transition. University of KwaZulu
Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg.
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Political Consumerism: An
Extension of Social Conflict
or a Renewed Form of
Economic Collaboration?
INTRODUCTION
A significant proportion of collective protest
action is currently assuming renewed forms,
sometimes innovative and often politically
ambiguous. The use of the economic market
as an arena for protest and venue for social
change (as a place to present social demands)
is an example of this renewal of forms.
Through various economic phenomena, we
can glimpse political propositions aimed at
regulating the economic field using tools
specific to this domain.
The following examples illustrate these
trends. Fair trade and ethical finance seek to
modify the rules of commerce and interna-
tional investment. Sustainable or organic
agriculture, forestry and fish breeding seek to
protect the soil, territories, populations and
cultures. Community-supported agriculture
(CSA) links consumers and producers in an
innovative local agro-food system. The ‘new’
19
Marco Silvestro
social economy develops alternative enter-
prises to meet particular needs. Barter sys-
tems and social currency allow people to
exchange goods and services outside of the
rules of the market. Free software and alter-
native rules for intellectual property pose a
major challenge to the capitalist system
through contesting its very foundation,
private property and patents. Voluntary sim-
plicity and the Slow Food movement offer a
radical critique of the foundations of the con-
sumer society and an improvement in the
quality of life through breaking away from
the logic of capitalist consumer society.
Finally, advertising campaigns and the mass
media, such as the anti-sweatshops campaign
and direct action against certain companies,
denounce the practices of multinationals
(Jensen, 2003; Klein, 2000).
The shared goal of actors in this vast
‘movement’ is to develop ways of producing,
distributing, selling and consuming which
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POLITICAL CONSUMERISM
are compatible with social justice, economic
equity, protection of the environment and
democracy. This is a vast programme, cer-
tainly not ‘new’, but employing a repertoire
of collective action that hopes to be a
response to the current phase of capitalism
(global, financial and oligopolistic).
The use of the economic market as an
arena for social demands gives rise to a cer-
tain number of questions about the definition
of political action and spaces of political reg-
ulation. Indeed, how can economic acts such
as producing, selling and buying, always the-
orized as being apolitical, now constitute a
political demand? How can the slogan
‘buying is voting’ have the massive mobiliz-
ing effect that it now does? A considerable
number of social science works have studied
the use of the economic market as an arena of
social and political protest. In this article,
I would like to contextualize work that has
focussed specifically on understanding acts
of ‘responsible consumerism’ (also called
ecological consumerism, or political con-
sumerism) in the food sector. In this way
I wish to demonstrate that, in these projects,
the theoretical limits to political action are
not clearly established and that consequently
it is difficult to distinguish between purchas-
ing behaviours resulting from changing
social tastes and those due to the espousal of
a political position. It is even more difficult
to establish a link between the evolution of
social taste and the adoption of a political
position. Thus, the question arises as to
whether the purchase of ‘ethical’ products
really constitutes a political act or whether
this is instead part of the logic of social dis-
tinction, ‘ethical’ products generally being
rarer, of better quality and more expensive.
Finally, I wonder if participating in a con-
sumer movement which is critical of norms
of production and product characteristics is
an act of collaboration with the system of
mass consumption or a genuine act of protest
against this system, a protest that is being
expressed in a new arena.
The article is developed in successive
layers. Starting with the most individualistic
279
explanations, I progressively add new dimen-
sions to the analysis to show how acts of con-
sumption may be theorized in different ways.
Thus, I start with market research and con-
sumer studies that conceptualize consumer
acts as apolitical expressions of individual
autonomy. A second type of research, coming
from American rural economic sociology,
proposes an interpretation that incorporates
the social determinants of consumerism – the
social imaginary and representations, as well
as the territorial systems of food production,
distribution and consumption. A third
approach, from political science, considers
the purchase and boycott of goods and
services as non-conventional political parti-
cipation, in other words as an adjustment, a
response, a shift in the locus of power and an
expression of reflexive individualism. This
approach, although interesting as a theoriza-
tion of political acts, nonetheless, proposes a
conceptualization of the individual that strikes
me as disembodied and under-socialized. This
is why, before concluding, I offer several
propositions to tie the study of consumer
practices to the sociology of collective
action.
CONSUMER SOCIETY UNDER ATTACK
Consumer society is a relatively recent con-
figuration of social relations, a result of rapid
advances of industrial and capitalistic logic
within all spheres of social relations. The
history of its development reveals the dis-
semination by different stakeholders in
global capitalism of an ideology of domestic
reproduction by the consumption of goods
purchased outside the household (Herpin,
2001; Princen, 1999: 348). Through techno-
logical progress and the market economy, this
ideology promises the attainment of happi-
ness, personal emancipation and the elimina-
tion of social and economic inequalities, as
well as suffering and war. On the other hand,
thinkers of the Frankfurt School quickly
highlighted the alienating character of this
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280 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
burgeoning society. Unbridled material
possessions, as well as constant monetary
relationships, create one-dimensional human
beings (Marcuse, 1968) committed to a life
in pursuit of a standardized form of happi-
ness. The mass production of the ‘cultural
industries’ leads to cultural poverty, as a
result of the thirst for profit to the detriment
of the diversity and quality of their contents.
Baudrillard (1970), on his part, showed how
social representations, forged in the culture
of mass consumerism, continually expand
the possible range of individual needs and
desires, with the latter arising more from
psychological conditioning than physical
needs, and favouring a culture of distinction
through possession, which is thoroughly
bourgeois. Consumer society is also charac-
terized by the ideological promotion and
social construction of a hedonistic individu-
alism, presented as being free of class, race,
gender and religious constraints, which is
socially achieved through economic partici-
pation in consumerism. In these analyses of
the consumer society, daily acts of consump-
tion are generally theorized as apolitical, rou-
tine and often irrational. Consumerism, in
this sense, belongs to and collaborates in the
politico-economic system. A good example is
the American President George W. Bush who,
the day after September 11, 2001, exhorted
his fellow citizens to continue their normal
life by consuming at shopping centres.
However, since the circulation of ecolo-
gists’ critiques, consumer society has been
questioned and put on trial. ‘Critical’ or
‘responsible’ acts of consumerism are multi-
plying, and this is reflected in the research
concerns of marketing psychologists. In fact,
because not inspired by the critical tradition,
most research in marketing and consumer
studies that examines health scandals in the
food business and genetically modified organ-
isms (GMOs), does not consider changes in
demand for food products as a critique by con-
sumer society (Lusk and Sullivan, 2002;
Mucci et al., 2004; Rowe, 2004; Wilcock
et al., 2004). These works of behavioural
psychology applied to marketing seek to
understand the intentions and purchasing
behaviours of consumers starting with their
perceptions of the safety and quality of food.
The anthropological postulate is that individ-
ual consumers are sovereign, autonomous
beings who act according to a model of
rational action in which behavioural change is
a function of the calculation of advantages and
disadvantages associated with modifying per-
sonal habits. Attitudes (i.e., relatively stable
judgements about objects) are the result of
individual socialization and experiences of
purchasing and using food products.
Individual perception is formed from individ-
ual knowledge, which is by definition always
incomplete, and often even erroneous.
In these studies, the importance of risk per-
ception is limited to the individual or the
family unit. Issues related to biotechnology,
food poisoning on a grand scale, pollution, the
cost of food, and its taste and nutritional qual-
ities are not even broached, except from the
narrow perspective of the individual consumer.
They are never raised in terms of public inter-
est, the global political economy, a critique of
the industrial model, questioning lifestyles, or
a critique of the power relations between com-
panies and consumers. Furthermore, for these
researchers, consumers use formal rationality
(the calculation of costs and benefits) but their
choices are, for the most part, motivated by
impulses and irrational desires. Consumers are
conceived of as being profoundly conformist,
very susceptible to advertising discourse, and
focussed inwards on their personal ambitions
and wishes, which are achieved socially and in
private by purchases and ownership. These
analytical models of marketing do not accept
that the emotions, feelings, beliefs and values
which influence attitudes about purchasing
have any political significance. In other words,
they are not related to the distribution and reg-
ulation of power relations within a society. On
the contrary, questions of food safety and qual-
ity are reduced to a simple technical problem
that can be resolved through trusting the rules
of the market:
[T]he market for food safety will be in equilibrium
when the price consumers are willing to pay for
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POLITICAL CONSUMERISM
increases in safety is equal to the price at
which suppliers are able to produce the increases.
At such an equilibrium, the level of safety supplied
by the market will reflect a level of risk
which is non-zero but acceptable. (Wilcock et al.,
2004: 62)
This extract illustrates a purely ‘economicist’
reading of economic regulation: the level of
acceptable risk is that which emerges ‘natu-
rally’ from the equilibrium between two
prices. The collective decision, the regulation
of the economy by the political community,
has no place in this reading. Consequently,
changes in consumer choice occur when there
is individual perception of a risk and an
alternative product is available for consump-
tion at an acceptable price. Clearly, using this
formal model to calculate costs and benefits
only succeeds in explaining acts of food con-
sumption by beliefs and attitudes, without
explaining how they arise and what
they mean. These explanations are ‘under-
socialized’. While habitus is taken for
granted, social determination is effectively
ignored and the ideological dimension is set
aside. Although valid at the micro-sociological
level to understand behaviour of subjects who
give no evidence of reflexivity or of an impar-
tial judgement of consumer society, this type
of explanation cannot take account of the
critiques of those who claim to be ‘political
consumers’. In fact, these political consumers
locate themselves at the margins of consumer
society, whereas the works mentioned above
are right in its midst. Clearly, research in
marketing and consumer studies conceives
of consumerism, regardless of how it is
expressed, as an act of membership and col-
laboration with the liberal capitalist politico-
economic system.
RESPONSIBLE CONSUMERISM AS A
CHANGE IN VALUES AND AN
IMPROVEMENT OF CAPITALISM
A second interpretation of changes in food
consumption habits is offered by American
281
research in rural economic sociology that is
interested in the critical study of networks of
food production, distribution and consump-
tion (Allen et al., 2003; Goodman, 2000,
2003; Goodman and Goodman, 2001). In
contrast to the works mentioned earlier, these
clearly situate consumerism within systems
of representation and social relations that
determine the particular form of networks of
production, distribution and consumption.
The main argument is that, in the case of
ethical or sustainable consumerism, the
relations of production and consumption are
reconfigured, on the one hand, by changes in
the social imaginary and, on the other hand,
by globalization’s effects on local spaces, in
other words, a socio-territorial reorganiza-
tion of production. From this perspective,
individual consumer habits are influenced by
culture, identities, social imaginaries and by
contingent factual elements. We could, there-
fore, conceive of responsible consumerism as
the effect of a change in the social imaginary,
in food tastes and/or in consumers’ political
ideas, in short, by a cultural change. In that
meaning, although implemented individually
in a private space, consumerism is an activity
which is largely socially determined.
According to David Goodman and his col-
leagues, the social imaginary which makes
up the discourse on responsible consumerism
is mainly concerned with the redefinition of
relations between humans and nature, a rede-
finition made necessary by the perception
of the finiteness and fragility of the earth’s
ecosystem. Since the first ecological cri-
tiques, a number of elements drawn from
ecologists’ analytic framework have pene-
trated social representations and, today,
discourses often promote consumer habits
which are radically different from those
prevailing in the consumer society from
the 1950s to 1990. During this first period
of the establishment of a society of mass
consumption, the imaginary was one defin-
ing social status by the quantity and
quality of the family assets. Mass production
and consumption were seen as a means
of reducing status inequalities by offering
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282 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
increasingly affordable products. At the end
of the World War II, the consumption of
products purchased outside the domestic
sphere was also an act of allegiance to the
nation, a patriotic act that indicated, in North
America and Europe, participation in the
American Dream. Consumption thus became
a normal counterpart to paid work, the rela-
tionship between the two ensuring reproduc-
tion of the domestic unit. Tastes in food
products, at this time, were promoted by the
advertising image of technological progress,
of a variety of products and the freedom that
this entails. From this flowed an appreciation
of processed food products, coming from the
laboratories of large agro-food industrial
firms.
Using the approach proposed here, the
current popularity of fair trade, organic farm-
ing, ethical investments and, more generally,
of responsible consumerism, could be
explained by changes in the mentalities,
values and aspirations of consumers. Ronald
Inglehart (1990) has already advanced the
strong hypothesis of a cultural transition in
Western capitalist societies that would
lead individuals towards more ecological,
pacifist, community-oriented, spiritual yet
self-indulgent aspirations, what he refers to
as post-materialist values. This change in
individual and social values cannot fail to
lead to a change in social tastes and con-
sumer choices. In the food sector, the shift to
more self-indulgence, based on personal
pleasure and influenced by a concern for the
local community and ecology, is brought out
by what a number of researchers have called
the ‘quality turn’ (Buttel, 1997; Goodman,
2003; Murdoch and Miele, 1999).
This quality turn is associated with the
desire to eat better by using better quality
foods. It is seen in the proliferation of ‘alter-
native agro-food networks’ alongside the net-
works of large-scale production-distribution
(Goodman, 2003: 1). One characteristic
of these alternative networks is that they
define themselves essentially by their strong
roots at the local level of economic relations
and by relations of trust between producer
and consumer. Goodman mentions that this
would be a case of a progressive replacement
of the industrial world’s logic of quality –
standardization, production/mass consumption,
cost reduction and deterritorialization – that
dominates the current representations of con-
sumption, by a logic inspired by the sphere
of domestic activities. The latter attributes
more importance to localized relations of
confidence, and to knowledge about the con-
ditions under which food is produced. The
parameters of product quality are also radi-
cally redefined by normative propositions
which are unfavourable to the logic of the
agro-food industry that has prevailed for the
past 50 years.
The two alternative conceptualizations of
the future of capitalism will entail different
developments in this quality turn. A first
approach suggests that the colonization of
the world experienced by the logic of the
capitalist market is unavoidable and is enter-
ing its final phase, with almost all aspects of
life segmented and commodified. From this,
we can only proceed to the reform of capital-
ism by using the means that it offers us, that
is, sanctions by the economic market, codes
of conduct for companies, product certifica-
tion and the lobbying of firms and govern-
ments. A second conceptualization considers
that other socio-economic systems of organi-
zation could coexist with capitalism despite
the latter’s claims to hegemony. This
would then involve a struggle with capitalism
and the decolonization of the present
world by the creation of relations between
production and consumption that are ecolog-
ically, socially and democratically sustain-
able alternatives (Goodman and Goodman,
2001: 97).
The first conception gives responsible con-
sumerism a significance similar to that pre-
sented in the first part of this chapter, in the
sense that it offers explanations in terms of
market adjustment. ‘With sustainable food
consumption reduced to production standards
and related food-safety claims, it is easily con-
signed to the neo-liberal terrain of individual-
market choice and consumer sovereignty’
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POLITICAL CONSUMERISM
(Goodman and Goodman, 2001: 104). The
example of certification of consumer prod-
ucts (organic or fair trade labelling) is essen-
tial here. This labelling reproduces the
capitalist logic of differentiating among
products and increasing the number of prod-
ucts offered, by using a logo guaranteeing
certain product characteristics, a logo that
acts like a brand name and should inspire
confidence. Organic products or fair trade
products are sold on the market, respond to
the laws of supply and demand, and are pur-
chased by individual consumers. In that
sense, Nike’s logo and a label of organic cer-
tification are equivalent in their acceptance
of the logic of trade and of the market econ-
omy’s rules of operation.
Consequently the political proposals for
change are quite weak. From this world view
the quality turn could have a purely cultural
significance. The desire for food produced
locally and identified as ‘home-grown’,
‘craft’, ‘organic’, or ‘fair trade’ is part of the
cultural transition identified by Inglehart, and
derives from the logic of social distinction
(Bourdieu, 1979). And it adopts a middle-
class perspective, rather than that of an anti-
establishment political philosophy. Thus, the
quality turn would be essentially a cultural
phenomenon of the upper and upper-middle
classes, becoming more widespread on the
basis of the development of social norms, in
other words, top-down and from the centre to
the periphery. The quality turn therefore
remains within the ideals of the American
Dream: social success, the achievement of
personal desires and comfort are the most
important objectives. In accepting this model,
we would expect the capitalist system of pro-
duction to adapt itself to the new social taste
which, after having demanded practical and
affordable food products, now asks for some
luxury, refinement, exoticism, a guarantee of
producers’ economic rights and protection of
the environment. The basis of the system is not
questioned; it is the products and some produc-
tion practices that are being questioned.
In the second conceptualization of the future
of capitalism, as developed by Goodman and
283
Goodman (2001), the accent is on the possi-
bility of political change, treating the alterna-
tive systems of production and consumerism
as counter-hegemonic elements of defiance,
a refusal to participate in a system of produc-
tion and consumption that, for a number of
reasons, is judged to be socially unjust, risky
in terms of health and destructive of the envi-
ronment. Dubuisson-Quellier and Lamine
(2003) show, for example, that there are
various degrees of commitment in anti-
establishment consumer practices. For exam-
ple, the purchase of labelled clothes or crafts,
fair trade products, or of organic food are not
necessarily anti-establishment acts if these
acts are not repeated over time. On the con-
trary, community-supported agriculture
(CSA) proposes a reversal of the logic of pro-
duction and asks consumers to get involved
in agro-food activities that profoundly trans-
form their traditional role. Consumers
become ‘partners’ of the organic farm and
commit themselves to financing the harvest
in advance, to working in the fields and,
above all, to receiving in return what the
earth has to offer, according to the climatic
and agronomic conditions. Not only does this
last condition reverse the current temporality
of food consumption, it is also very subver-
sive of the representation of the ‘customer as
king’ who chooses what he or she wants
when he or she wants it. In the context of
such a partnership, acts of responsible con-
sumption assume a significance other than
the mere cultural and social modification of
taste; they are the expression of a political
judgement and choice in favour of a different
organization of the relation of food produc-
tion, distribution and consumption. They
constitute a break with the traditional per-
spective and social institutions that support
the social reproduction of households.
Indeed, we are here dealing with a new
form of consumerism. Traditional con-
sumerism, in the industrial society of mass
consumption, consisted of defending con-
sumers’ economic interests: the right to the
lowest price, the right to a certain quality
(defined in the agro-food sector in terms of
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284 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
health and safety) and the right to sufficient
information to make an informed choice.
This consumerism broadly shares the eco-
nomic vision of capitalism, is part of the con-
sumer society and uses its rules of operation
(market sanctions, labelling and lobbying) to
attain objectives (the defence of individual
rights) that are in accord with the system. It
is embodied in the organizations and social
movements that have demanded the regula-
tion of products (safety and quality) and
support for consumers’ right to pay the best
price.
The ‘new form of consumerism’, or politi-
cal consumerism, seeks for its part to go
beyond economic interests and individual
consumer rights by putting forward collective
interests, such as social justice, protection of
the environment, workers’ rights and fair pay.
In addition to its concern with product qual-
ity, this consumerism directly addresses the
methods of production, the rules of trade, the
rule of maximum profit and the culture of
mass consumption. Michele Micheletti has
defined political consumerism as follows:
[P]olitical consumerism is choice among producers
and products with the goal of changing objection-
able institutional or market practices. These
choices are informed by attitudes and values
regarding issues of justice, fairness, or non-
economic issues that concern personal and family
well-being and ethical and political assessment of
favorable and unfavorable business and govern-
ment practices. Political consumers engage individ-
ually or collectively in such choice situations. Their
market choices reflect an understanding of mate-
rial products as embedded in a complex social and
normative context. (Micheletti, 2003a: 1)
POLITICAL CONSUMERISM AS
NON-CONVENTIONAL POLITICAL
PARTICIPATION AND AS
INDIVIDUALIZED COLLECTIVE ACTION
This definition of responsible consumerism
includes it as a form of political participation
and makes it accessible in concepts of politi-
cal science. Thus, for a group of researchers
(Micheletti 2003a, 2003b, 2004; Micheletti
and Stolle, 2003; Micheletti et al., 2003;
Stolle and Hooghe, 2004; Stolle et al., 2003),
political consumerism is clearly a ‘non-con-
ventional’ form of political participation that
appears within the space of the market
economy. This is a form of ‘individualized
collective action’, adapted to contemporary
individualism, and permitting a mode of civic
engagement which is more closely related to
daily life. They see responsible consumerism
as favouring personal expression, speaking
up, creativity, and identity performance, all
dimensions of political participation that
cannot be overlooked in any traditional
analysis of socially acceptable ways of
expressing ideas. As purchasing goods has
become practically the only way of procuring
commodities necessary for the reproduction
of life, we can understand that, for individu-
als, a purchase gives the impression of
making a gesture with direct repercussions in
the marketplace. It is a much more effective
gesture than expressing oneself through an
anonymous institutional political system,
which is full of distortions and intermedi-
aries. It is in this way that some advance the
slogan ‘buying is voting’ and affirm that one
can, thanks to repeated actions, ‘change the
world one act (of purchase) at a time’
(Waridel, 2003, 2005).
Using the language of reflexive moderniza-
tion of Ulrich Beck (1992, 1996) and of the
cultural transition of Inglehart, the works of
researchers around Michele Micheletti per-
ceive Western citizens as reflexive individuals,
obliged by the context to become autonomous
and responsible for their fate. On the one hand,
their reflexivity makes them aware of the risks
of industrialization and, on the other hand,
their disappointment with the promises of lib-
eral democracy and the welfare-state makes
them sceptical of the ability of political institu-
tions to regulate these matters. In this context,
the traditional political space is strongly criti-
cized: political representatives and institutions
appear increasingly distanced from people’s
lives and incapable of regulating issues of
economic, political and cultural globalization.
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POLITICAL CONSUMERISM
The theoreticians of new social move-
ments had already identified this relative dis-
affection with political institutions and the
restructuring of collective action in the cul-
tural space in order to fight institutions from
the outside (Kriesi et al., 1995; Melucci
1989, 1996; Offe, 1987). They concluded
that collective action increasingly assumes
intricate and shifting forms, which are more
supple, and sometimes submerged and inac-
tive. The issues are increasingly removed
from those of the world of work and class
struggles, touching instead on personal con-
ditions of existence and the recognition of
social and political rights. Klaus Eder (1985,
1993) even speaks of the moral crusade of a
very broad ‘middle class’, quite well inte-
grated into the economic system, that tries to
influence the development of societies in
terms of its cultural and economic ‘post-
materialist’ interests.
Jacques Ion (1997a, 1997b, 1994) has
identified an important alteration in the
process of civic, social and political engage-
ment since the 1970s. His thesis is that, in
industrial societies, the individual belonged,
often on the basis of class identity, to one
hierarchical, centralized, federated organiza-
tion, where he or she was lost in the masses.
Today, particularly since the 1980s, the indi-
vidual negotiates a more ‘selective’ or ‘flexi-
ble’ commitment to some organizations or
some causes.1 Therefore, rather than belong-
ing, we associate with organizations. This
form of commitment is less restrictive than
total commitment; it allows people to define
their level of commitment themselves and to
express their selves. Over time, not only is the
mode of belonging changing, but so too are
the modes of organization and the process of
construction of public issues.
Tim Jordan (2002), in a study of radical
forms of activism, also notes that current rad-
ical political action is taking on more subjec-
tive forms, and is increasingly oriented
towards actually experiencing the desired
society. For him, contemporary social move-
ments, in addition to fighting institutions, are
engaged in discussion and experimentation,
285
both within movement and between move-
ments. This allows for the generation of ‘new
ethical forms, new moralities, that are seep-
ing into the smallest crevices of society and
are becoming the ways in which we think the
good life can be lived’ (Jordan, 2002: 23). He
shows how concrete and immediate experi-
ence of change has become a focal point of
the new ethics, which is being woven within
the range of progressive thought. According
to him, the ‘new activism’ places respect for
difference and solidarity among those who
respect these differences at the centre of its
ethic. Furthermore, disillusioned by both
reformism and revolution, an increasingly
significant activist fringe is involved in con-
crete (experimental) activities that create,
sometimes only fleetingly, the social rela-
tionships which they envisage for the society
of tomorrow. This partially explains the multi-
plication of direct actions, experiments with
direct democracy, occupations, and alternative
practices for production, distribution and con-
sumption. Thus, the significance of political
action is no longer limited to Policy, with a
capital P, but also concerns policy as expressed
outside institutions, in daily social relation-
ships between groups and between individuals.
The individual form of this type of politi-
cal involvement would be what Miguel
Benasayag and Florence Aubenas (2002)
describe as ‘dissenting subjectivity’ (subjec-
tivité contestataire), a reflexive mode of
being that seeks to maintain a psychologi-
cally satisfying equilibrium (reducing cogni-
tive dissonance) between personal beliefs
(moral, ethical and political positions) and
the social conditions of existence that go
beyond what the individual can control. In
this concept of being, coherence can only be
attained through the search for lifestyles
which are consistent with one’s beliefs. In
this sense, daily acts of consumption may
acquire political significance if they persist
over time and if the individuals participate in
the social networks that develop counter-
hegemonic discourses and practices.
In L’écologie au quotidien (Ecology in
Everyday Life), Michelle Dobré (2002)
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286 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
develops a complementary argument, saying
that the economic logic of consumer society
has colonized domestic space and that, today,
this provokes increasing pangs of conscience
about the inability to live according to one’s
personal principles. Exploring the topic of
ecological representations, the author then
shows the development of practices of
‘everyday resistance’. Recycling and reusing,
systems of local bartering, voluntary simplic-
ity and responsible consumerism are all
attempts to escape from the logic of con-
sumer society. However, for her, acts of
everyday resistance do not constitute a polit-
ical force or a social movement to the extent
that they are largely fragmentary, are not
applied consistently, and are only resistance
to an oppressive situation rather than con-
crete affirmation of a new model.
SYNTHESIS: THREE POSITIONS ON
RESPONSIBLE CONSUMERISM AS A
POLITICAL ACT
Clearly, as we end this analysis, we find our-
selves with three major positions on responsi-
ble consumerism as a political act. First,
starting from a traditional conception of politi-
cal participation, Micheletti and her colleagues
seek to demonstrate that the normative impulse
that collective discourse gives the individual,
as well as the personal gesture that acts of pur-
chasing entail as a vote in the economic
market, are enough to make consuming (or
buying) a political act. Therefore, for them,
political consumerism is a positive strategy of
‘individualized collective action’ that allows
for self-expression and direct influence on the
world market, a new arena for expressing polit-
ical power. Nonetheless, the scope of political
spaces and their articulation are fluid; political
space is at one and the same time that of
national boundaries and institutions, that of a
de-territorialized economic market and that of
domestic space.
The position of Micheletti and her col-
leagues is consistent in some respects with
that of the market researchers, in the sense
that both are based on an individualized con-
ception of social relations. For marketing
experts, the individual is not very reflexive,
and is even rather impulsive. While the exact
opposite is true from the political scientists’
perspective, in both cases the individual
appears largely unaffected by social determi-
nants, such as socio-economic status, habits
and local culture, and socialization from
birth to adulthood. Furthermore, the two
positions are hardly critical of the bases
of consumer society and its operating princi-
ples (the differentiation of products and
the renewal of needs by advertising). On
the contrary, each in its domain reflects the
neo-liberal paradigm.
Marketing and consumer studies conclude
that consumers’ demands are apolitical and
part of a normal process of the capitalist eco-
nomic system, the evolution of demand.
Therefore, this is collaboration with the
system, adherence to its principles. For their
part, political science researchers affirm that
thoughtful, autonomous and critical individ-
uals, motivated by personal political convic-
tions, act politically by making consumer
choices. These choices modify demand for
products and oblige producers to adjust their
practices. These are, then, acts that one may
deem political but that essentially have
effects on the economic practices of produc-
tion. If this is politics, it is the neo-liberal
politics of self-regulation by the invisible
hand.
Second, a position such as that of Michelle
Dobré ranks responsible consumer practices
ahead of collective action, considering that
they constitute resistance, and defining it as a
disruptive reaction to a threat which is still
misunderstood. Making alternative consumer
choices individually – for example, buying
used clothes to extend the life of manufac-
tured products – is not a political act. If this
act is performed by hundreds of people, it
will have cumulative effects, but will it be
collective action? Surely not, as the actors
are unaware of acting collectively to defend a
position in the public arena.
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POLITICAL CONSUMERISM
Political acts, in this view, only arise when
organizations and individuals develop sus-
tainable and clearly critical discourses and
practices – based on their objectives or their
ways of functioning – about one or a number
of dimensions of current capitalist economic
relations. The CSA initiatives, for example,
propose radical changes and give consumers
a role radically different from that assigned
them in post-World War II Western societies.
For an action to be truly politicized, it is not
enough merely to claim that it is expressing a
political position. Cooperation with the
system or challenging it is measured by the
duration, the repetition and the institutional-
ization of alternative practices. This is akin to
the position developed by researchers such as
David Goodman and his colleagues, who
have come to conceive of certain alternative
practices of production and consumption as
political acts, when they express social imag-
inaries which are critical of the hegemonic
pretensions of capitalist logic. The political
potential, whether to promote change or
maintain the status quo, is therefore meas-
ured by the analysis of the social forms of
networks of production, distribution and con-
sumption. Micheletti and her colleagues, as
good political scientists trained in the analy-
sis of electoral systems, only record inten-
tions and actual actions, without taking into
account the socialization of individuals, their
real conditions of existence and their posi-
tions in social networks.
A third, even more radical, position would
be one of ‘dissenting’ or ‘critical’ subjectiv-
ity, the ongoing search for coherence and bal-
ance between beliefs and real life. This is a
logic that arises from total personal commit-
ment. Inspired by libertarian positions and
those of Gandhi, for example, authors such
as Jordan or Benasayag will theorize about a
total situational commitment, an individual
position that consists of immediately putting
into action the world which is envisioned.
From this perspective, strategies of collective
action must contribute to bringing about the
ideal society. Responsible consumerism thus
becomes a temporary expedient, and a point
287
of departure in the search for real alterna-
tives, while for most other researchers,
responsible consumerism is an end in itself.
A position like that of Benasayag or Jordan
does not entail only a modification of con-
sumer choices, but rather an individual with-
drawal from the institutions and lifestyles of
consumer society and a collective reconstitu-
tion of concrete alternatives in order to
ensure the reproduction of life. In this posi-
tion, there is clearly a protest and a refusal to
collaborate with the current economic and
political system.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
I hope that I have succeeded in demonstrating
that, in the mainstream trends of social sci-
ence research about responsible consumerism
(or political consumerism), the conception of
politics is often, if not nonexistent, at least
vague. The definitions and analytical models
change depending on whether one adopts the
viewpoint of marketing, political science,
economic sociology or of critical sociology.
Research on consumerism in general is quite
disparate. As a result, it is not clear that one
may conceptualize and understand behav-
iours which are ‘labelled’ responsible con-
sumerism as political acts.
In my opinion, such research would benefit
from an analysis of consumerism as a socially
constructed activity, which is differentiated
according to socio-economic contexts, cul-
tures and local traditions. At present, this is
not being done; everything that has preceded
and determined the act of consumption is
taken for granted. We also need to adopt a
clear definition and detailed indicators of
political participation and consumerism as a
political act. Theoretical work on this subject
is still embryonic and the authors referred to
in this article are pioneers. As we have
shown, there are a number of nuances to
consider about political commitment and
the depth of the critique that an act of con-
sumption may express.
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288 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
If ‘buying is voting’, does this mean that
the person who chooses to be completely dis-
connected from the system of mass con-
sumption is not making a political statement?
University research on this emerging phe-
nomenon also urgently needs to assemble
more precise and plentiful data about these
‘political consumers’. Who are they? What
are their occupations? Do they mostly belong
to the middle class or upper-middle class, as
we suspect? What about their local inclusion
in social networks? Along the same lines, we
need to go further than opinion surveys and
factual questionnaires and get the political
consumers themselves to speak. We need
to reconstruct the meaning that they give to
their actions and evaluate the real effects of
these acts. Concretely, this will involve ana-
lyzing the life course of people who openly
call themselves ‘political consumers’ in order
to understand how such people, as members
of social networks and spheres of life, build
their personal identities. To what collective
discourses, collective identities and frame-
works for collective action, do they refer in
order to situate their own acts? Do they
express and claim this identity of political
consumers elsewhere and in other ways? Do
these people belong to organizations? Are
they engaged in other activist pursuits
(Filieule, 2001; Passy and Giugni, 2000)? It
is only by starting from a corpus of numerous
interviews, a description of several contexts
of collective action and the analysis of many
activist networks and/or networks of produc-
tion, distribution and consumption, that we
may go beyond the identification of the phe-
nomenon and a description of its general
characteristics, to arrive at an understanding
of its socio-political dynamics, and an evalu-
ation of its political scope.
Because we are not satisfied with the
current dominant explanations that establish
an equation between a purchase and a vote,
as in the slogan ‘buying is voting’, this poses
serious challenges to the conceptualization
and practice of democracy. In my opinion,
this equation between a purchase and a vote
shows that contemporary individuals have
internalized the logic of liberal capitalism
(CEPS, 2007). These are the same individu-
als who are presented as being so liberated
and reflexive. Without a critical sociology of
responsible consumerism, we run the risk of
presenting as anti-establishment acts that may
in fact only be a new form of participation in
and reproduction of the capitalist system of
oppression.
NOTE
1 The French expression Jacques Ion uses is
‘engagement distancié’, which implies commitment
to a cause without being committed to a particular
organization.
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9781412934633-Chap-20 1/10/09 8:53 AM Page 291
Modes of Structured
Interplay in the Modeling of
Digital Futures
Conflict, competition, and cooperation are
the three fundamental modes of creating
future society. This article aims to show that
these three categories can be meaningfully
applied to an analysis of the social shaping of
the new global mediascape and digital
futures. It examines the rise of the Internet
and its related technologies from a global and
comparative perspective, paying particular
attention to the role of key social actors and
the changing modes of their interplay. It will
then discuss the social consequences of cur-
rent trends and point to the stakes of future
development. The goal is thereby not to pro-
vide an exhaustive account of the creation of
digital futures but to contribute to the orien-
tation of questions for empirical research
with normative relevance.
COMPETITION, CONFLICT, AND
COOPERATION IN FUTURES
RESEARCH
Futures studies owe as much to nineteenth
and early twentieth century traditions of
20
Markus S. Schulz
thought as any other sociological field. This
is especially true when tracing the origins of
how the principles of competition, conflict,
and cooperation entered the field. Charles
Darwin’s evolution-theoretical concept of the
‘survival of the fittest’ and Adam Smith’s
notion of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market
that could be entrusted with distributive and
regulatory order functions came to inform
the model of competition. Karl Marx’s
notion of inevitable class struggle was taken
up and further developed by different strands
of conflict theory. Emile Durkheim’s notion
of a modern society held together by organic
integration and the collaboration of comple-
mentarily specialized social sectors lacked
attention to conflict but it raised important
questions about the conditions of possibility
for social order and cooperation.
The field of futures studies, which began
to boom in the 1960s and 1970s, shared its
technological enthusiasm with the theorists
of early industrialization. The wave of futures
studies prepared in the 1960s was above all
characterized by a belief in technology
as savior. Books about the future in the
year 2000 had become widely discussed
9781412934633-Chap-20 1/10/09 8:53 AM Page 292
292 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
bestsellers (e.g., Bell, 1968; Jungk and
Galtung, 1969; Kahn and Wiener, 1967).
Most of these displayed an outspoken opti-
mism based on technological progress and
focused on the benefits of space age tech-
nologies and mass consumer goods (see the
overview in Bell, 1997a). This optimism was
given credence by experiences in daily life.
Technological breakthroughs, such as the
landing of an Apollo rocket and the first steps
of a man on the moon, were televised to a
global audience. Mass-produced technology,
including automobiles and an increasing
plethora of household electronics, had
become affordable to ever wider circles
throughout the wealthier countries. It was
hoped that the Green Revolution would feed
the Third World, and that technology would
trickle down to all people on the planet.
Yet, this technological optimism was soon
to give way to a more pessimistic perspec-
tive. A variety of heterogeneous factors led to
this shift. The oil crisis of the early 1970s led
to a world-wide recession. The consequences
of this abrupt stoppage of growth were felt
not only by motorists but by consumers
world-wide. The welfare-states of the First
World ran into a crisis of legitimacy. The his-
torical compromise between capital and
labor was put to a test as the cake for redistri-
bution had slowed down its growth or even
had stopped growing (Offe, 1987). The
Report to the Club of Rome by Dennis
Meadows and his collaborators expressed a
strong warning about the Limits of Growth
(Meadows et al., 1972) and became famous
as it touched a chord of concern. An environ-
mental movement began to emerge in an
increasing number of industrialized countries
criticizing the abuse of planetary resources.
Other critics warned about the specter of a
Third World War. The growing arsenals of
nuclear weapons had resulted in thousand-
fold overkill capacities. Technology came to
be seen as an imminent threat by the Cold
War’s peace movement. The Third World
developed the Dependency School (Amin,
1977; Cardoso and Faletto, 1979; Frank, 1967),
which argued that modernization theories
and trickle-down assumptions of develop-
ment were naïve and that the Third World
was positioned in a system of unequal terms
of trade that did not allow any betterment for
systemic reasons.
After the decline of futures studies during
the late 1970s and the 1980s, we see a re-
emergence of futures research with yet more
sophisticated methodologies, sharper methods,
and a consciousness of time characterized
by a fundamental contingency that is open
to the horizon of the possible and the politi-
cally shapeable (Bell, 1997a, 1997b; Boulding
and Boulding, 1995). Contemporary social
theory expressed this in its emphasis on
the ‘creativity of action’ (Joas, 1996)
and in the explicit inclusion of ‘human
agency’ as a factor (Emirbayer and Mische,
1998).
In an effort to summarize the work cur-
rently being undertaken within the field of
futures research, one can distinguish four
major approaches: (1) forecasts, especially
those based on Delphi-Interviews with lead-
ing experts in research and development
(e.g., Beck et al., 2000); (2) studies that
employ scenario building techniques about
possible and probable futures (e.g., Schulz,
1999, 2001d); (3) empirical research on the
futures of the past or present, that is., the
images of futures prevalent during past
moments of time (Bell, 1997a); the processes
by which such past images of the future were
constructed (Mannheim, 1936); and the effi-
cacy of these visions for social change – this
is what can be called the sociology of the
imaginary (Castoriadis, 1991); and (4) nor-
mative or norm-analytical theorizing about
preferable futures (Bell, 1997b), including
theorizing on the relationship of values and
futures, as will be attempted here.
The principles of competition, conflict,
and cooperation play a role in all four of
these approaches. Futuristic forecasts
that draw on the expertise of scientists, engi-
neers, economists, and other specialists
accept implicitly their assumptions about
9781412934633-Chap-20 1/10/09 8:53 AM Page 293
MODELING OF DIGITAL FUTURES
how more or less smoothly current trends are
expected to continue. Alternative scenarios
might be constructed according to assump-
tions of successful cooperation between
decisive actors, its conflictual breakdown, or
some intermediate path. This has been done,
for example, in an interdisciplinary study of
the impact of the climate change on the
Lower Weser region in Germany, in which
indicators of social conflict, economic
competition, and global cooperation were
integrated into a regional econometric model
for the generation of path-specific long-term
future scenarios (Schulz, 1999, 2001d).
The study of the futures of the past shows
how certain expectations can, depending on
context, serve as self-fulfilling prophecies
or bring about just the opposite of what was
expected (cf. Bell, 1997a). Warnings about
the cost of conflict can help to persuade the
relevant actors to cooperate. Predictions
about rising values in the stock market tend
to contribute to increases in the stocks’ value.
Most recent normative theorizing tends to
postulate cooperation as a necessary mecha-
nism for the making of preferable futures
(Bell, 1997b; Masini, 1999). The major
exceptions are free market advocates, for
whom competition is the only conceivable
engine of innovation, growth, and progress.
Yet, no matter how strongly market
advocates embrace the notion of competi-
tion, it can function only on assumptions
of cooperation with regard to market rules
and institutional structures enforcing these
rules.
However, a more detailed discussion of the
role that the principles of competition, con-
flict, and cooperation play in all of the
diverse strands of futures research would be
beyond the scope of this chapter. I will there-
fore focus my discussion in an exemplary
fashion on a – in my view – particularly
salient aspect of the current future, that is.,
the modeling of digital futures. A brief exam-
ination of fundamental empirical data will
point to the theoretical and normative issues
at stake.
293
UTOPIAS, DYSTOPIAS, AND BEYOND
The rising speed with which the New
Information and Communication Technologies
(NICT) are being introduced has inspired
much euphoria among scholars and the larger
public. Marshall McLuhan’s famous notion of
a ‘global village’ (McLuhan,1964) gained with
the breakthroughs in digital technologies and
the rise of the Internet renewed popularity.
After the disillusionment with radio and televi-
sion, which fostered war propaganda and mass
culture industries more than global neighborli-
ness, the Internet provided a new canvas for
projecting hopes and seemed to offer the ben-
efit of a true interactivity that the earlier elec-
tronic media had lacked. The number of people
going online experienced growth rates so enor-
mously high that it appeared to observers as if
it would be only a matter of a relatively short
time until everyone could share the bounty
of the Internet and become part of a global
community.
The utopian hopes for computer-mediated
global reconciliation evaporated in the
course of events associated with September
11, 2001, and were replaced by dystopian
views of an unavoidable ‘clash of civiliza-
tions’ (Huntington, 1996). The specter of
cyber terrorism was employed to justify new
security measures. Critics warned of the
NICT’s repressive potential, pointing to a
future of universal surveillance, not only by
an Orwellian ‘big brother’ government, but
also by private corporations (Lyon, 2001;
Sassen, 2000). On the other hand, business
hopes for windfall gains from e-commerce
shattered, at least temporarily, when the
‘dot.com’ bubble imploded and the limits of
market expansion became apparent. NICT
diffusion, which was once regarded almost as
an automatism, turned out to be a much more
complicated matter. I will return to the various
aspects of these contradictory visions of
alternative digital futures after a brief exami-
nation of empirical data on the global diffu-
sion of NICT, which will also help to point to
the theoretical and normative issues at stake.
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THE DIFFUSION OF THE
NEW INFORMATION AND
COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES
IN GLOBAL AND COMPARATIVE
PERSPECTIVE
By the end of 2004, the global cyberspace of
the Internet was populated by more than 870
million users world-wide, according to esti-
mates published by the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU, 2005).
More reliable than estimated user numbers
are counts of Internet host computers.1
A July 2005 count by Network Wizards put
the figure for host computers world-wide at
above 350 million (ITU, 2005). A quarter
century ago, in August 1981, there were only
213 hosts, which were accessed by not more
than a few thousand users (ITU, 1999;
Zakon, 2002). According to a widely shared
assumption, the price for Internet access is
bound to decline with competitive mass
production of the necessary hardware and, as
a consequence, the number of users was and
is expected to continue its rapid rise. Current
trends were and are seen as strongly suggest-
ing that in a few years, Internet access will be
just as common for the majority of people in
the industrialized zones of the world as
newspaper, radio, and television are today,
while there may be at least a partial conver-
gence of these media. Prognoses, however,
that predicted constant annual growth rates
of 100% for the early years of the new cen-
tury (Odlyzko, 2001) have already proved
wrong.
Although the Internet can already be
accessed in virtually every country of the
world, the distribution of access is very
uneven. Internet access in the financially
weaker countries still continues to be largely
restricted to educated urban elites. This is
especially true for countries in Africa, south
of the Sahara and north of the Republic of
South Africa. Latin America takes an inter-
mediate position, as there are some countries
with little infrastructure and others that are
developing rapidly.
At the end of 2004, more than half of the
world’s estimated Internet users were based
in North America and Europe, but only 7%
in Latin America and, even fewer, only 2%, in
all of Africa (ITU, 2005). A breakdown of the
more reliable host counts shows a similar
imbalance. At the end of 2004, an estimated
85% of the world’s 265 million Internet host
computers were in North America and
Europe, but only 2.5% were in Latin America
and a mere 0.16% were in Africa, where most
of them were concentrated in the Republic of
South Africa (ITU, 2005). The most recent
user estimates published by ITU (2005) indi-
cate that in the world-wide average there are
13.86 Internet users per 100 persons. The cor-
responding figures for the USA and Canada
are 62 and for 63%, for Europe 31.8%, for
Australia/Oceania 51.7%, Asia 8.3%, and for
Africa 2.6%. There are also great disparities
within regions. In Latin America, for exam-
ple, the corresponding user figures range
from 27.9% in Chile and 23.5% in Costa Rica
down to 2.5% in Paraguay and 2.2% in
Nicaragua, while the most populous coun-
tries, Brazil and Mexico, have averages of
12.1% and 13.4% respectively (ITU, 2005).
There is a plausible expectation that the
share of less represented regions will rise as
the penetration rates in North America and
Europe approach saturation levels, yet these
uneven distribution figures need to be kept in
mind when discussing the rise of the Internet
and the diffusion of the new information and
telecommunication technologies. Only one-
third of the world’s Internet users reside out-
side OECD countries, while of the world’s
broadband users, it is less than a fifth
(Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development [OECD], 2005). More striking
yet is the imbalance when looking at the
access opportunities in the poorest countries.
As the OECD (2005) observed, the 45 least
connected countries, together, have no more
international connectivity than a single
high-end user with a 100 mega bits per second
broadband line in Japan. Yet, the meaning
of center and periphery does not neatly coin-
cide with national borders, if it ever did.
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MODELING OF DIGITAL FUTURES
Educated urban elites from currency-weak
countries appear on the same side of the dig-
ital divide as the middle classes of post-
industrial countries. Digital inequalities exist
across and within countries.
A brief glimpse at the diffusion patterns of
television sets can provide some indication
of the ability to save up funds over long peri-
ods of time to acquire a popular but some-
what costly electronic device. Television sets
are appliances that depend neither on a wired
infrastructure nor on sophisticated skills for
their use, and they have had several decades
for their diffusion. While the average number
of TV sets per 100 inhabitants is well above
80 in the USA, the equivalent figures in the
Latin American countries mentioned above
range from 14% to 32%. The diffusion rates
for TV sets illustrate the limitations of
market-driven distribution models insofar as
they show that these electronic devices could
be obtained by some part of the population
but not by others, and that the portion of the
population that was able to acquire them is
several times smaller than that in the USA.
DIGITAL INEQUALITIES
Whereas much of the emerging sociology of
cyberspace has focused on domestic aspects
of leading OECD countries, this article advo-
cates a global and comparative perspective
that takes into account the experiences and
conditions of both center and periphery. The
restructuring of communicative relations is
global, though not globally uniform. The tra-
jectories of regulation, usage, and impact of
the NICT vary widely between world
regions, across and within countries. Current
trends point to very unequal chances for par-
ticipating in the emerging network structures
and public spheres of incipient global civil
society (Castells, 1996; Sassen, 1997;
Schulz, 2001a; Wellman, 1999). The modes
of NICT implementation and regulation at
national and global levels have a decisive
impact upon the distribution of access
295
chances, access quality, and opportunities for
usage.
Studies of Internet access in the USA
during the late 1990s pointed to a ‘digital
divide’ along the lines of income, education,
age, gender, and rural/urban (US Department
of Commerce, 1995, 1998). According to
more recent data however, these divides tend
to disappear, except for the most disadvan-
taged parts of the population, including the
poor and the disabled (US Department of
Commerce, 2000). Yet digital inequalities are
not only a matter of having or not having
basic access, but also a qualitative issue with
educational and socio-economic aspects,
beyond technological aspects narrowly con-
ceived. What one can do with access,
depends on the bandwidth and speed, on nav-
igational skills (Hargittai, 2001), and the
capacities to process information critically
and communicate effectively within multi-
media environments. In addition, more and
more commercial service sites require extra-
payments for access; while the expanding
corporate intranets are password protected
and off-limits to outsiders (Sassen, 1997).
Whereas findings valid for the USA case
might not be totally different from those for
other post-industrial countries, these cannot
be further generalized to cover the situation
in the global South which seems to be strik-
ingly different.
Why are digital inequalities a problem?
Are there not more urgent concerns in coun-
tries in which basic needs for clean drinking
water, nutrition, sanitation, shelter, health,
and basic education are not met? Is not the
diffusion of new technologies just a matter of
the time it takes to trickle down to the late-
comers? The problem we are witnessing is a
widening of the gap between those who are
well-off and those who are marginalized and
excluded. Those who can connect to cyber-
space can use it for their social, economic,
and political benefit. Let me illustrate the
potential importance of access to NICT for
marginalized groups with two examples. In
the perhaps most famous case, the Zapatista
rebels in Chiapas gained world-wide attention
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296 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
and mobilized unprecedented solidarity
when their cause was relayed by supporters
onto the Internet (see Schulz, 1998, 2001b,
2001c for more detailed discussions). Less
known is the case of the Unión Regional de
Ejidos y Comunidades de la Costa Chica
(Regional Union of Communal Landowners
and Communities of the Costa Chica, the
URECHH), a regional association of indige-
nous communities on the Costa Chica in
Oaxaca. The URECHH was able to over-
come its problems with the intermediary
buyer of its members’ agricultural products
after it located a fair trade buyer in Canada
on the Internet with the help of Servicios
Profesionales de Apoyo al Desarollo Integral
Indígena (Professional Support Services
for Integrated Indigenous Development
[SEPRADI]), a Mexico City-based NGO. In
both cases, access to global means of infor-
mation and communication meant gaining
political and economic strength, without
which the prospect for an upgrading of
conditions might not have improved in the
same way.
The social distribution of formal and effec-
tive NICT access is largely the product of
pronounced socio-economic inequality and at
the same time a cause for further inequality.
An elite of the well-connected and best con-
nected is emerging vis-à-vis a majority that
has only insufficient access or no access at
all. Those who are excluded from access are
at a disadvantage relative to those who are
connected. This is true both economically,
because they cannot access profitable knowl-
edge and useful contacts, and politically,
because they cannot use these media for gen-
erating communicative power. Digital
inequality, thus, is not an irrelevant ‘luxury’
kind of inequality. It is not only an addi-
tional dimension of social inequality but it
increases the existing inequalities. The
already marginalized parts of the population
are exposed to the acute danger that digital
marginalization will marginalize them
even further. Having pointed to the stakes
involved in the formation of the new global
mediascape, I will now examine more
closely the processes by which these are
created.
THE SOCIAL SHAPING OF THE
INTERNET
The theoretical perspective employed here
rejects not only the resilient assumptions of
technological determinism but also one-sided
political-economic structuralism and outright
voluntarism. To be sure, one-sided perspec-
tives can have the heuristic merit of recog-
nizing through exaggeration the significance
of underappreciated factors. For example,
White (1966) made the famous technologi-
cal-determinist argument that feudal society
was the result of the invention of the stirrup.
In her view, the stirrup led to a dramatic
increase in military power because it made
fighting on horseback more effective.
Mounted combat then required a new econ-
omy that could produce new weapons and
specially trained fighters and war horses.
This led in turn to a social reorganization and
the rise of an aristocratic elite of mounted
warriors. This historical reading has been
criticized (Hilton and Sawyer, 1963). White’s
account is an innovative way of showing how
technology can matter, but it is overly sim-
plistic. The stirrup had come into use in many
other places without causing a reorgani-
zation of society in the Frankian way. Innis
(1951), and later McLuhan (1964), pointed
out that all societies are profoundly shaped
by the particular propensities of specific
communication technologies. Ellul (1964)
argued that in modernity, technology had
taken over and turned humans into its servants.
These types of arguments are enormously
important not only for scientific discourse
but also for the normative debate about
what kinds of media technologies might
have more preferable social implications.
However, the problem with technological
determinism, especially in its popular
varieties, is that it lets technological change
appear as a quasi-natural process that is
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MODELING OF DIGITAL FUTURES
beyond the reach of public deliberation.
One-sided economistic approaches fall into
the same trap (see discussion in Elster, 1983).
On the other hand, voluntaristic approaches
underestimate the power of structures. The
stories about genius inventors make for a
popular genre but exaggerate the role of indi-
viduals (Hong, 2001; Weightman, 2003).
These shortcomings can be overcome
through a more holistic approach that bal-
ances structure and agency, and through stud-
ies of how social shaping processes are
accomplished in the more or less conflictual,
competitive, or cooperative interplay of social
actors who are understood as being embed-
ded in institutional and structural contexts,
which in turn provide both limits and
resources for creative action. This approach
draws on technology studies by Latour
(1987), Bijker (1995), MacKenzie and
Wajcman (1999), and more generally, the
agency and structure balancing work of
Giddens (1984). How NICTs are shaped is
thus seen as the outcome of a complex inter-
play of social forces. These forces include
socio-economic structures, legal frameworks,
political systems, cultural patterns, the
options and constraints set by previous tech-
nologies, and the agency locatable in a range
of social actors with differential means of
influence (cf. Kubicek et al., 1997 and Wilson
and Kahin, 1997 for the USA and Europe;
Herzog et al., 2002 and Schulz, 2001a for
Latin America). The contextually embedded
social actors involved in these more or less
contentious shaping processes include, inter
alia, transnational corporations with interests
in software, hardware, and e-commerce, inter-
governmental organizations and international
treaty frameworks, political-administrative
elites, domestic legal frameworks and courts
of jurisdiction, domestic corporations and
lobby groups, NGOs, users, consumers, and
civil society initiatives, all with differential
interests, resources, imaginary capacities, and
strategies acting in changing contexts and
constellations. Several partly overlapping phases
can be analytically distinguished in the devel-
opment of the Internet according to which
297
social actors took the lead and according to an
analysis of the type of interplay among actors.
Phase I (1970s–1980s)
The Internet’s predecessor, the ARPAnet,
was funded by the US Department of
Defense in an effort to bolster the American
lead in research and technology after the
Soviet Union’s successful launching of
Sputnik had indicated that the Cold War
opponent was catching up. The concepts of a
redundancy of links and the transmission of
messages in smaller, flexibly switched pack-
ets had been developed in the 1960s at
RAND, a think-tank close to the Pentagon, as
part of a plan to set up a decentralized com-
munications infrastructure that could survive
the breakdown of some of its nodes in the
scenario of a nuclear attack (Baran, 1964).
Although initially hesitant about the possibil-
ity of relinquishing control over their com-
puters by linking them to others, computer
scientists recognized the benefits of such a
network rapidly and developed a thriving
culture of cooperation among colleagues at
distant campuses (Abbate, 1999). ARPAnet
was eventually transformed into the NSFnet,
with funding provided by the National
Science Foundation. The conflict of the Cold
War can thus be seen as having given impe-
tus to the development of the Internet in its
early phase. Yet, within the conflict the prin-
ciple of publicly funded cooperation among
research scientists was crucial. Moreover, the
state-led development of ARPAnet and
NSFnet must also be seen in connection with
developments centered in the counter-culture
of the Californian Silicon Valley.
Phase II (1970s–early 1990s)
Silicon Valley computer scientists envisioned
decentralized personal computers as alterna-
tives to the big mainframes that only resource-
rich institutions could afford. Linking their
computers via conventional phone-lines and
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298 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
modems, they developed an open culture of
free content sharing and collaborative work
on software codes. The sociable uses of the
net gave rise to increasingly far-flung ‘virtual
communities’, such as those on the Whole
Earth Lectronic Link, the electronic bulletin
board system better known under its abbrevi-
ation as the WELL, which was founded in
the Bay Area of San Francisco in 1985 by
Stewart Brand and vividly described by
Rheingold (1993). NGOs soon recognized
the potential of these network technologies
for their efforts to build linkages not
only among activists across the USA but
also abroad. The San Francisco-based
Association for Progressive Communication
(APC) spearheaded the outreach efforts to
global civil society and played a pivotal role
in setting up nodes in scores of countries
around the world.
Phase III (mid-1990s to the present)
The third phase is characterized by increased
commercialization. It began with the intro-
duction of graphical user interfaces, which
lowered the threshold of skills required for
using a computer and facilitated navigation
on the rapidly expanding World Wide Web.
The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML),
which was crucial for the construction of the
World Wide Web, was developed with public
funding in the European research center,
CERN, but private companies took the lead
in developing a plethora of software applica-
tions and in providing access to the net.
America Online (AOL) and other companies
became the most popular access providers of
the then privatized Internet for an exponen-
tially increasing number of subscribers. The
market for computers and software was soon
dominated by IBM-compatible hardware and
Microsoft’s proprietary operating systems
and applications.2 As the number of users
began to represent an ever-growing con-
sumer market, advertising companies
invented new techniques of sending out elec-
tronic spam, integrating pop-up ads on popu-
lar web-sites, and collecting data profiles of
users. The ability to freely exchange identical
copies of digital content on the net alerted
first the music and later also the film indus-
try. Their lobby efforts led in the USA to the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),
which severely restricted the previous user
rights to fair use of cultural content. Large-
scale non-commercial peer-to-peer file-shar-
ing networks (P2P) were more or less
effectively shut down and replaced by profit-
seeking content providers.3 Corporations
with vested interests in patents and copy-
rights had already exercised their influence
on the Trade Round on Intellectual Property
and Services (TRIPS) and model laws
prepared by the World Intellectual Property
Organization (WIPO) and the United Nations
Commission on International Trade
Law (UNCITRAL) (Sell, 2003; UNCI-
TRAL, 1998), which in turn were to shape
the legal definitions of the participating
countries (Schulz, 2002). The world-wide
computer networks are the technology
behind the global trade in financial deriva-
tives and the accelerated circulation of capi-
tal. In principle, they would allow a taxation
of these flows, which could then be used to
fund supranational agencies and cooperative
initiatives; but there is insufficient political
will to do this.
The competition-based mode of develop-
ment failed to solve the problems posed by
digital inequalities and the needs of citizens
for a global media infrastructure supportive
of a democratic public sphere. The World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), and the OECD continue to push coun-
tries toward privatization and liberalization
of their telecommunication sectors with the
argument that competition brings down
prices. But this is only true under the condi-
tion that strong state regulation is capable of
creating and enforcing level playing fields.
A private oligopoly that captures its regula-
tory agency is not necessarily performing
any better than a well-run state provider. The
main problem, however, in many poorer
countries with a high degree of social
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MODELING OF DIGITAL FUTURES
inequality is that the impoverished sectors
are not of much interest to commercial
providers if these are left unregulated. And it
would solve the problem neither of how to
access password-protected, subscription-
only quality content nor of how to provide
the education for turning passive consumers
into active users.
In the absence of valid regulations for
toxic waste, obsolete NICT garbage from the
well-connected countries is usually dumped
under the rubric of recycling in the poorer
countries, where it creates environmental
health hazards. It thus appears that the unfet-
tered market forces that prevent people at the
margins of the digital world from sharing the
benefits of the cyber-age expose them at the
same time to its externalized cost. In a recent
study, the Basel Action Network (BAN), a
Seattle-based NGO, estimated that three
quarters of the NICT products shipped to
Nigeria for recycling are actually neither
usable nor economically repairable and end
up as unaccounted toxic waste, which is fre-
quently discarded in poor shanty-towns
(Puckett et al., 2005). This toxic waste
regime is partly made possible by the fact
that the United States has neither ratified the
Basel Convention, which would make such
practices illegal, nor implemented equivalent
regulation.
Meanwhile hopes are being projected on
the new round of technologies. Wireless serv-
ices are currently experiencing a boom. The
number of wireless phones has already sur-
passed the number of fixed phone lines.
Although wireless connections are currently
not as powerful as services via Digital
Subscriber Lines (DSL) or cable, it can be
expected that they will be improved and even-
tually will replace wired technologies. This
presents opportunities especially in countries
with less developed fixed line infrastructures
but sufficient individual purchasing power.
The development of a US$100 laptop
computer could push up diffusion rates
throughout the developing world and may
help computer manufacturers expand beyond
rapidly saturated markets. But it still leaves
299
open the question of whether a US$100
laptop user in Sub-Saharan Africa will have
the same kind of access to the Internet as a
high-end user in NY or Tokyo. It also leaves
out the question of whether the low-end user
will be able to engage in the same informa-
tion and communication multi-media activi-
ties as the high-end counterpart or whether
he or she will be a second-class citizen in
cyberspace while being told to just wait for
the next new technology to trickle down and
solve any problem then.
MODELING DIGITAL FUTURES
A new phase in the development of the
Internet might have just started but its mode
and outcome are quite uncertain. That the
future NICT will offer more capabilities and
more bandwidth supportive of audiovisual
content is easy to imagine, as leading
research institutions are already building
with public funding Internet2 as a high-speed
successor to the current Internet. The trends
point to it being dominated by a mixture of
commercial and USA security interests but
there are also emerging counter-trends. The
US Department of Homeland Security that
was set up in the wake of the attacks on the
World Trade Center in NY and the Pentagon
in Washington seems bound to assume more
and more control in the name of the war
against terrorism. The Echelon system for the
interception of international Internet commu-
nications through filters was already estab-
lished prior to these attacks. Private
companies are inventing ever new technolo-
gies for collecting data on consumers in a
legal environment which does not provide
effective protection. An anti-trust suit against
Microsoft was discontinued by the federal
administration but individual states continue
the legal battle in the USA, and the European
Union has advanced its own legal proceed-
ings to curb what it perceives to be flagrant
monopolistic business practices undermining
fair market competition.
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300 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
There are also signs of an alternative
future development of the Internet driven by
the principle of cooperation. This model is
supportive of the vision that the global medi-
ascape belongs to a global community and
that there should be a social right for commu-
nication. Parallel to the 2003 Geneva World
Summit on the Information Society (WSIS),
NGOs organized their World Forum on
Communication Rights, in which they
affirmed the social right to communication
and demanded a more equitable framework
for global communication. On a practical
level, a non-proprietary operating system has
been developed under the name of Linux by
a network of computer programmers who
embrace cooperative values and share a com-
mitment to an open source code that can
be freely used by anyone. Brazil, Peru,
and Venezuela are among the countries
most strongly promoting the use of Linux,
though Microsoft has threatened costly law
suits, claiming that Linux would violate
copyrights. As a result, the city of Munich,
Germany felt it necessary to put its
Linux program on hold. The International
Telecommunication Union (ITU), which had
been largely on the sidelines of the Internet’s
development, published the results of a web
survey on the question: ‘Should Cyberspace
be declared a resource to be shared by
all?’ Of the 1250 online respondents 94.2%
voted ‘yes’, and 5.78% ‘no’ (ITU, 2004).
The percentage of ‘no’ votes was higher in
better connected world regions than in the
less well-connected ones. Although the
survey does not qualify as strongly represen-
tative, it does indicate a new level of aware-
ness within the ITU.
Whether the future Internet will follow the
path of a ‘Future I’ dominated by commercial
and national security values and the modes of
competition and conflict, or the path of a
‘Future II’ inspired by an alternative agenda
based on the social right to communicate in
the mode of cooperation, is up to the actors
who are getting involved in the process of its
social shaping.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
This chapter has argued that conflict, compe-
tition, and cooperation are the fundamental
modes of creating future society. It traced
these three categories from the beginning of
the sociological discipline in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries and demon-
strated their applicability in an analysis of the
social shaping of the NICT, focusing espe-
cially on the Internet.
The values and cooperative mode of
Californian computer engineers and
researchers have had a profound impact on
the shaping of computer networks. Their lib-
ertarian convictions and practices translated
into horizontal networking, free sharing of
ideas, and cooperative interaction. The
Internet’s predecessor, the ARPAnet, was
able to flourish largely due to funding pro-
vided by the Pentagon with its aim of bolster-
ing the technological lead against the Cold
War adversary. The later privatization of
what was to become known as the Internet-
led entrepreneurs to compete with one
another over clients and customers, resulting,
among others things, in the invention of
email-spam and spam-blocking software and
in the battles between file-sharing software
and record companies. Not only does the
computer code, narrowly conceived, matter
in the shaping of digital futures, but also the
legal code, as established by lawmakers and
interpreted and applied by courts. Whether
the values of citizens should have been given
higher regard than the values of record labels
appears to have been debated only in circles
too small to exercise any great pressure on
the USA policy makers who voted on the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
However, views that look only at develop-
ments in OECD countries are too limited.
When taking a more global perspective, we
come to acknowledge that it is only a small
fraction of the world’s population that has
access to the new digital media. What values
are behind such an unequal distribution of
human goods? How does it come about that
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MODELING OF DIGITAL FUTURES
the digital futures are primarily framed in
terms of marketable property rights and not in
a language of human rights to access informa-
tion and communication? How are images of
digital futures imagined, by whom, and with
what implications for broader concerns such
as social equality and democratic efficacy?
Applying the concepts of conflict, compe-
tition, and cooperation as heuristic devices to
an analysis of how the NICT are being
shaped, not only contributes to overcoming
resilient assumptions of technological deter-
minism but also helps to open the horizon for
broader empirical and normative debates and
for the imagination of alternative futures. In
this chapter, the contrast between alternative
trajectories was used to indicate what is at
stake in the shaping of the technological pre-
conditions of social communication.
NICT exclusion is not merely another
dimension of social inequality; it increases
existing inequalities. The already marginal-
ized parts of the population are exposed to
the acute danger that digital marginalization
pushes them even further to the edge.
This presents a major barrier to democratic
inclusion and global social equity. In the
absence of broader access policies, the new
digital inequalities are exacerbating the exist-
ing social inequalities within and across
countries.
What is the solution? Waiting for a trickle-
down of NICT is certainly not enough. That
would only deepen the existing inequalities
during the diffusion period because those
who can make effective use of NICT have a
relative advantage over those who cannot,
thus diminishing the chances for any leap-
frogging. Moreover, when considering how
quickly the development of new hardware
and software makes older versions obsolete,
continuous investment seems to be required
more than in the case of technologies with
early maturity and relatively negligible sub-
sequent refinements that do not undermine
their interoperability.
Access and access quality are only the
most basic issues in the establishment of new
301
global communication relations. The ways in
which NICT can be used depends on aspects
of national and international policy, such as
privacy, censorship, surveillance, taxability
of economic transactions, consumer protec-
tion, rights to information and communica-
tion, administrative transparency, intellectual
property rights or privileges, regulatory con-
trol, standard-setting authority, and dispute
resolution procedures.
The course and mode of the diffusion and
shaping of NICT is not an historical ‘automa-
tism’. Social actors are not just passively
impacted by new technology. They can,
rather, impact the way these are implemented
to the extent of their active appropriation and
involvement in regulatory processes. As stud-
ies critical of technological determinism sug-
gest, technology is a product of its ‘social
shaping’, a process dynamically determined
by technicians, developers, corporations,
inter-governmental organizations, national
legislators, lobby groups, users, and con-
sumers, interacting within specific socio-
economic, legal-administrative, cultural and
political environments. Some actors appear
to have more influence than others. The
question now is whether NICT will be
shaped more by corporate interests or by
actors in civil society in the North and in the
South?
The power of consumers operates accord-
ing to the binary code of buying or not
buying. The power of users rests on the cre-
ative use of a given technology. NGOs, such
as the San Francisco-based, globally active
Association for Progressive Communication
(APC) or the Mexican LaNeta, boosted
the use of computer-mediated communica-
tion among grassroots actors through the pro-
vision of network access and technical
expertise. The Internet-savvy transnational
supporters of the Zapatistas pioneered
global cyber-activism, disseminating alterna-
tive information, linking activists, and mobi-
lizing campaigns around the world. Yet, these
types of activities might not impact those
other aspects of the shaping processes that
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302 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
take place in closed-door negotiations.
Without doubt, it is important to set up prac-
tical projects that provide marginalized com-
munities with NICT access, but it seems that
the resources of NGOs, especially in the
global South, are far too limited to fundamen-
tally alter deep inequalities. Perhaps most
crucially lacking are actors in civil society
who diffuse critical knowledge about the
stakes of legal regulatory issues, conceive of
democratic alternatives, and mobilize to exert
pressure on governments to use national
policy leverage and push for more equitable
international treaties.
The dangers of digital marginalization and
socio-technological misdevelopments are
acute. Similar to the extent to which decisions
during the early periods of the establishment
of a new medium tended in the past to have a
fundamental impact on its subsequent trajec-
tory, today’s social decisions about NICT are
setting the tracks for future developments that
might be even more difficult to adjust at later
stages. The mode according to which NICTs
are being regulated has a decisive impact
upon the distribution of access chances, the
distribution of access quality and the opportu-
nities for effective usage. The technological
pre-conditions of social communication are
too important for the actors of civil society to
leave the arena to others.
The rapid pace of NICT development and
its social shaping presents social research
with urgent challenges. More research on the
emerging new global mediascapes is needed
to enable relevant actors to identify shape-
able policy aspects and make better choices.
Research about the roles of conflict, compe-
tition, and cooperation as analytically dis-
tinct modes of the structured interplay that
shapes NICT can help in modeling digital
futures which are more desirable than the
alternatives pointed to by current trends.
NOTES
1 Strictly speaking a host computer is not the
same as a server. A server is a computer program
that waits to be contacted by a client program and
then exchanges information with the client, while a
host is a computer on which one or more servers are
running. Yet, pars pro toto, host computers on
which the server software of a local computer net-
work runs are often referred to in short-hand as
servers.
2 From the viewpoint of Microsoft Corporation,
the market for operating systems is characterized
by competition. Anyone could just write a new
code for an operating system and compete with
Microsoft’s Windows. The US Justice Department
under Clinton and Judge Jackson, who oversaw
the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Microsoft,
saw it differently. In their view, Microsoft had
assumed a dominating position in the market for
operating systems and abused their market power
to prevent smaller players from even entering into
competition over other software applications by
keeping crucial parts of the operating system code
secret and by bundling its platform with other
applications.
3 Napster, once the most famous P2P network,
was shut down in July 2001 after an injunction by
the United States Ninth Circuit Court and went into
bankruptcy during the following year. In October
2003, Napster was re-launched as a commercial
online music provider, then competing with Apple’s
iTunes store, which was opened six months earlier.
After Napster’s decline, KaZaA rose in popularity. It
was seen then as less vulnerable than Napster
because it had no centralized server. Yet in
September 2005 an Australian court ordered KaZaA
to install filters that would prevent the exchange of
copyrighted materials. While KaZaA has lost in pop-
ularity to P2P rivals such as BitTorrent, eDonkey, and
Gnutella, it seems likely that any P2P networks will
be pursued in similar ways as Napster and KaZaA
once they have grown to a size significant to com-
mercial interests.
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Sociological Theory, Social
Change, and Crime in Rural
Communities
Joseph F. Donnermeyer, Pat Jobes and Elaine Barclay
INTRODUCTION
This chapter presents ‘community’ as a key
concept from which to develop a compara-
tive approach to the examination of crime
among rural people and rural communities.
Community is treated as a sociological
framework that can relate individual behav-
iour, underlying economic and social struc-
tural characteristics, social meanings and the
various demographic and ecological dimen-
sions of social phenomena that are relevant to
the examination of crime in the rural context
(Liepins, 2000). A community approach rec-
ognizes the unique characteristics of rural
social structure and rural cultures, but avoids
a single template for rural settings, recogniz-
ing instead that specific rural places are each
affected by historical, cultural, social, eco-
nomic and geographical components.
We emphasize rural for three reasons.
Conceptually, rural communities across the
globe share sufficient similarities to be con-
sidered a common phenomenon despite
enormous cross-national and cross-cultural
differences. Scientifically, rural community
characteristics and their relationship to crime
21
have remained relatively unstudied in the
field of criminology, despite their global recon-
figuration. Finally, crime in the rural context
suffers from two mutually reinforcing myths.
The first is that rural crime rates are always
much lower than urban rates when comparing
data from similar kinds of social units, such as
state/provincial or county/county-equivalent
level areas. Hence, stating the myth, rural
crime research is neither necessary nor impor-
tant to the scientific advance of criminology.
The second is that rural places display less het-
erogeneity than urban places. Therefore, since
rural communities are mostly alike and the
data says urban rates are generally higher, by
extrapolation, all rural places display lower
crime and exhibit less interesting criminologi-
cal phenomena to study (Donnermeyer and
Jobes, 2000).
THE EVOLUTION OF RURAL CRIME
SCHOLARSHIP
Tönnies (1957) utilized his now famous
Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft dichotomy to
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306 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
examine the relationship of human will to
criminological behaviour (Deflem, 1999). He
claimed that essential will, associated with a
Gemeinschaft-like form of social organiza-
tion, was related to murder and other forms
of violent behaviour (as well as perjury and
arson); while arbitrary will, which is con-
nected with a Gesellschaft form of social
organization, explains more rationally
planned types of crime, such as theft, con and
fraud and robbery (Deflem, 1999). From
Tönnies’ point of view, the dichotomy is
trans-historical, that is, communities were
made up of a mix of both types of will.
Unfortunately, Tönnies’ dichotomy was
misinterpreted to some extent, so that by the
time the Chicago School of sociology was
beginning its empirical studies of crime, the
focus was squarely on the heterogeneity and
other so-called Gesellschaft features of urban
neighbourhoods (Deflem, 1999). Even
though the Chicago School developed at a
time that was not too far from America’s
frontier days of violence and lawlessness, the
myths about rurality and lack of crime had
formed. Studies of crime within the urban
milieu already had cornered the intellectual
market in criminology.
Adding to the situation was a very com-
prehensive review of scholarship about rural
society, including rural-urban comparisons
of official crime rates from the USA and sev-
eral other European countries by Sorokin
et al. (1931). They concluded that ‘the
number of crimes or offences is greater in the
cities than in the country’, that ‘cities pro-
duce a proportionately greater number of
offenders than does the country’, and ‘in gen-
eral the agricultural population is one of the
least criminal of all occupational classes’
(Sorokin et al., 1931: 266–67).
Throughout the first 80 years of the twen-
tieth century, rural crime research was
largely ignored, except to be juxtaposed to
the conditions that cause crime and were
falsely assumed to exist only within urban
places. Some exceptions did exist. Smith
(1933) wrote a comprehensive account of
rural crime in the USA, but apparently it did
little to change the headstrong urban bias of
criminology. Vold (1941) was careful to point
out that homicide rates in the rural portions
of some states exceeded those in the major
cities of other states. Clinard’s (1942, 1944)
work on rural criminal offenders highlighted
both similarities and differences from urban
offenders, as did Gibbons’ (1972) study
of criminals in rural Oregon over 30 years
later. Dinitz (1973) conducted victimization
research in a small Ohio town, representing
one of the first attempts to use a crime survey
in a rural locality. Furthermore, studies of
juvenile delinquency in rural places by Lentz
(1956), Feldhusen et al. (1965) and Polk
(1969) were early exceptions to the urban
dominance of criminology.
The situation began to change signifi-
cantly in the late 1970s and since then, rural
crime scholarship has slowly but inexorably
increased. Some criminologists focused on
the so-called ‘culture of violence’ found in
the southern region of the USA (O’Connor
and Lizotte, 1978) and explored further
issues of homicide in non-metropolitan
counties (Bankston and Allen, 1980). Fischer
(1980), utilizing classic Chicago School of
criminology themes about urbanism (Wirth,
1938), examined the spread or diffusion of
violence from urban to rural places. Smith
and Huff (1982) studied the perceptions of
crime and victimization among residents in a
rural county of northwestern Indiana.
Wilkinson (1984a, 1984b) and his associates
(Wilkinson et al., 1982, 1984) adopted a
more social disorganization-like approach to
the examination of rural violence, consider-
ing the possibility that poverty combined
with social and physical isolation disrupts
mechanisms of social control within places
with small populations.
One critical mass of research, this time
focused more on property offences, was con-
ducted by Phillips and associates (see book
of readings by Carter et al., 1982). Phillips’
work is important because it greatly influ-
enced the development, for the first time, of
a network of scholars who began to pursue
sub-topics within rural crime that reflected
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CRIME IN RURAL COMMUNITIES
many of the same themes found within crim-
inology proper. In other words, at this point,
researchers with rural interests began to talk
to one another.
One theme was agricultural crime, sum-
maries of which can be found in Barclay and
Donnermeyer (2002) and Donnermeyer and
Barclay (2005). Most of this research has
examined the relationship between physical
and layout features of agricultural operations
with the probable occurrence of various
types of theft, vandalism, trespassing and
other crime. These studies either directly or
unknowingly utilized what is known today as
situational crime prevention theory, that is, the
theory which argues for a relationship between
features of the immediate physical and social
environments that either facilitate or constrain
crime (Clarke, 1992; Tilley and Laycock,
1999). In turn, the roots of situational crime
prevention go back to Newman’s (1972) pio-
neering work on ‘defensible space’. In other
words, agricultural crime researchers adopted
a place-based criminology theory without the
Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft baggage.
A focus on the relationship of crime to
rural community economic and social struc-
ture and rural community change developed
as a second strand of research. Scholars in
this area used classical sociology themes
derived from Durkheim, Weber and a variety
of twentieth century theorists who continue
to inform the work of scholars of crime
today, including proponents of social disor-
ganization theory (Barnett and Mencken,
2002; Freudenburg and Jones, 1991; Jobes,
1999a; Kowalski and Duffield, 1990; Lee
et al., 2003; Osgood and Chambers, 2000;
Petee and Kowalski, 1993; Rephann, 1999;
Spano and Nagy, 2005; Wells and Weisheit,
2004). One variation on this theme has a long
tradition in mainstream criminology which
touches upon issues of rural crime, and
harkens back to Wirth’s (1938) article on
‘urbanism as a way of life’. It is the idea of
a relationship between crime levels and vari-
ous measures of ‘urbanism’ (i.e., anonymity,
segmented, less organized) which by implica-
tion defines ‘ruralness’ (cohesive, integrative,
307
more organized) (Ingram, 1993; Laub, 1983).
Although we argue that these characteriza-
tions get dangerously close to a misinterpre-
tation of Tönnies’ original dichotomy, they
nonetheless helped contribute to the advance
of rural crime studies.
The third theme concerns the victimiza-
tion experiences and attitudes of rural people
toward crime and criminal justice. These
studies have ranged from fear of crime
among ranchers and farmers (Saltiel et al.,
1992) to perceptions of incivilities (public
drunkenness, litter, graffiti and other forms
of so-called ‘broken windows’) in rural
Michigan (Reisig and Cancino, 2004).
Recent studies of note include the Bouley
and Wells (2001) study of perceptions among
residents of a southern rural county, Ball’s
(2001) examination of opinions about crime
and disorder in rural Maine, and Bachman’s
(1992) in-depth comparison of victimization
rates from the USA Department of Justice’s
National Crime Survey.
The next theme focuses more on criminal
justice issues, such as studies of rural
police and courts (Brock et al., 2001; Decker,
1979; Ellsworth and Weisheit, 1997; Feld,
1991; Golden, 1981; Kraska and Cubellis, 1997;
Maguire et al., 1991; Marenin and Copus,
1991; Myers and Talarico, 1986; Payne et al.,
2005; Weisheit et al., 2006). Many of these
studies explicitly compare policing styles,
outcome/recidivism of probationers and
court procedures and practices as exhibited
in rural and urban localities. The greatest dif-
ferences are found in policing styles and are
related to the discretionary behaviour of
police in relation to local community expec-
tations, values and expressions of social class
differentials (Weisheit et al., 2006). Not only
in all the other major themes, but especially
with regard to criminal justice issues, the
comprehensive summary of rural-related
scholarship by Weisheit et al. (2006) has
made a significant contribution to the
advance of rural criminology.
The study of domestic violence (also
known as intimate partner violence) is the
newest development within rural crime
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308 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
research, and the most critical in approach
among the five themes described thus far,
using various social constructivist approaches
to analyze people’s experiences as victims
and their experiences of the rural context in
which this form of violence occurs. Its find-
ings challenge the long-accepted notions in
criminology that social cohesion is related to
less crime (DeKeseredy and Joseph, 2006;
Gagne, 1992; Miller and Veltkamp, 1989;
Van Hightower and Gorton, 2002; Websdale,
1995, 1997). This literature turns concepts of
Gemeinschaft upside down with its findings
about the relationship of intimate partner vio-
lence and rural patriarchy. Further, the
research indicates that peer networks are
used by rural male abusers to exchange infor-
mation about ways to control their partners
through physical and psychological violence
(DeKeseredy and Joseph, 2006). Going all
the way back to the first theme, that is, agri-
cultural crime, Barclay et al. (2004) exam-
ined the ‘dark side of Gemeinschaft’ as it
affects the discretionary behaviour of police
in their response to reports of stock and other
kinds of theft by agriculturalists in New
South Wales. Again, the social cohesion of a
rural community can contribute to crime, not
constrain it.
The final rural crime theme is the exten-
sive body of literature that has developed
around the issue of illicit substance use by
various rural populations, including both
adolescents and adults. This literature is
much more multi-disciplinary in scope, and
include literally hundreds of studies utilizing
rural samples. Notable special compilations
of scholarship on rural substance use
include a book of collected chapters on sub-
stance use and violence in rural communities
(Blaser, 1994), a technical review by the
National Institute on Drug Abuse (Robertson
et al., 1997), plus special journal issues
edited by Edwards (1992) and Edwards and
Donnermeyer (2002).
Unfortunately, there are many gaps in the
rural literature, such as systematic research
on organized drug production in rural areas,
although Weisheit (1992, 1993) and Clayton
(1995) make valuable contributions to this
topic. However, more recent rural-related
issues, such as the diffusion of methamphet-
amine production, trafficking and use in
rural communities of many Midwestern USA
states is under-researched (Donnermeyer and
Tunnell, 2007). Issues related to environmen-
tal crimes are likewise ignored, and a great
many of these crimes occur in rural places,
but represent how globalization influences
the lives of rural people in all societies. In
addition, vandalism is a little studied rural
phenomenon, from the viewpoint of both the
victim and the offender, despite early work
by Phillips and associates (as summarized in
Donnermeyer and Phillips, 1984).
Aside from specific gaps in the literature,
there are two very important shortcomings in
the present state of rural criminology. One is
the USA-centric nature of the literature. To
date, nearly all of the scholarly work on rural
crime is limited to the USA, although the
Edwards and Donnermeyer (2002) volume
cited above was intentionally international in
its focus, and included empirical studies
from a variety of countries. Even it, however,
did not provide a comparative framework for
integrating the findings and observations of
each study. Fortunately, there is now a small
but growing body of international work, even
though this work is restricted mostly to
English-speaking countries. Notable advances
include contemporary work in: (1) Australia
(Barclay and Donnermeyer, 2002; Barclay
et al., 2007; Donnermeyer and Barclay, 2005;
Hogg and Carrington, 1998, 2003, 2006;
Jobes et al., 2004; Jobes et al., 2005); (2)
Canada (Wood and Griffiths, 1996); and (3)
Great Britain (Aust and Simmons, 2002;
Dingwall and Moody, 1999; Little et al., 2005).
Although rural populations and communi-
ties within these countries are large and
diverse, little rural crime research can be
found beyond their borders, where lan-
guages, cultures, economic conditions and
the pace of change can vary enormously. It is
possible that issues of crime in rural places of
these neglected areas may be far different, or
remarkably similar. Either outcome has
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CRIME IN RURAL COMMUNITIES
important implications for criminological
theory in general and certainly for the
advancement of a rural criminology.
Unfortunately, no one really knows. A few
studies from other nations have been pub-
lished recently, but they hardly fill the
tremendous need that exists, given the large
rural populations of so many of these coun-
tries and the rapidity of global-based change
(Erulkar, 2004; Fafchamps and Moser, 2003;
Jobes, 1999b; Koenig et al., 2003; Jain et al.,
2004; Krishnan, 2005; Panda and Agarwal,
2005). Furthermore, some aspects of rural
crime are trans-national in scope. Drug pro-
duction and trafficking is one example. The
other is human trafficking.
The second problem is that rural criminol-
ogy has yet to develop viable conceptual
frameworks that allow scholars to synthesize
current scholarship effectively and advance
theory and research beyond the borders of a
single country, especially the USA. The
remainder of this chapter proposes the begin-
ning steps of a solution to both problems.
COMMUNITY AND RURAL CRIME
C. Wright Mills (1959) stated a basic socio-
logical relationship between macro-level
change, which he called ‘public issues’, and
the situation of individuals at the micro-level,
which he termed ‘personal troubles’. Without
knowledge of the context of broad structural-
level conditions and change, little could be
understood about individual behaviours,
including criminality. It is context that
counts, and whether criminology research
utilizes quantitative or qualitative data, there
is a need for conceptual frameworks that
recognize the situated context of crime
(Kitsuse and Spector, 1973). Definitions of
crime are indicators of the norms, mores
and ideologies of groups who compete for
power and influence within various societies
(Greenberg, 1981).
Most definitions of community agree that
it is a geographical place in which networks
309
of actors communicate, solve problems and
conduct their daily lives (Liepins, 2000).
Hence, community forms the starting point
for the development of a comparative frame-
work in which to understand rural crime, and
to assist in the continued diffusion of rural
crime research to a diversity of settings.
There are three common features of rural
communities (and their populations) which
justify the need for a specialized sub-field
within criminology. Rural communities, by
definition, have smaller populations and
lower population densities. Patterns of daily
living are comparatively more limited than in
urban communities, and involve a greater
share of persistent personal face-to-face
interactions among people who know each
other. Finally, rural communities are today
rapidly losing their isolation and autonomy
to the forces of globalization. Compared to
the past, nearly all rural places around the
world are influenced to some extent, and
many to a great extent, by external cultural,
economic and social forces. Proximity to
cities, industries with absentee ownership,
tourism and development policies of nation-
states are just a few of the factors that influ-
ence the loss of autonomy of rural places
today. In turn, these factors must be accounted
for in conceptual frameworks designed to
improve the theoretical sophistication of
rural crime research. Issues interrelated with
crime, such as power, dominance, gender and
discrimination, further exacerbate external
processes shaping the dynamics and the
attributes within and between rural commu-
nities throughout the world.
Despite commonalities, as well as the
diversity, of rural places, why use the concept
of community as a starting point for the
advance of theory in rural criminology? The
answer lies in the central roles of community
in the formation of behaviour and attitudes
(Oetting et al., 1988). As already mentioned,
community is a concept capable of linking
‘personal troubles’ and ‘public issues’. The
structural level study of crime, much
of which emerged from the Chicago School
of sociology and continues in the work of
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310 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
Sampson and associates, helps make this
connection (Bursik, 1999; Saegert and
Winkel, 2004; Sampson and Groves, 1989;
Sampson et al., 1997). The reason is that
community is both geography and sociology;
hence, a community’s social ecology, includ-
ing the time and space dimensions of crime,
are simultaneously reflective of local condi-
tions and of the wider society in which a
place is situated (Liepins, 2000). Rural com-
munities may shield residents from global
forces that disrupt local social cohesion and
promote criminal and deviant behaviour, or,
they may allow these forces to facilitate the
local expression of crime.
Also, communities, both large and small,
are networks of individuals and organizations
who both compete and cooperate for eco-
nomic, social, political and cultural power.
These local processes of competition and
cooperation are emblematic of similar
processes at the national and international
levels. Although their local expressions are
greatly influenced by local context, they also
are linked to extra-community dynamics.
Third, rural (as well as urban) people
experience the forces of globalization and its
impact on their society and culture through
the places where they live. For example, con-
sider the concept of vicarious victimization.
Cable television reports news on murders and
other violent crimes at places distant from
the viewer’s home and neighbourhood, yet,
exposure to crime stories in the media can
increase one’s sense of vulnerability to crime
and influence one’s behaviour, such as walk-
ing on a country road or attending nearby
public events (Gibson et al., 2002).
A fourth feature of communities of all
sizes is that they provide the specific context
in which people express their opinions and
behaviours. In relation to crime, how mem-
bers of rural communities anywhere in the
world define what a crime is and whether or
not they feel safe, is based on the local con-
text. Furthermore, criminal behaviour itself
is influenced by locality, through family,
neighbours, friendship cliques and a host of
other social groups and local conditions.
All communities perform a normative func-
tion whereby different communities exhibit
varying degrees of tolerance/intolerance for
certain criminal and deviant behaviours.
Finally, all places exercise socialization and
social control functions (Oetting et al.,
1998). Attitudes and behaviours of individu-
als are transmitted, mostly through such
primary groups as family and peer groups,
and through formal agencies, such as school
systems, police and courts.
SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION: THE
FIRST STEP TOWARD A SOLID
THEORETICAL GROUNDING
The most frequently employed place-based
theory in criminology is ‘social disorganiza-
tion’ theory, which emerged from research of
crime in urban neighbourhoods by sociolo-
gists of the Chicago School (Tittle, 2000).
There are obvious but significant reasons for
this, although it can be argued that ‘disor-
ganization’ is not the correct label for what
the theory really says, and the idea of disor-
ganization does not reflect the reality of how
crime emerges, increases and declines
within the varying contexts of different sized
places.
One reason for the popularity of social dis-
organization theory is its emphasis on the
ecology of crime (Bursik, 1999). Simply put,
crime varies geographically by conditions
exhibited within different kinds of localities.
As Tittle (2000) points out, earlier versions
of social disorganization theory emphasized
differences between cities, and part of this
focus was on the relationship between urban-
ism and crime. City level comparisons are
problematic because of their internal hetero-
geneity and for a while, social disorganiza-
tion theory fell out of favour. However, once
the focus was re-set to examine differences
within specific areas or neighbourhoods of
cities, and by extension, smaller places as well,
the theory once again became popular. Hence,
the latter-day version of social disorganization
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CRIME IN RURAL COMMUNITIES
could ignore processes of change because
there were so many other possible ways of
empirically analyzing information about
neighbourhoods cross-sectionally, that the
theory could be rigorously tested without
regard to co-variation or time. Time was the
second prime dimension of original concep-
tualizations of human ecology, and was
always problematic for sociologists who lean
toward quantitative analysis. Now changes in
levels of social disorganization across time at
the same place could be ignored and the
empirical enterprise of theory testing from
cross-sectional data of many places could
continue unabated. As well, variations
between different kinds of neighbourhoods
or places could be argued as indirectly exam-
ining social change, or at least, having impli-
cations for social change. Remarkably, one
of the only exceptions to the application of a
static view was by rural sociologists who had
become interested in the possibility of chang-
ing crime rates due to the boomtown phenom-
ena of the 1980s in western energy towns
(Freudenburg and Jones, 1991; Krannich et al.,
1985, 1989; Wilkinson et al., 1982, 1984).
Second, many of the conditions said to be
indicative of relative levels of social disor-
ganization can be measured, and statistical
tests of relationships with various crime phe-
nomena can be conducted. These conditions
include demographic/population composi-
tion, such as population heterogeneity and
population turnover or transience; economic
conditions, such as poverty rates and income
inequality; family indicators, such as propor-
tions of single parent families and divorce
rates; and social structural/human capital
characteristics, including frequency of inter-
acting with neighbours (Bursik, 1999;
Sampson et al., 1997). Third, different kinds
of criminological phenomena can be tested
utilizing a social disorganization framework.
Not only official police statistics concerning
crime, but arrest data, calls for service, per-
ceptions of crime and fear of crime, among
others (Tittle, 2000).
We contend that social disorganization
theory provides a first step toward the solid
311
theoretical grounding of rural crime research,
and leads down a path toward the development
of more advanced conceptual frameworks
which have yet to be created. Ultimately, the
goal, as is the mission of all science, is to
advance scholarship to the stage that social
disorganization theory is considered obso-
lete, with due recognition given to its histor-
ical importance.
The adoption of social disorganization
theory as a first step in synthesizing rural
crime research may impress the reader
as ironic, given the history of its urban
bias and the simplistic interpretation of Tönnies’
Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft dichotomy. How-
ever, we also contend that a proper interpre-
tation of social disorganization is able to
account for place-based variations without
engaging in a form of the ecological fallacy
that makes blanket assumptions about crime
in all rural places.
The social organization of communities of
any size has three specific sources. First,
informal relations among primary groups,
such as neighbours, friendship cliques, and
extended family determine much of the vari-
ation in a place’s density of acquaintanceship
(Freudenburg, 1986), hence, also control the
behaviour of members. Second, participation
in these primary groups overlaps, creating
webs of reciprocity that can be seen through
the demographic composition, social class
(or caste, depending on the place of refer-
ence) characteristics and the cultural expec-
tations expressed within the context of
specific places. Finally, social organization is
variably reinforced by external links, that is,
forms of social capital utilized by various
actors within specific groups at specific
places.
We begin our journey by discarding the tra-
ditional functionalist assumption that a condi-
tion of so-called ‘disorganization’ is
abnormal. It simply makes no sociological
sense to start with an image that places of any
size are normal only when they are organized
and cohesive. We could argue that it makes
better sociological sense to assume that rural
places are continuously changing due to
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312 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
influences which are commonly identified as
sources of disorganization, such as popula-
tion change and population turnover. Hence,
that is the normal state of things. In addition,
we start anew with the notion that at every
place, representations of both crime and law-
abiding behaviour are the products of varying
forms of organization (Barclay et al., 2004).
COMMUNITY CHARACTERISTICS AND
RURAL CRIME
As mentioned, it was long assumed that rural
communities had less crime because their
social structures were more homogeneous,
cohesive and integrated than those in urban
places; that is, rural places manifested less
social disorganization. Recent research has
shown that rural communities are not crime
free. Rural rates may be higher in particular
types of rural places and for specific kinds of
crime than urban rates (DeKeseredy and
Joseph, 2006; Jobes et al., 2004; Weisheit
and Donnermeyer, 2000), as Vold (1941)
tried to make plain to an earlier generation of
criminology scholars. Simply put, rurality
does not imply the sociological equivalent of
immunity from crime.
At this point, it appears that social and cul-
tural factors may be more important in the
explanation of crime variations in rural com-
munities than in urban areas, where eco-
nomic conditions show greater weight (Jobes
et al., 2004, 2005; Osgood and Chambers,
2000; Wells and Weisheit, 2004). For exam-
ple, in a study of local government areas
(LGAs) of rural New South Wales (LGAs are
equivalent, to some degree, to counties in the
USA), Jobes et al. (2004) found that various
economic indicators did not statistically
explain variations in crime rates. Their
regression analyses of official crime rates for
assault, breaking and entering, motor vehicle
theft and malicious property offences (i.e.,
vandalism) found statistically significant rela-
tionships only for certain demographic and
social characteristics, including population
mobility, population growth, proportion of
single-parent households, home ownership and
race heterogeneity of the local population.
However, of greater import was their clus-
ter analysis (Jobes et al., 2004). First, they
found that their set of 123 rural LGAs could
cluster statistically into six types or profiles,
which could be arrayed on a continuum by
population size. Second, they discovered that
population size and rates of crime showed
some relationship, but two clusters or types
of rural LGAs exhibited noticeably higher
crime rates, and the distinctiveness of both
clusters suggests that something other than
urbanism (or conversely, rurality) was at
work. One was the cluster of LGAs with the
largest average population, that is, rural
LGAs which were service centres to their
surrounding hinterland (cluster 1– ‘Urban
Centres’). This cluster showed above average
educational levels and income, but below
average levels of married couples and higher
proportions of indigenous people and of
immigrants, that is, people born overseas.
The other cluster (cluster 5 – ‘Medium
Declining Communities’) was the second
smallest in average population size, but
showed a different set of characteristics,
including net out-migration, below average
educational levels, low income, a higher than
average proportion of indigenous people, but
only a small percentage of the population
was born in another country and immigrated
from overseas. The social structure or organ-
ization of the first cluster was distinctive
based on population or demographic charac-
teristics. The fifth cluster was unique for
what today would be called social capital
(Recker, 2005). In comparison to the other
clusters, the first showed the highest or
second highest rates of crime for motor vehi-
cle theft, malicious damage and burglary. The
fifth cluster exhibited the highest rates
between all six clusters for assault and burglary.
Third, each of the four crime types varied
across the six clusters of communities in
somewhat different ways. In other words,
different kinds of rural places demonstrated
different crime profiles. Furthermore, rural
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CRIME IN RURAL COMMUNITIES
places which fell into the same clusters
showed similar crime profiles.
Wells and Weisheit (2004) conducted a
similar county-level analysis in the USA, but
included both non-metropolitan and metro-
politan counties, and official crime rate data
(i.e., Uniform Crime Reports of the FBI).
Their results were similar to those of Jobes
et al. (2004). Economic variables were
inversely related to both property and violent
crime rates in metropolitan counties, but had
only weak effects for the non-metropolitan
counties. They concluded that the mix of
similar and dissimilar results when compar-
ing metropolitan and non-metropolitan
county crime rates with various social and
economic indicators suggests ‘using more
than one causal model to explain crime in
both settings’ (Wells and Weisheit, 2004: 17).
Osgood and Chambers (2000) examined
rural youth violence within non-metropolitan
counties of four USA states of the South and
Midwest. Like the findings of Jobes et al.,
(2004), their results demonstrated a non-
linear relationship between the population
size of non-metropolitan counties and violent
crime arrest rates among juveniles. They con-
cluded that ‘per capita rates of juvenile arrest
for violent crimes are significantly and
consistently associated with residential insta-
bility, family disruption, and ethnic hetero-
geneity’ (Osgood and Chambers, 2000: 106).
Further, family was a ‘critical element’, that
is, areas where adults were ‘actively engaged
in parental roles ... bring formal and informal
controls to bear on the behaviour of children
throughout the community’ (Osgood and
Chambers, 2000: 106). Moreover, poverty
and delinquency did not exhibit the same
kind of relationship as urban-based social
disorganization theory would have predicted.
Osgood and Chambers (2000) suggest that
this is because the ethnic homogeneity of
rural places in their study correlated with
poverty and residential instability, whereas
many urban places would find ethnic hetero-
geneity related to both. In other words,
Osgood and Chambers’ (2000) results from
the USA echo the cluster analysis of rural
313
LGAs in New South Wales (Jobes et al.,
2004), especially for the more rural cluster,
the fifth cluster, which had a declining
population.
The research reviewed above, and other
work focused on rural crime that implicitly
or explicitly adopts a social disorganization
framework or logic, have identified five
primary sets of factors that combine to create
particular types of rural communities with
specific profiles of crimes.
Proximity
By their nature, rural places have smaller
populations and lower population densities.
Wilkinson (1984b) was among the first
authors to suggest that rural communities
exhibit considerable variability in rates of
crime because of their smaller populations.
By itself, size is meaningless, but small size
interacting with other factors creates unique
contexts in which both law-abiding and crim-
inal behaviours, as defined by the norms and
laws of a society, are expressed. Rural com-
munities proximate to large, urban centres,
and rural communities that experience rapid
economic and population change (both
growth and decline) are examples of places
in which crime can increase rapidly. The spe-
cific sources can include the relocation of
factories, military bases, energy develop-
ment, tourism and other forms of economic
gain and loss (Freudenburg and Jones, 1991;
Wilkinson, 1984a). Further, many of these
economic activities exploit rural people
through directives emanating from urban-
located headquarters.
Poverty
Rural communities that manifest higher than
average rates of poverty also possess fewer
resources to support institutions, such as
schools, which promote pro-social behaviour
(Oetting et al., 1998). In some situations,
poverty may act as a protective factor against
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314 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
the development of crime if it serves to
reinforce cohesion among the members of
a small, remote community where class
differences are minimal because the commu-
nity itself is both economically and politi-
cally marginalized. More typically, however,
poverty is an indicator of social class divi-
sions that are local expressions of country-
level and international economic structures
(Greenberg, 1981). With economic inequal-
ity come social and political inequality, cre-
ating rural-located social structures with
sub-groups manifesting divergent values,
norms and group loyalties.
Persistent and deep poverty creates a differ-
ent situation than inequality. Some members
living in these places can begin to develop
alternative means of sustenance (often
referred to as ‘informal economic activities’),
some of which may include involvement in
illegal activities, especially drug production
(O’Dea et al., 1997; Rojas, 2002; Weisheit,
1992). Moreover, notions of male masculinity
and rural patriarchy are most evident in high
poverty rural localities, which in turn, are
associated with various forms of domestic
violence (DeKeseredy et al., 2006).
Residential mobility
Rural communities dependent on extractive
industries may experience ‘boom and bust’
cycles, accompanied by transient populations
and higher rates of crime (Freudenburg and
Jones, 1991). The introduction of tourism or
of a new industry to exploit cheap rural
labour can change a rural locality’s crime
profile. Regardless of the source, high rates
of in- and out- migration can lead to rural
social structures with high rates of crime.
Probably one reason why Tönnies’ (1957)
Gemeinschaft remains such a popular word,
and one frequently associated with idealized
forms of rural living, is that it evokes the
image of a place where people know each
other and generally engage in cooperative
relationships. High rates of population
mobility reflect the opposite, that is, social
structures in localities with transitory popu-
lations and much less cohesion, and these
conditions, in the absence of other mitigating
forces, frequently display high rates of crime.
Race and ethnicity
Differences in customs and a lack of shared
experiences lead to fragmented social struc-
tures that may breed fear and distrust
(Sampson and Groves, 1989), especially
when combined with poverty and other
economic features that exacerbate these
divisions. Jobes et al. (2005) illustrate these
dynamics in their study of two rural
Australian communities with significant pro-
portions of indigenous people. In the first
locality with high crime, there was a fair
degree of race-based distrust and division in
the community. In the second locality, there
were less divisive relations, even though
residential segregation was a fact of life. In
the latter, crime was much lower.
Family
Family and extended family are a primary
source of socialization (Oetting et al., 1998).
Sampson (1986) argues that single parents
are often too strained for time and money to
supervise their children effectively and to
interact with other adults. Alternative struc-
tures for socialization, such as gangs or
delinquent cliques can develop. On the flip
side, family can be a primary source for cre-
ating the context, including the modelling of
values and behaviours, for such offences as
spouse, child and elder abuse, and for
involvement in other forms of violence, such
as assault and bullying.
SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION
The foregoing discussion draws heavily from
literature within a few English-speaking
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CRIME IN RURAL COMMUNITIES
countries. The five dimensions that define the
organization of a community partially com-
pose and influence rural communities of
other countries as well, though the dynamics
with which they operate may vary dramati-
cally. The problem is that there is not enough
research to know for sure.
Crime in rural places displays high variabil-
ity. Some communities are stable, with little
in- or out- migration and neighbours who
know each other well. In these communities,
crime levels are generally low (Jobes et al.,
2004), although some studies suggest that it is
merely the case that crime in stable rural and
agricultural communities is simply less invisi-
ble (Barclay et al., 2004; DeKeseredy and
Joseph, 2006). When two or three of the
factors are in rapid flux or are sources of
considerable strain, levels of crime increase
markedly, not because of social disorganiza-
tion per se, but because forms of social organ-
ization conducive to crime are created.
Further, one factor unique to all rural commu-
nities is their small size, which can make them
more vulnerable to the development of new
forms of social structures in a shorter period of
time. We also argue that stability should not
imply lack of crime, as endemic crime can
occur because informal local patterns of
unethical, immoral and illegal behaviours,
such as domestic violence, are perpetuated.
There is increasing recognition that rural
crime is a social phenomenon that merits
international sociological analysis. There is a
need for concepts that promote cross-
national and cross-cultural analyses. A theo-
retically grounded approach to rural crime
will facilitate innovative and fertile discourse
amongst scholars, whether their approach is
qualitative or quantitative. An established
and persistent concept in sociology, ‘commu-
nity’, is at the core of key theories of crimi-
nology, including social disorganization
theory. Community structure is applicable to
comparative analyses across the full spec-
trum of social structures from traditional to
post-modern. Equally important, community
structure is a crucial causal force behind
crime in both rural and urban areas.
315
Gradually, rural crime is being recognized
as a significant set of phenomena for empiri-
cal research and the application of crimino-
logical theory. The volume of studies focused
on crime in the rural context that now
appears in journals and in presentations at
professional society meetings where crimi-
nologists congregate, is already at a notice-
able level and continuing to grow each year.
This presents many valuable opportunities
for the advancement of scholarship for rural
criminology and for the general field of crim-
inology.
Focusing on rural-related crime in this
new century requires dual acknowledgement
of local context and global influences, hence
extending Mills’ (1959) original idea. Simply
put, the extension incorporates community as
the key to a specification of local context,
whether this specification is operationalized
quantitatively or qualitatively. Ultimately, a
comprehensive theory of rural crime must
account for ways that broad national and
global-level influences affect the context of
daily living as defined by the kinds of com-
munity/neighbourhood level factors that
create distinctive forms of local social struc-
tures and their accompanying crime profiles.
What are the next steps? The first real
advance will be to discard the logic implied
in so much of the criminological literature,
including that focused on rural crime, that
disorganization (i.e., disruption, lack of sta-
bility, rapid change) and high levels of crime
are necessarily related and that organization
(i.e., stability, cohesion, and integration) is
related to low levels of crime. As we have
found, this is not easy. If readers of this arti-
cle go back to the beginning and carefully
examine each word, sentence and paragraph,
they will certainly find passages that appear
to correspond to what we now suggest is
obsolete. The important point, however, is
that rural crime researchers must begin to
identify forms of ‘social organization’ that
co-vary with different types of crime. This
is where the thinking about crime needs to
be turned upside-down, and crime
in the rural context is the ideal laboratory.
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Rural communities, by virtue of their smaller
size and population densities, and because
they are physically (and in other ways) dis-
crete places with a wide variety of demo-
graphic, economic, social and cultural
conditions, constitute ideal locations for test-
ing criminological theories. Further, new
frameworks must be developed that can take
account of social organization and crime in
the tens of thousands of rural places located
beyond the borders of a few English-speak-
ing countries. We conclude by suggesting
that these new developments can best be
effected by the study of crime in rural places,
with the urban bias of mainstream criminol-
ogy held in abeyance, appreciated for what it
is, but recognizing its limited potential for
extending intellectual boundaries.
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PART FOUR

Illustrative Case Studies

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Hunger and Plenty:
Fragmented Integration in
the Global Food System1
INTRODUCTION
Many sociologists of agriculture and food
argue for a systemic approach to examine the
complex social, economic and political rela-
tions involved in different stages of produc-
tion, distribution and consumption of food in
modern societies. The food system refers to a
web of social relations, processes, structures
and institutional arrangements that cover
human interaction with nature and with other
humans in their attempt to reproduce their
livelihoods (Fonte, 2002; Friedmann, 2000;
Koc and Dahlberg, 1999).
The existence of human societies has
depended on their collective ability to inter-
act with their environment, and to respond to
the social and ecological challenges they
faced (Diamond, 2005; Harris, 1978). The
survival of individual members and societies
required collective action. Anthropological
studies looking at the few remaining foraging
societies, leftovers of the pre-Neolithic
world, argue that cooperation and egalitarian
social relations were crucial for the survival
22
Mustafa Koc
of the earlier primitive communal societies.
In these societies, sharing was an essential
adaptive survival strategy. A simple division
of labour based on gender and age rather than
on social class distinctions, identified commu-
nally defined roles in everyday activities such
as hunting and gathering. Conflicts arising
from demographic pressures or inter-tribal
rivalry for hunting grounds were not infre-
quent, but their consequences were highly
detrimental to their social existence.
The agricultural revolution in the Neolithic
era made it possible to produce a surplus
beyond everyday needs. Agricultural activity
necessitated increased collective action and
complex social relations, thus creating a
potential for conflict in an increasingly
stratified society around gender and class
lines. In agrarian societies, access to basic
necessities of life, such as food, access to
means of production, distribution of surplus,
ownership rights, entitlement and rituals of
eating often reflected differences in the
social hierarchy. Conflict and cooperation
became two contradictory tendencies shaped
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by the need for collective action for survival
and differences in access to power.
THE MODERN FOOD SYSTEM
The modern food system has emerged and
evolved gradually in the last 500 years. The
basic tenets of this period are broadly shaped
by the general characteristics of the capitalist
accumulation process identified with private
ownership of means of production and gener-
alized commodity relations. The expansion
of commodity relations freed labour both
from feudal bondage and from access to and
control of means of production. In an
increasingly commodified economy, where
producers lost their traditional rights of
access to land and where all means of pro-
duction are privatized, labour itself became a
commodity. Day-to-day survival compelled
people to sell their labour power in return for
a wage by entering into contractual relations
with the owners of the means of production.
While driven by the coercive laws of com-
petition among individual enterprises, the
capitalist system simultaneously socialized
the labour process and division of labour by
emphasizing ‘working together’ and ‘co-
operation’ within the enterprise.
Competition among individual producers for
the maximization of profit required each
enterprise to find ways to increase the pro-
ductivity of labour by modernizing the social
division of labour (Marx, 1977: 437). As all
enterprises operated under these competi-
tive pressures, the anarchy of production
would necessarily lead to periodic crises of
overproduction and cause a decline in rates
of profit. This in turn created further pres-
sures for the spatial expansion of commodity
relations around the world. As Engels argued,
‘the contradiction between socialized pro-
duction and capitalistic appropriation …
present[ed] itself as an antagonism between
the organization of production in the individ-
ual workshop and the anarchy of production
in society generally’ (1975: 61).
Expanding on the tendencies of over-
accumulation and underconsumption, early
twentieth century, observers of the global
movements of capital, such as Hobson and
Lenin, argued that competition for profitable
markets led to tendencies towards concentra-
tion and centralization of capital, and to the
emergence of monopolies. The growing ten-
dency to export capital led to imperialist
expansion and colonialism. Rivalries for the
control of territories among imperial powers
and emerging nation states were responsible
for armed conflicts at the regional or the
world level (Hobson, 1938; Lenin, 1970).
FOOD REGIMES
The dynamics of accumulation, the agents of
expansion and the nature and patterns of
political conflict have presented significant
variations during different phases of the
global expansion of commodity relations
(Koc, 1994). Each of these stages, while
reflecting the general laws of motion of the
accumulation process, has been unique in
terms of the dynamics of production and
distribution, and the patterns of socio-
political arrangements and state regulations
(Aglietta, 1979; Koc, 1994; Lipietz, 1987;
Van der Pijl, 1984). From a ‘world system’
perspective, various observers (Friedmann
and McMichael, 1989; Le Heron, 1993;
McMichael, 1994) have identified food
regimes that correlate with dominant eco-
nomic trends, unique regulatory premises,
historical characteristics, national and inter-
national policy features. While domestic
political and social influences are responsible
for variations in the patterns of capitalist pen-
etration and resistance to it, the food regimes
concept allows us to see general economic
and political tendencies that have led to the
current corporate global food system. In the
following section we will examine patterns
of competition, conflict and cooperation
during the three food regimes in the twenti-
eth century.
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HUNGER AND PLENTY
The first food regime (Atkins and Bowler,
2003; Friedmann and McMichael, 1989;
Le Heron, 1993; McMichael, 1994) emerged
in the pre-World War I period under British
hegemony. It was based on global exchange
of manufactured goods from European states
for tropical goods from the colonies.
Complementary product exchange gave way
to competitive product trade according to
comparative economic advantage. In the col-
onized territories, land that was appropriated
from aboriginal peoples was granted to a new
class of settler farmers. Unlike peasant
economies of pre-capitalist societies that
were organized by the rules of subsistence
and reproduction, the family farm special-
ized in commodity production. As industrial
capital began to ‘appropriate’ parts of the
agricultural labour process, the same com-
petitive dynamics that emerged among indus-
trial enterprises also determined the relations
among the rural simple commodity produc-
ers. Cooperation among pioneers in early years
of settler farming weakened under commodity
pressures. On the other hand, in the newly
emerging nation-states new alliances formed
among wider social segments of the popula-
tion, bonded through nationalist ideologies.
Nationalism helped hegemonic social classes
to define boundaries of their home markets and
unify diverse segments of the society around a
new imaginary community.
The second food regime corresponded
roughly to the period following the World
War II until the mid-1970s, shaped by the US
hegemony and the Cold War competition.
Reflecting the overriding Fordist accumula-
tion tendencies during this era, the restructur-
ing of agricultural sectors by agro-food
capital aimed at mass production for mass
consumption (Baca, 2004). Three factors:
namely direct investment through transna-
tional corporations (TNCs), the development
of durable food and intensive meat commod-
ity complexes, and strong state protection for
agriculture – food and farm subsidies –
marked the general tendencies of the second
food regime. Food aid, commodification and
modernization policies, which were often
325
encouraged by the Western TNCs and inter-
national development agencies in the newly
emerging Third World colonial states,
destroyed local farm economies. They also
led to urbanization and reconstructed
urban diets fashioned according to Western
models. Emphasizing economies of scale,
efficiency, productivity and profitability, a
productionist paradigm prevailed throughout
the first and second food regimes. For exam-
ple, Green Revolution schemes introduced
during the second food regime were justified
as the crucial tools to respond to increasing
global population and hunger. Instead, the
destruction of rural peasant forms of produc-
tion led to rapid urbanization, increasing
poverty and more hunger while millions of
unemployed, or marginally employed, urban
residents became increasingly dependent on
foreign aid packages (Atkins and Bowler,
2003; Friedmann, 1987; Le Heron, 1993;
McMichael, 1998).
The crisis of the second food regime and
the general accumulation crisis of Fordism in
the mid-1970s gave way to the third food
regime. The collapse of Breton Woods, the
oil crisis, global economic recession and
Third World debt led to corporate and state
restructuring in the 1980s. Corporate response
to the crisis included measures, such as a
shift to new information technologies, decen-
tralization and privatization, emphasis on
increasing rationalization and efficiency;
deskilling, cheap labour, intensification of
the work process; global sourcing and
shrinking of time and space. Globalization of
industrial and agricultural production was
accompanied by an even more dramatic
globalization of the financial markets in this
era (Aglietta, 1982; Giddens, 2000; Hall and
Jacques, 1989; Harvey, 1982; Lipietz, 1987;
Thornton, 2004).
THE GLOBAL FOOD REGIME
The emerging global world order defined a
historical conjuncture in the restructuring of
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the capitalist state, state society relations and
a shift in the balance of power among differ-
ent social classes and groups (Araghi, 2003;
Barndt, 2002; Bonanno et al., 1994; Friedland,
2004; Koc, 1994; McMichael, 2005; Moreira,
2002, 2004; Pritchard, 2005; Tilzey, 2006). A
shift in international geopolitical alignments
after the end of the Cold War, the integration
of China into the global economy as a state
capitalist nation, and the emergence of the
EU as a new power bloc challenging the
hegemony of the US on the global economic
front, set the stage for a new international
order. Competition for agricultural exports,
the disruption of traditional trade patterns
with developing countries and the increasing
commercial power of agro-food corporations
created new tensions between national and
transnational capital. Trade disputes between
the North and the South at the international
trade talks of the World Trade Organization
(WTO), international disputes around institu-
tionalized food surpluses and the impacts of
farm subsidies, the formation of new regional
trade blocs such as the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and ‘the war on
terror’ defined some of the general character-
istics of this era.
The response to the crisis of Fordist accu-
mulation involved two potential courses.
First, a more expansionist global Fordism
(Lipietz, 1982) would spread the mass pro-
duction and consumption model to the semi-
periphery. Second, the intensification of the
process of accumulation in the capitalist
centre, with the use of new information tech-
nologies and automation, transgenics2 and
corporate reorganization encouraged over-
consumptionism among certain segments
of the population (Pianta, 1988). While the
first of these processes was only partially
achieved, the latter resulted in significant
transformation in the social organization of
labour, production and consumption patterns
in advanced industrial countries.
The social restructuring in the late twentieth
century was justified by the dominant neo-
liberal ideology. Offering a populist critique
of state interventionism, regulation and
costly social programmes, the neo-liberal ideol-
ogy that gained hegemony in the last two
decades of the twentieth century in the West
introduced a business-oriented vision of cor-
porate and state restructuring; it also legit-
imized the social consequences of these
changes. Under the neo-liberal regime, the
normal is identified as a decentralized and
deregulated liberal economy, where the local
state will create the services and infrastructure
for the private sector, community groups will
supply voluntary services to replace or reduce
welfare costs and the locality will be attached
to global networks through connections
offered by transnational corporations (TNCs)
(Bonanno, 2004; Burch and Goss, 1999).
This process paralleled an increase in mil-
itary spending in the US in the 1980s (often
called the ‘Star Wars’). With the end of the
Cold War in the 1990s, instead of fading
away, this military tendency emerged as a
‘military Fordist’ accumulation strategy
(Kaldor et al., 1988; Melman, 1985). Later it
was endorsed by neo-conservative unilateral-
ism, a derivative of the neo-liberalist ideology
emphasizing imperial hegemony through mili-
tary supremacy, regional wars, disenfranchis-
ing and exclusion (Durham, 2006; Kristol,
1995; Thornton, 2004).
The global food regime (McMichael,
2005) emerged in the era of neo-liberal
restructuring in response to the accumulation
crisis of Fordism in the last two decades
of the twentieth century. The corporate
food regime shows many of the general
tendencies of the previous food regimes –
albeit in an intensified way – and continues
to introduce, on the other, new ways food is
grown, sourced, processed, marketed, dis-
tributed and consumed.
The productionist paradigm (Lang and
Heasman, 2004) that emerged during the
industrial revolution has continued to shape
the Green Revolution and the genetic revolu-
tion, transforming the way food is grown
(Busch and Bain, 2004; Goodman and Watts,
1997; Kneen, 1999; Paul et al., 2003).
Mass use of agrochemicals, hybrid plants, fac-
tory farms, monocultures, intensive livestock
9781412934633-Chap-22 1/10/09 8:54 AM Page 327
HUNGER AND PLENTY
rearing and pharmaceuticals accompanied
structural and spatial changes in farming,
such as contract farming, increasing global-
ization of supply and the disappearance of
the notion of seasonality (Constance and
Bonanno, 1999; Ervin et al., 2003). In pro-
cessing, marketing and distribution, changes
included just-in-time sourcing, extrusion
technology, cosmetics and additives to dis-
guise products, development of niche prod-
ucts, decentralized forms of labour process
and work organization. The Fordist restructur-
ing of the food system emphasized branding,
product diversification, product placement
methods, advertisement, marketing for specific
consumer types, centralized ordering, the use of
information technology, flexible specialization
and reduction in stocks. It also led to the expan-
sion of food miles, by increasing the use of air
freight, heavy lorry networks and satellite
tracking (Pritchard and Burch, 2003).
FROM COMPETITION TO CORPORATE
CONCENTRATION
The most significant characteristic of this era
has been increasing corporate concentration
and control in this process, paralleled with
the declining role of nation-states. Supra-
national bodies and international treaties,
such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT), the WTO, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank
play an increasingly significant role in shap-
ing freedom for financial, commercial and
productive capital, while nation-states define
the boundaries of globally interlinked home
markets, and regulated/restricted movement
of labour.
Mostly through mergers and buy-outs, a
few companies control the largest segment of
the agri-food business. To see the extent and
speed of corporate concentration, we can
look at the US beef-packing industry. In the
mid-1970s, about 25% of the market was con-
trolled by four companies. By the mid-1990s
about 20 feedlots were handling half the
327
cattle in the US and these were directly con-
nected to the top four companies processing
81% of the beef (Hendrickson et al., 2001).
Similar trends were observed in Canada.
The concentration ratio of the top four com-
panies (CR4) reached in pork packing
76.2%, beef packing 73.2%, grain handling
64%, wheat flour milling 78.76% in
2003/2004. In retailing CR4 for 2004–2005
was 77.99%. In fertilizers CR4 varied from a
low of 81.3% in nitrogen to 100% in nitric
acid, ammonium nitrate, ammonium sulfate
and nitrogen solutions. From banking
(CR5 = 82.41) to transportation (CR2 in rail-
ways = 100) farmers faced oligopsonistic3
markets (Market Share Matrix Project, 2006).
These corporate concentration trends are
not unique to North America. In agrochemi-
cals, the top 10 global corporations control
84% of the $30 billion market. Thirty-two
grocery retailers account for 34% of the
global food retail market estimated at $2.8
trillion. In seeds, the world’s top 10 seed
companies have increased their control from
one-third to one-half of the global seed trade
between 2003 and 2005 (ETC Group, 2005).
One company (Monsanto, owned by
Pharmacia) accounted for 94% of the total
area sown to genetically modified crops in
2000 (Ervin et al., 2003; Heffernan and
Hendrickson, 2005; Lang and Heasman,
2004; RAFI, 2001).
As Hendrickson (2003) and others have
demonstrated, the ever-increasing levels
of horizontal integration through consolida-
tion since the mid-1970s allowed some
companies to control even wider sections of
the food system. As Table 22.1 demonstrates
three or four big corporations in the US
food system control anywhere between
63% and 83.5% of the market in some of the
Table 22.1 Level of concentration in the US
food processing sectors (2005 figures)
Sector Rate of concentration Companies
Beef packers 83.5% 4
Soybean crushing 71% 3
Pork packers 64% 4
Flour milling 63% 4
Source: Heffernan and Hendrickson, 2005.
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328 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

key agricultural commodities. New strategic by the market dynamics that continue to
alliances, mergers and takeovers, vertical and short-change them. Like hunger, the farm
horizontal integration strategies allow global crisis became a permanent feature of the
TNCs to control various segments of produc- modern food system (Qualman, 2001).
tion, marketing, service and financial func- In Canada, there has been a persistent
tions. Agro-food TNCs are often able to decline in real net farm income since the
combine productionist, commercial and mid-1980s. Between 1985 and 2004, real net
speculative strategies, and control wider farm income declined by an average of $104
segments of the markets (Moreira, 2002). million per year (according to the 1992 dollar
Vertical integration, on the other hand, by rate), although output prices slightly
connecting diverse segments of production, increased by about $90 million annually. In
processing and retailing, allow firms to own the same period, productivity gains were esti-
their upstream suppliers and downstream mated at $238 million. Increase in input
buyers, creating virtual monopolies. In this prices, however, chipped away about $422
scheme, farmers have nowhere to move million annually from farmers’ net farm
except out of the market. income, producing poverty in the midst of
plenty (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada,
2006). NFU figures indicated that the market
net income in the early 2000s fell even below
POVERTY AND PLENTY the Great Depression levels in Canada (see
Graph 22.1) (NFU, 2005; Qualman and
While proletarianization or marginalization Wiebe, 2002).
was inevitable for the rural dispossessed, sur- The tendency towards a concentration and
vival on land continued to be a challenge centralization of ownership in agriculture
even for those who continued to produce in that started in the post-World War II era, has
increasingly oligopolistic markets. While continued to decimate the farm population,
feeding the world, many farmers in the North and has resulted in increasing consolidation
as well as the South realized that their ability among Canadian farmers. Between 1971 and
to feed their own families was undermined 2001, for example, the average number of
Dollars per farm (adjusted to 2005 dollars)

$40,000

$30,000

$20,000

$10,000

$0 1985

−$10,000

−$20,000
1926
1931
1935
1941
1945
1951
1955
1961
1966
1971
1976
1981
1985
1991
1996
2001

Source: NFU, 2005.

Graph 22.1 Market net income in farming in Canada, 1926–2005.

9781412934633-Chap-22 1/10/09 8:54 AM Page 329
HUNGER AND PLENTY
dairy cows per farm more than tripled while
the average number of pigs per farm
increased more than ten times (Agriculture
and Agri-Food Canada, 2006: 66). Fewer
farms controlling larger operations, such as
mega farms and factory farms, dominate the
food scene (Buttel, 2003). They use large
amounts of agro-industrial inputs, fertilizers,
pesticides, herbicides, hormones and antibi-
otics in an attempt to maintain increasing
productivity in a market dominated by fewer
and fewer TNCs. Farming has become
increasingly separated from its populist roots
as a ‘way of life’ under pressures of com-
modification, intensification and globaliza-
tion. Yet, an increase in productivity only
ensures survival for some, at least for one
more season. Farmers rely increasingly on
extra-farm income, and many could not sur-
vive without costly government assistance
(Lobao and Meyer, 2001).
Identifying progress as growth-oriented
industrial models of production, technologi-
cal progress and commodification, agricul-
tural development policies often encourage
the tendencies that caused the problems.
The Green Revolution, which emphasized
mechanization, artificial irrigation, special-
ization, hybrid and genetically modified seed
technologies, has been promoted without
critical scrutiny of its long-term conse-
quences for rural ecology, soil, water and air
quality, deforestation, and loss of biodiver-
sity and gas emissions that are responsi-
ble for global warming (Wackernagel and
Rees, 1996).
The anarchy of production was inevitable
in a system that was organized around the
goal of maximization of profit for each enter-
prise rather than for societal needs. Unique
features of the commodity markets, includ-
ing the subsidies and other incentives offered
by governments, led to the build-up of sur-
pluses and created the crisis of overproduction.
This is cyclical in nature in capitalist
economies and a permanent feature of the agri-
food system. Hunger and surpluses continued
to grow together, and attempts to use surpluses
to alleviate hunger have only worsened the
329
situation as cheap food destroyed attempts
for local self-reliance.
Treating food as a commodity rather than
as an essential of life leads to externalizing
the health-related costs of hunger, malnutri-
tion and diet-related diseases. While the
modern food system has reduced some of the
stresses of the last century regarding food
safety and nutritional adequacy, new con-
cerns about the health impacts of diets have
emerged. Worldwatch Institute estimated that
while the world’s underfed population
declined slightly between 1980 and 2000 to
1.1 billion, the number of overweight people,
during the same period, surged to 1.1 billion.
The same report quoted the World Bank
figures to the effect that hunger cost India
between 3% and 9% of its GDP in 1996. At
the same time, obesity cost the United States
12% of its national health-care budget in the
late 1990s, around $118 billion, more than
twice the $47 billion attributable to smoking
(Gardner and Halweil, 2000). In Canada
the prevalence of obesity has increased dra-
matically since the 1980s. In 1978/79, the
age-adjusted adult obesity rate was 14%.
Twenty-five years later, this figure was 23%.
FRAGMENTED GLOBALISM,
MARGINALIZATION AND HUNGER
Since the 1980s, the impact of neo-liberal
restructuring has been to add to the ranks of
the poor and the marginalized on a global
scale. Whether living in the shantytowns of
Third World cities, or in the flooded slums of
New Orleans, the poor face similar condi-
tions of poverty, exclusion and marginaliza-
tion (Therborn, 2006; UNDP, 2005). In the
meanwhile, the income gap between the rich
and the poor has continued to grow. A
study released by the Helsinki-based World
Institute for Development Economics
Research of the United Nations University
(UNU-WIDER) reports that in the year 2000,
the richest 1% of adults in the world owned
40% of global wealth, the richest 2% owned
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330 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
more than half and the richest 10% accounted
for 85%. Meanwhile, the bottom half of the
world adult population owned barely 1% of
global wealth (Davies et al., 2006).
The global movement of capital in the
post-Cold War era has been a very selective
process, creating islands of integrated com-
munities and territories, while leaving many
others marginalized (Bauman, 1998; Conway
and Heynen, 2006; Ghosh and Guven, 2006;
Kennedy and Danks, 2001; Perrons, 2004).
The boundaries of development and under-
development, inclusion and exclusion are
no longer necessarily formed along the
north-south axis, but at the community level
(spatially as well as socially) all around the
globe (Amin, 2006; Frieden, 2006; Geyer,
2006). Conditions of membership in the
global economy, foreign aid, free trade
partnerships, preferential status by interna-
tional agencies and investment opportunities
are tied to membership status. Nations,
ethnic groups, regions and cities compete for
global membership status. Being the ‘other’
in this process has become an increasingly
heavy burden.
In 1996, at the World Food Summit (WFS)
in Rome, World leaders admitted that
approximately 800 million people around the
world did not have enough to feed them-
selves and their families (Koc and MacRae,
2001). A commitment was made to reduce
the number of hungry people by half by 2015
at the WFS, but this commitment was later
considered to be unattainable. At the follow-
up conference in Rome that met in June 2002,
the Food and Agricultural Organization of the
United Nations (FAO) changed its projection
to reduce hunger to 440 million by 2030, still
above the original 2015 target.
In the emerging new-world order in the
early twenty-first century, there appears to be
an abandonment of the commitment to co-
operation, universalism and developmental-
ism, key characteristics that made modernity
appealing to wider masses. The ‘empire’, as
Hardt and Negri (2000) attempt to describe
it, is not a republic built upon the ideals of
liberté, égalité, fraternité, but a project of
world domination, a ‘decentered and deterri-
torializing apparatus of rule’ (Hardt and
Negri, 2000: xii), a world market that
includes less than one-fifth of the world pop-
ulation, an exclusive club that defines mem-
bership as privilege.
Access to food is still regarded by many as
a privilege rather than as a basic human right,
and hunger and malnutrition prevail. Ill effects
of malnutrition hurt even larger numbers of
people, mainly children, women and the
elderly. Far from disappearing, hunger and
malnutrition are on the increase, even in
advanced industrialized countries like Canada
with a relatively effective social safety net
(Riches, 1997). The National Population
Health Survey (NPHS) released by Statistics
Canada indicates that about 15% of Canadians
were considered to be living in a ‘food-inse-
cure’ household at some point during 2000/01
(Statistics Canada, 2005). These figures show
a significant jump over the figures from the
previous survey which claimed that 10.2% of
Canadian population was food insecure. The
Canadian Association of Food Banks (CAFB,
2006) reported that 753,458 people used a
food bank in a typical month in 2006.
The United States Department of Agriculture
(USDA) reported that about 12.6 million
American families worried that they couldn’t
afford to buy food (Nord et al., 2006). People
living on low incomes, recipients of social
assistance, the elderly, single mothers,
children of lone parents and Aboriginal
people, as well as ethnic minorities face a
much higher risk of food insecurity than the
general population.
Many observers argue that food insecurity
has little to do with lack of food (Lappé and
Lappé, 2002). FAO (2002) sources indicate
that on a global scale 17% more calories are
produced per person today than three
decades ago, despite a 70% population
increase. This amount is estimated to offer an
average of 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per
person per day. In fact, a significant propor-
tion of agricultural produce is being used
as animal feed or industrial products such
as gasoline, biodiesel, lubricants and other
9781412934633-Chap-22 1/10/09 8:54 AM Page 331
HUNGER AND PLENTY
industrial products instead of food. In the
US, for example, it is estimated that 90% of
all soya beans, 80% of all corn and 70% of
all grain is used as animal feed (Schwartz,
1996: 30). The main issue is not availability
but accessibility of food to people. This has a
lot to do with low income, lack of access to
land and other means of production and
sustainable livelihoods for the increasingly
marginalized segments of the world popula-
tion. UN sources estimated that in 2000,
about 2.7 billion people struggled to make a
living with less than two dollars a day. While
there is some progress in poverty alleviation,
at least in some parts of the World, the oft-
cited figures of the human consequences of
global poverty are alarming.
While in most cases exclusion is handled
through the hidden hand of the market place,
in the Cold War era international sanctions
were increasingly used as a tool to put pres-
sure on uncooperative states to weaken their
military ability and political will (Brzoska,
2003; Colonomos, 2004; Cortright and Lopez,
2000; Davidsson, 2004; Drezner, 2003;
Gordon, 1999; Hawkins and Lloyd, 2003;
Marks, 1999; Messer and Cohen, 2001).
CONCLUDING REMARKS
The global food system is organized according
to principles of efficiency, productivity,
profitability and comparative advantage.
Misgivings about safety, fairness, local and
regional development and national security
are seen as socio-economic, and political sta-
bility concerns only indirectly relevant to the
conditions of accumulation. Reviewing the
characteristics of the modern global food
system, this chapter has argued that certain
chronic or periodic problems that are associ-
ated with the food system, such as the farm
crisis, hunger and malnutrition and obesity,
are not anomalies but are reproduced by
structures and institutions of the modern food
system. The intensification of commodity
relations in agriculture and in the food system,
331
and the concentration and centralization of
ownership have resulted in the destruction
of subsistence economies, peasant and
simple commodity production in agriculture.
This has in turn led to massive rural-urban
migration patterns, to increasing hunger and
poverty both in the countryside and in
the urban shantytowns. Despite its tremen-
dous transformative capacity, the modern
food system tends to pay more attention to
efficiency, productivity and profitability than
to equity, sustainability and health (Lang and
Heasman, 2004; Nestle, 2002).
Globalization of the agri-food system
offers potential for cooperation on a global
scale, reduced vulnerabilities to regional
food security crises and a broader selection
of food choices to those who can afford it.
Nevertheless, globalization also causes prob-
lems that threaten food security. The most
visible impacts of globalization include:
1 an increase in inequality, poverty, hunger
and poor health, as well as a loss of cultural
diversity;
2 increasing exploitation of the natural environ-
ment which is manifested in increasing pollution,
the degradation and loss of resources, and the
loss of biodiversity;
3 the steady loss of national and local sovereignty
to concentrations of economic and corporate
power, with a corresponding reduction of demo-
cratic power and social controls.
When the wide-ranging impact of global-
ization is considered, the so-called success of
the current food system – its great productive
capacity – is seen as its biggest liability for
long-term economic and ecological sustain-
ability. Its very structures lead to an under-
mining of local and traditional systems
which provide efficient and accessible pro-
duction and distribution. They also steadily
reduce future food options of the world’s
many societies and cultures – both through
the destruction of their cultural and biologi-
cal diversity and by making them dependent
upon big corporations that are motivated by
private gain and accountable only to their
shareholders.
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332 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
Recognizing the complexity and extent of
the problems within the food system is the
first step towards developing creative politi-
cal and practical solutions. Setting up a just
and sustainable food system resistance to
fragmented globalism must be boosted by
a search for local solutions and increasing
global cooperation.
NOTES
1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at
the Mid-term Research Council Conference of the
International Sociological Association (ISA),
University of Ottawa, May 29, 2004. I would like to
thank Ann Denis, Devorah Kalekin, Ellen Desjardins,
Suzanne Dietrich, Jennifer Welsh and the anonymous
reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
2 Transgenics is a term referring to the science of
intentionally introducing a foreign gene or genetic
construct into the genome of a target animal or
plant.
3 Oligopsony refers to a market situation in which
only a small number of buyers exist for a particular
product, resulting in imperfect competition.
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Social Movements in Brazil:
Characteristics and Research
INTRODUCTION
This chapter presents a brief panorama of
the social movements in Brazil in the last
decades of the twentieth century and at the
beginning of this millennium; and character-
izes the changes in the collective actions
and in the new forms of cooperation in civil
society in recent years, in urban and rural
areas. The chapter also presents the principal
authors in the literature about social move-
ments and the theoretical paradigms used by
the Brazilian researchers in their research
describing the setting for ‘associativism’1
during recent decades. Initially we point out
that we are using the concept social move-
ments as used by Alain Touraine in his analy-
ses. In that sense, social movements are
collective actions of civil society: where there
are collective actors making demands, there is
an opposition that constitutes a social adver-
sary, a conflict that impels the movement and
a project based on the subject of the demands.
The collective action develops a sense of iden-
tity among the participants (Touraine, 1978).
It is important to remember that in Brazil
and in many other Latin American countries,
23
Maria da Glória Gohn
at the end of the 1970s and during part of the
1980s, the popular social movements articu-
lated by groups opposed to the military
regime became famous. They were mainly
movements with a Christian base, inspired by
the Theology of Liberation. When we talk
about popular movements, we consider the
poor as the agents of the movements, and not
the common people or citizens participating
in grassroots movements, as in several other
countries, including the United States. At the
end of the 1980s and during the 1990s, the
social political panorama suffered a radical
change. Initially, street demonstrations,
which made popular movements visible in
the cities, decreased. Some analysts diag-
nosed a crisis within the movements because
they had lost their target and main enemy: the
military regime. In reality, there were many
causes for this demobilization. It is an
unquestionable fact that through their demands
and organized pressure, the social move-
ments of the 1970s and 1980s contributed
decisively to the recognition of several social
rights, which became law in the new
Brazilian Constitution of 1988. The appear-
ance of other forms of popular organizations,
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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN BRAZIL
more institutionalized, started in the 1990s.
Some examples are various forums like the
National Forum for the Struggle for Housing,
the National Forum for Urban Reform, the
National Forum for Popular Participation, the
Forum for São Paulo XXI, and so on. These
forums established the practice of large-scale
national meetings, generating diagnoses of
social problems, as well as defining goals and
strategic objectives in order to cope with
them.
Several partnership initiatives between
organized civil society and public power
emerged, impelled by the government policies,
such as the Participative Budget, the Minimum
Income, the school grants, administrative
counsels in social public areas and so on.
THE SETTING FOR SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS AND OTHER FORMS OF
‘ASSOCIATIVISM’ IN BRAZIL
It has become commonplace to hear that civil
society is consolidating itself as the driving
force behind innovations and change, even
on an international level. In Brazil, the notion
of civil society is undergoing reformulation,
following the trajectory of the country’s
political and social struggles. Generally
speaking, civil society first came into promi-
nence in the period known as the ‘transition
to democracy’, at the end of the 1970s, when
the term was introduced into the political
vocabulary then current and became the
object of theoretical elaboration. In political
terms, it became synonymous with the
participation and organization of the civil
population in the struggle against the military
regime. One of the main focal points of civil
society’s articulation at that time arose from
the notion of autonomy: it was a question of
getting organized independently of the state
(mostly by ignoring the state). Direct partici-
patory democracy carried out autonomously,
at home and at work, was held to be the ideal
model for building a counter-hegemony.
To participate in the practices of organizing
337
civil society was tantamount to an act of civil
disobedience and of resistance to the domi-
nant political regime.
During this period, new players appeared
on the public stage, giving special emphasis
to popular urban social movements, demand-
ing public goods and services, land and hous-
ing, as well as the new social movements that
fought for the recognition of social and
cultural rights: race, gender, sex, standard of
living, environment, safety, human rights and
so on. The common ground of these social
players was the demand for social rights and
justice. In the sphere of urban movements,
there was a great increase in the diversity of
the collective players taking part in the strug-
gle: they were not exclusively confined to the
trade unions or political parties. The popular
movements played an important role in the
construction of the Constitution of 1988. It
adopted several social rights that produced
juridical instruments of participation for civil
society, among them the participative coun-
cils and decentralization in the federal
sphere, for instance, which promoted the del-
egation of responsibilities to municipalities.
With the gradual opening of channels of
participation and political representation fol-
lowing the fall of the military regime, the
social movements (especially the popular
ones) have been losing the centrality that
permeated discourse on participation in civil
society. There began to be a fragmentation of
the ‘historical social subject’, who played
a relevant role in the social change and trans-
formation that focused on the popular sectors
and was the fruit of an alliance between the
trade union movements and the popular
neighbourhood movements (workers and res-
idents). A plurality of new actors appeared
as a result of new forms of ‘associativism’
on the political scene. This led to a broaden-
ing and diversification of organized groups:
the creation of new movements, associations,
institutions and NGOs. This trend has
created several social networks and config-
ured new patterns for the organization of cit-
izens in what is widely recognized as ‘civil
society’.
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338 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
Civil society is composed of old and new
actors, promoting collective actions, such as
putting pressure on the authorities, mobiliz-
ing people in the streets and acting with state
agents in the planning and administration of
public policies, like the above-cited councils.
The defence of the autonomy of civil soci-
ety is no longer a fundamental structuring
focal point for building a democratic society.
Old and new players now define the aims of
their struggles with and conquests over polit-
ical society, especially in the field of public
policy. The expansion of the number of
players of and in civil society was prominent
throughout the 1990s.
In the analyses and discourses of the leaders,
the decentralization of the popular subject and
the emergence of a plurality of new players
bestowed importance on new analytical cate-
gories such as social exclusion and citizen-
ship. The latter categories came to the fore in
the 1980s, but in the 1990s they took on
new meaning. Political leaders incorporated
ideas about civil participation, the exercise of
civility and the social responsibility of citi-
zens for their rights and duties into official
discourse.
In this scenario, civil society becomes
entwined with political society, making pos-
sible a new contradictory and fragmented
character of the State in the 1990s. A new
public space, a ‘public non-state’, developed
where advisory bodies, forums, networks and
links between civil society and representa-
tives of public power were introduced into
public administration to meet the highly
articulate social demands, treated now as part
of the country’s ‘Social Question’. The cate-
gory of social exclusion and the pursuit of
inclusion dominate the debate on social issues.
In this context, governments consider partici-
pation of civil society crucial to the democrati-
zation of public administration so as to change
the priorities of the administrations.
Nowadays, there are several programs of the
state with civil society that initiate policies
aimed at the regulation of conflicts in urban
areas. The state has ‘captured’ the subject of
collective conflicts, organizing many projects
and events and giving them economic support.
These actions are considered by the state as
partnership projects involving social move-
ments; but, in fact, the majority of these actions
are developed with NGOs and civil associa-
tions rather than with social movements.2 The
actions are promoted by the public administra-
tion. The poor now have specific public pro-
grams, such as the ‘bolsa família’ (family
allowance), that provide them with some finan-
cial support. These programs are introduced
because of high rates of unemployment and
dependence on government help.
Since the year 2000, social movements in
Brazil have reorganized themselves. They did
this by combining their initiatives with the
action of more institutionalized forms of organ-
ization (see Note 2). Examples are: the
Movement of Landless Workers (MST) and the
‘Forum Nacional Pela Reforma Agrária’
(National Forum for Land Reform). Other
examples are the cooperation of the African-
Descendants Movement, which has partici-
pated in the development of government
policies for the official demarcation of land
which was ‘possessed’ by their forefathers, and
the Indigenous Rights Movement, which has
worked together with the Indigenous National
Council. These forms of cooperation have
appeared in a new moment of the democratiza-
tion process in Brazil (and, more generally, in
Latin America as a whole), in which the strug-
gles of the social movements are resulting in the
social inclusion of historically excluded peo-
ples. This new scenario has attracted the atten-
tion of analysts and policy makers to the study
of social movements. In the next section we
will focus on the main theoretical approaches
that have been guiding these studies.
THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO
ANALYSES OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
IN BRAZIL
Authors and paradigms used as
references
Briefly we can say that in the studies about
social movements in Brazil, there are three
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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN BRAZIL
theoretical paradigms: the materialist, the
cultural and the institutional. The materialist
paradigm has been developed by Marxists in
Brazil and is based on the writings of Marx
and on the work of such authors as Gramsci,
Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson and Manuel
Castells (in his books of the 1970s). Most of
the popular social movements which arose in
Brazil during the transition from the military
to the democratic regimes were predomi-
nantly analyzed using the ‘class theory’ of
this paradigm. It emphasizes the economic
aspects of the demands that came from the
movements and their contradictions with
the capitalist model of economic production
prevailing in the country. Nowadays, this
approach is an important inspiration for rural
movements.
The second theoretical paradigm, the cul-
tural, is based on the phenomenological
approach and on other cultural and critical
theories. It emphasizes the values, the sub-
jectivity and the socio-cultural aspects of
mobilized groups; the authors who have used
it stress on the construction of group identi-
ties. In studies of social movements using
this paradigm, the authors have theorized the
‘identity of the movements’, with an empha-
sis on the collective identity of the ‘new
social movements’. By learning from the
practical experience of participation in col-
lective actions, the people create this identity.
This theory focuses on cultural perspectives
on reality and seeks to understand collective
actions as belonging to a multicultural world.
The principal international references for this
theory are the analyses of Alberto Melucci
(1996) and Alain Touraine (1973, 1978,
1994, 1998, 2005). This approach has
inspired a multicultural analysis of the move-
ments that make demands related to ques-
tions of gender, ethnicity and race.
The third model is the ‘institutional’ para-
digm, which emphasizes the behaviour of
individuals – mainly leaders – within organi-
zations, and the processes of integration and
institutionalization of collective actions in
the political order. The central questions
in the social movement studies using this
339
paradigm are: how and why are social move-
ments created? What are the organizational
dimensions of the collective’s actions? What
are the motivations, feelings and ideas of
actors in the movement? This paradigm is
having a great influence on analyses of social
movements in the United States and in some
European countries such as England. It has
spawned ‘resource mobilization’ and ‘politi-
cal mobilization’ theories. In this last theory,
the focus is on the investigation of the politi-
cal opportunities that movements are using to
improve their actions. It focuses also on the
topics of injustice, identity and efficacy in
actions of the collectives. John McCarthy
and Doug McAdam (McAdam et al., 1996),
and Anthony Oberschall (1993) are among
the principal authors who have used this par-
adigm in analyses of social movements. In
Brazil, nowadays, the theory of political
opportunities is used by some authors to ana-
lyze such topics as civic citizenship, citizen
participation, belonging, empowerment, net-
works of sociability and social ties.
Categories for the analysis of social
movements in Brazil
Most Brazilian studies about social move-
ments in the 1970s and 1980s relied on the
Marxist approach; they emphasized social
classes and the economic contradictions in
society. These studies, such as Moyses
(1982), analyzed the popular movements as
a new historical subject that claimed citizen-
ship rights, urban services and housing. The
Marxist idea of contradictions was used in a
different form for examining popular move-
ments. Theorists looked at urban contradic-
tions rather than at class, which had been the
typical approach in working class analyses. It
is important to spell out the difference
between the concepts prevailing in popular
movements and those prevailing in the syndi-
calist (trade union) movement. In the popular
movements, the demands usually stemmed
from bad urban conditions, failures of public
services (health, education, transport, etc.).
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340 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
The demands of the working classes in the
trade unions on the other hand, were for
increases in salary and better working condi-
tions. The unions were reorganizing them-
selves in new ways which became known as
the ‘new syndicalism’. Therefore, we can see
that the panorama of social movements in
Brazil of the 1980s not only called attention
to the labour movement but also put the poor
on researchers’ agendas. Theories were pre-
viously organized in terms of the conflicts
among social classes.
Reading Antonio Gramsci’s ideas on the
organization of civil society (1979) heavily
influenced the researchers who were using
the Marxist approach. For Gramsci, the con-
struction of a new hegemony is based on the
strengthening of the social movements of
civil society which are in opposition to polit-
ical society. Researchers who participated in
social movements elaborated some of these
analyses. They diagnosed reality and con-
tributed recommendations for strategic
actions of popular movements. These move-
ments had the support of priests, intellectu-
als, leftist politicians, and they produced
collective action that was known as the ‘New
Strength of the Periphery’ (Gohn, 1985).
Brazilian authors such as Kowarick (1975),
Singer and Brant (1981), Moyses (1982) and
Oliveira (1972) gave fundamental theoretical
support to research, studying the social
movements of that time in Brazil. They
developed the themes of social marginality
and new urban surroundings and critiqued
dualistic theories.
The Marxist paradigm is still important
nowadays in Brazil, but it is no longer used by
a large number of researchers. After the
mushrooming of the popular movements in
the 1980s and the new stage in national poli-
tics3 in Brazil in the 1990s, the number of
researchers involved in work on social move-
ments diminished (with a slight rise in the
study of rural movements). Currently, there is
again an increase of research on new move-
ments, NGOs, the Third Sector, new forms of
‘associativism’ and public policies, but most
researchers do not use the Marxist approach.
Since the second half of the 1980s, the cul-
tural theory of identity has had an important
influence on Brazilian studies of social
movements, in particular, on attempts to
explain the emergence of new actors on
the political scene (Sader, 1988). These
movements are described as making ‘a revo-
lution a day’ (Scherer-Warren and Krischke,
1987). New themes have emerged about such
issues as women, children, indigenous peo-
ples, the descendants of Africans, and the
poor in general. The Afro-Brazilian, the
Indian and the women’s movements in
Brazil have been analyzed using this para-
digm by Cardoso (2002), Cunha (1987),
Guimarães (1998), Munanga (1999) and
Valente (1994).
The theme of multiculturalism gained
importance in the study of social movements
in the 1990s (Pinto, 2000). Touraine (1994,
1997, 2005) became the principal reference
for analyses of social movements in Brazil
during that period. He discussed the crises of
modernity and the emergence of new actors in
society. His concept of ‘identity’ has become
very useful for analyzing social movements
by specific minority groups.
In the 1990s, researchers of Brazilian social
movements extended their analytical refer-
ence points and incorporated the field of cul-
ture in a relevant way. Many researchers from
the United States and Canada exerted an influ-
ence on a wide range of contemporary theo-
retical approaches.4 With the changes caused
by globalization in the world, new themes
came to the fore, notably the question of par-
ticipation in civil society. The principal inter-
national researchers on social movements
analyzed these changes in society and elabo-
rated new theories. Castells (1996, 1997), for
example, researched networks of collective
action. Touraine (1994, 1997, 1998) studied
the effects of modernity in society and
the emergence of new forms of solidarity
as ways of constructing the subject in histori-
cal actions. Melucci (1996) discussed subjec-
tivity and the role of the media in social
movements. Other authors such as Tarrow (1994)
wrote about the power of social movements.
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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN BRAZIL
Cohen and Arato (1992), Hall (1995), and
Lyman (1995) discussed civil society and
democratization. They articulated the topic of
social movements in terms of public space and
democratic regimes using Habermas’ perspec-
tive. All these authors have influenced Brazilian
analyses of social movements.
In the 1990s, there was also a revival of
some classical exponents of sociological
analyses, coming from critical social theory,
political science, psychology or philosophy.
Such authors as Bobbio, Arendt, Tocqueville,
Elias, Bourdieu, Giddens and Foucault
contributed to the development of theoretical
fields, as did such critical theorists as
Habermas, Alexander and Honneth. The
influence of historians such as Hobsbawm
became more marked and widespread in sev-
eral fields, not only in social movements
studies. In the 2000s, within sociological
analysis, there was also a revival of some
classical exponents of symbolic interaction-
ism including studies by Goffman, and Wirth
on sociability in the city.
New analytical categories developed for
use in the analysis of the movements, among
them: the public sphere, civil society, social
exclusion and inclusion, political culture,
planetary citizenship, active citizenship, civic
citizenship, citizen participation, political
opportunities, belonging, empowerment,
social networks, social ties and so on. The
category ‘globalization’ has been used so
widely that it no longer explains social differ-
ences and this has produced a homogeniza-
tion of the interpretation of social reality.
However, there was a reorientation of the
analyses. They were no longer exclusively
focused on the social movements and NGOs;
rather the focus shifted to the interaction of
civil society with political society, to the
public, not the state sphere, to the policies of
partnerships of the movements and organiza-
tions with the government and public admin-
istration (although participation is almost
exclusively by NGOs and rarely by the
movements). They were, then, relocated to
institutional analysis. This has given rise to
the elaboration of additional analytical
341
categories, such as: sustainability, cultural
diversity, democratic governance, local
power, radical and deliberative democracy
and accountability (see Souza Santos, 2002).
These categories affirm that cultural differ-
ences should be respected – the values, habits
and behaviour of both groups and individu-
als, belonging to a society, globalized by the
economy and by the multiple interactions of
the media (TV, Internet, etc.). In Brazil, stud-
ies of social movements have recently been
published in books by Avritzer et al. (2004),
Costa (2002, 2006), Dagnino (2002) and
Dagnino et al.(2006), Doimo (1995), Gohn,
(2000, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2006a, 2006b,
2007), Scherer-Warren (1993), and Teixeira
(2001), among others.
WHICH SOCIAL MOVEMENTS HAVE
BEEN RESEARCHED: A PANORAMA
In Brazil, most of the studies and publica-
tions about social movements have been
coordinated by women. Interstingly, the pres-
ence of Afro-Brazilians has only been exam-
ined by researchers of the Afro-Brazilian
movement.
A brief overview of the social movements
of the last decades of the twentieth century
and the beginning of this millennium in
Brazil discloses part of the construction of
the political democratic process of recent
decades; it also shows the extent of poverty
and exclusion within society. This panorama
can be described using the following the-
matic focal points of struggles and
demands:
1 Movements about living conditions in cities, cen-
tred around housing issues, with these struggles
expressed on two fronts: (a) the articulation of
socio-political networks comprised of intellectu-
als of the centre-left and popular movements
about urban issues (the habitat, the city, strictly
speaking). They have participated in the process
of developing and obtaining the ‘Estatuto da
Cidade’ (City Statute), a federal law of 2001 on
issues of urban policies. The National Congress
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342 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
adopted it after 13 years of debates and intensive
pressures from and negotiations with the
national social movements that demanded urban
reform, such as the National Forum for Urban
Reform; (b) networks of popular social move-
ments of the homeless (street-dwellers and
squatters) and their networks of articulation with
the unemployed. They are supported by pastoral
movements of the Catholic Church and are
organized in such major cities as São Paulo, Belo
Horizonte and Recife.
2 Actions of middle-class groups against urban vio-
lence and in favour of freedom from strife (in
traffic, on the streets, in schools, regarding acts
against people and their possessions).
3 Popular mobilization and organization based on
institutional structures of participation in the
politico-administrative management of the
city (such as the Participatory Budget and
Administrative Advisory Bodies). This type of
organization was introduced, among others, by
the Labour Party Administration in Porto Alegre
(1989–2004), São Paulo (2000–2004), and Belo
Horizonte (2000–2004). When the party lost
the elections in 2004 in São Paulo and in Porto
Alegre, this form of organization stopped.
4 ‘Mobilizations’5 and movements to recover envi-
ronmental structures, both of a physical-spatial
nature, such as squares and parks, as well as of
collective equipment and services (in the fields of
health, education, leisure, sports and other public
services which have degenerated over the past
few years due to neo-liberal policies).
5 ‘Mobilizations’ of union movements against
unemployment.
6 Movements of solidarity and support for street
children, adolescent drug-users, HIV carriers and
others with special needs.
7 ‘Mobilizations’ of the Movement of Landless
Workers (MST), in the camps (which are discussed
in more detail in a later section of this chapter).
8 Ethnic-racial movements of Indians and those of
African descent.
9 Movements involving gender issues (women and
homosexuals).
10 Movements such as the World Social Forum
against neo-liberal policies and the effects of
globalization (against the Free Trade Area of the
Americas, the FTAA).
11 Movements for demanding human and cultural
rights.
12 Movements for education (in the popular sector:
for nursery schools and for places in state schools;
in the university sector: hiring teachers, more
funds for education and control of the monthly
increases in tuition at private universities).
13 Religious movements to defend different beliefs,
sects and traditions.
14 Youth cultural movements.
15 Movements of popular cooperatives.
16 The movement against the construction of dams,
in the south and northeast of the country.
17 The environmental movement, that has devel-
oped since the United Nations Conference on
Environment and Development (UNICED), infor-
mally known as the Earth Summit, Eco 92 that
took place in Rio de Janeiro, in 1992.
We can observe in the above list that a
broadening of the demands, actors and forms
of social movements has occurred. Some of
the movements have become the sites of
great conflicts, notably the landless workers’
movement and the movements against neo-
liberal policies and the effects of globaliza-
tion. Others, such as the youth cultural
movements and the environmental move-
ment, are organized in NGOs. They develop
competitive relations among themselves
because they have to apply for resources from
the same agencies in order to survive. Other
new movements, such as the cooperative
movements (recycling of materials, for
example), have developed relations predomi-
nantly of cooperation, among themselves and
with NGOs.
The Marxist theoretical approach has
inspired the leadership of the trade union
movements in their ‘mobilizations’ against
unemployment, as well as the leaders of
the ‘mobilizations’ and movements of the
Movement of Landless Workers (MST), in
the camps. The popular organization based
on institutional structures of participation in
the politico-administrative management of the
city (Participatory Budget and Administrative
Advisory Bodies) has been constructed, and
analyzed using rational choice theory, the
rationality of participation and deliberation
of the people are considered. In other move-
ments that appear on the above list, the lead-
ers are inspired by the cultural theoretical
approach. These movements are pluralistic in
9781412934633-Chap-23 1/10/09 8:55 AM Page 343
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN BRAZIL
their social composition and draw on a wide
variety of ideological conceptions.
Pluralistic social movements: some
characteristics
The movements with an identity centred on
ethnic and racial factors, such as the Afro-
Brazilian movement and the indigenous move-
ment have survived and are gaining strength at
the beginning of this millennium. The indige-
nous movements made important institutional
conquests in the 1988 Constitution, among
them the demarcation of their lands and
instruction in their own language. However,
their situation is precarious. Recently, with
support from international NGOs, they have
begun to sell their products in globalized
rather than alternative markets, at fair and
competitive prices. In 2006, at the time of the
second ‘Environmental Institute’ there were
225 groups of Indian peoples (approximately
600,000 persons) living on Brazilian territory.
They occupy 1.08 million square kilometres
(12.74% of the national territory).
The Afro-Brazilian movement struggles
against racial prejudice. Recently the federal
government approved quotas for university
entrance and passed a federal law, the ‘Race
Equality Statute’ (2006). The movement is
also struggling for ownership of the land
already occupied by Afro people. One stream,
for example, is the ‘Quilombola Movement’.
This name comes from ‘Quilombo’, a word
that has origins in the Bantu language and is
close in meaning to words, such as habita-
tion, camp, forest and warrior. In Brazil, in
the nineteenth century, the ‘Quilombo’ was a
territory occupied by fugitive slaves from
farms. Nowadays, contemporary ‘quilom-
bos’ in Brazil are constituted as the
‘Quilombola’ community. In 2006, there
were 2,842 ‘Quilombola’ communities rec-
ognized by the federal government.
A total of 69,649,861 Brazilians were clas-
sified as black and brown by the Brazilian
Institute of Geography and Statistics in 2000,
making up 47% of the national population.
343
Even though most of the lower socio-
economic classes in Brazil are made up of
black or ‘mulatto’ (brown) people, there are
few lower class Afro-Brazilian organizations.
More common are NGOs of the middle-class
Afro-Brazilians which operate independently
on broader political issues such as poverty
and focus their interest on the question of
racial discrimination.
Among movements characterized by the
age of the members, we can distinguish
a movement of those who are younger, a
movement of senior citizens and the ‘defence
of children’ movement. Youth is predominant
in the youth movements, both in the students’
movements (concentrated in the state univer-
sities) and in the popular youth movements.
Youth’s cultural manifestations are expressed
through music (hip-hop, rap and other musi-
cal styles). The modern anarchist movement
is on the rise among the young middle-class
Brazilians. Movements in defence of street
children and others of senior citizens (con-
centrated in the middle classes) complete the
gamut of the generations’ movements.
Gender movements include women’s and
homosexuals’ movements. Some women’s
organizations act more like NGOs than like
social movements, and the majority of their
activists are from the middle class. The pro-
grams of these movements have focused on
women’s health, breast-feeding campaigns
and so on. Gay and lesbian movements have
grown in Brazil over the last decade. Since
1996 the ‘Gay Parade’ has taken place annu-
ally in São Paulo, with a steadily increasing
number of participants. Two million people
participated in 2005 and 2,300,000 in 2006.
Before ECO 92, interest in the environ-
mental question was very much restricted to
the middle classes, but afterwards, it became
a concern of the popular neighbourhood
movements. This constituted a great qualita-
tive leap because in the popular demands and
calls of the 1970s and 1980s, the environ-
mental issue was played down in centres
such as São Paulo. In Brasilia there are many
offices of international organizations of ecol-
ogists that fight for the preservation of forests
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344 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
and the Amazon region. Preserving clean
water in rivers and lakes is also the theme of
several movements and councils.
At the beginning of this millennium, an as
yet diffuse movement against violence devel-
oped, especially in large urban centres. We
certainly already had a Human Rights move-
ment and this has played an important and
fundamental role since the struggles of the
1970s and 1980s. The Human Rights move-
ments have created national networks and are
associated with international networks such
as Amnesty International. However, at the
moment, due to an overall lack of security
within Brazilian society, the movement
against violence in the cities has gained
strength. Organized in neighbourhoods, it
represents a clamour of civil society in the
area of public security, to seek protection for
the lives of citizens as they go about their
daily business. Public opinion polls show
that safety has become the population’s main
concern, far greater than the fear of unem-
ployment or of contracting a serious illness.
The movements against violence in urban
centres are based on localized groups and
actions, and motivated by personal loss; they
have begun to create networks, to mobilize
the neighbourhood community associations,
which are often intimidated by organized
armed groups in the region. The movement
against urban violence has organized
marches, street demonstrations and so on.
Even the student movement, which repeat-
edly makes entrances and exits from the
public stage, has played an important role in
the anti-violence movement, in campaigns
such as disarming the population.
To complete the present overview of urban
social movements, we must not fail to men-
tion the anti-globalization movement, which
is also present in Brazil, and although in its
infancy, is well organized. Despite the differ-
ences existing within this movement, which
is composed of a network of networks, it
combines criticism of the causes of poverty,
social exclusion and conflicts with the search
for and creation of a consensus that makes
joint action possible. Together with economic
globalization, the movement proposes an
alternative type of globalization, based on
respect for different local cultures. This was
its contribution to the construction of a net-
work of globalization based on solidarity.
Some of the anti-globalization movements
were present at the First, Second, Third and
Fifth Social Forums in Porto Alegre in 2001,
2002, 2003 and 2005; and those in 2006 in
Venezuela and in 2007 in Kenya.
THE POPULAR MOVEMENTS IN
BRAZIL
Urban popular movements
It is important to emphasize that the socio-
political setting described in the first part of
this chapter has contributed to changes in
popular movements. In recent years, the
problems and the demands in poor areas have
not diminished but have increased. The arena
of strikes has changed because the forms of
organization have changed too. The move-
ments started to participate in networks with
governmental entities, as the councils of
management (even though, as is mentioned
in the first part of this chapter, most public
policies are formulated in partnership with
NGOs and civil associations, and not with
the members of movements).
The popular movements have always been
heterogeneous in terms of issues and demands.
They are united by their socio-economic
needs. In the 1990s, they created and devel-
oped networks and relationships with other
social movements (from the rural areas, as
MST), with unions, other social bodies,
political parties and religious entities, NGOs
and so on. However, profound alterations
have taken place in daily life where the inter-
nal dynamics are generated. On the one hand,
they have lost visibility in the urban areas; on
the other hand, they have incorporated other
elements, and with this have left the level of
general demands, and achieved a more oper-
ational level, that of proposals. Although the
9781412934633-Chap-23 1/10/09 8:55 AM Page 345
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN BRAZIL
nucleus of their demands remains practically
the same, they are adopting new practices.
Among the popular movements, the strug-
gle for housing has continued to have central
importance as the most organized popular
struggle in the urban area. Some sectors
became institutionalized, operating on the
judicial plane, through advisory bodies, and
making important conquests, such as the
aforementioned City Statute. Another sector,
together with its advisors, transferred to the
NGOs in civil society, taking part in institu-
tional projects, such as the self-administered
mutual-help cooperatives and various branches
of the shanty-town movements, which have
initiated projects dealing with re-urbanization,
removal or transfer to projects run by
the public sector. A third segment has fol-
lowed the model of the rural popular move-
ment: it carried out invasions, no longer of
empty areas (increasingly scarce and distant
in the great urban centres), but of public and
private buildings, either not in use or aban-
doned, in the central area of large cities.
A fourth category in the housing struggle
was headed by street dwellers (in São Paulo
alone they number about 10,000). Living
under bridges, in the doorways of shops, in
squares and public places, these ‘dwellers’
increased significantly in the 1990s, both in
number and in the spaces occupied. The
organization of street-dwellers is rather diffi-
cult because they ‘float’ in space and they
usually do not have steady jobs. In the 1990s,
many of these dwellers were ‘recruited’ by
MST (we will analyze this movement in the
next section).
The urban popular health movement,
despite having become fragmented, entered
into a struggle on the question of the cost of
health insurance and medicine, the role of
public health centres and so on. It has taken
part in National Health Conferences and
many of its members became involved in the
administration of health advisory bodies as
consumers’ representatives. With regard to
the field of health, it is important to note that
in some places the popular advisory bodies,
created in the 1980s, still survive alongside
345
the official administrative advisory bodies.
Health Councils are part of a movement in
which political actors and civil society have
joined forces to institutionalize social partic-
ipation in the process of formulating, imple-
menting and monitoring public policies (see
Coelho, 2004).
The movement for transportation became
considerably institutionalized and other
actors came on stage, among them the inde-
pendent bus drivers (who offer alternative
transport), with their extremely undemocratic
behaviour, as shown in their strikes. Changes
in public policies related to mass transport
were responsible for diminishing the con-
flicts in this area. But, for some social cate-
gories, such as students, there has been
conflict whenever the ticket price has
increased.
The movement for day nurseries, which
was important in the 1970s and became quite
institutionalized in the 1980s, is being revived
in several cities, such as São Paulo. One
example is the movement of those without a
day nursery.
The popular movement for education is
worth noting. Even though it has never had
great visibility as an independent actor, at the
beginning of this millennium it is taking a
new form among all levels of society. Its
demands have frequently been adopted by
the teachers’ union and by other educational
professionals. They have also been absorbed
into more comprehensive battles such as the
struggle for education at the time that the
1988 Constitution was being drawn up.
These demands for education were put into
practice by the National Forum for the
Struggle for Public Schools and were basi-
cally put forward by middle-class actors. In
fact, the economic crisis and unemployment
have led many middle-class families to seek
places in public schools. Not only are these
families now more numerous, they were
already used to taking an interest in school-
life and expected to do so within the State
system, even though the latter had previously
been closed to any community participation.
As a result, schools began to play the role of
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346 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
community centres since the lack of funding
and the need to solve new problems, such as
safety, violence among young people and the
world of drugs, drove them to look for part-
nerships with other entities and organized
associations in the neighbourhood or region.
Finally, there is a new neighbourhood
movement, which differs from the residents’
associations and Friends of the Neighbourhood
that have played a traditional role in various
parts of Brazil. These are Community
Centres of Production which have the goal of
organizing the segments of the population
dedicated to the production and commercial-
ization of innumerable products for domestic
use or as food. They set up warehouses for
recycling products, encourage the production
of food without agrochemicals, build small
brick factories, apiaries and chicken farms,
and market home-produced cheeses and
sweets. In short, they are involved in a vast
number of activities centred in cooperatives
or associations in the less affluent neighbour-
hoods themselves. Behind these associations
there are more comprehensive NGOs,6 which
assess the groups wanting to set up projects,
enable them to obtain funds and help them
write reports and so on.
The rural popular social
movements: the landless
and the MST
The MST is the most famous of the approxi-
mately 80 rural social movements in present-
day Brazil (Fernandes, 2004). It was created
in 1984. In the 1990s, social conflicts involv-
ing direct fights were displaced from the city
to the countryside with the landless move-
ments. Of the organized groups that appeared,
the MST was the most noticeable and
received international attention. The MST is
a mass movement, but its coordination is
structured as a movement/organization of
staff. The MST is led by coordinators, less
than 100 in all. They sustain such a mass
movement the membership of which they
themselves have difficulty in counting, in
terms of numbers of militants, followers and
adherents. To act as an organized movement,
the MST assumes an on-going role in training
these coordinators. The principal campaigns
organized by the MST took place in the cities:
rallies, boycotts, demonstrations, occupations
of public buildings and so on. Little by little,
the MST has become a reference group for
the struggles of other social categories of the
lower and the middle classes, and even for the
actions of some entrepreneurs – who went to
the streets in demonstrations with banners
and white caps (one of the emblematic signs
of the MST is the red cap).
The MST helps groups to set up settle-
ments when they occupy the land. After the
implementation phase of a settlement, the
MST continues its support by means of tech-
nical assistance in productive cooperatives,
the political organization of members and
training in the area of education (literacy for
children, training of teachers and technical
training for youths and adults). The process
is one of differentiated education, geared to
men and women in the field, which was ini-
tiated in 1987 with the creation of an
Education Sector. It experienced qualitative
leaps after 1990 with the creation of a National
Education Collective and the publication of
materials such as educational exercise books,
bulletins, and material on farming, history
and other collections. In 2004, the MST inau-
gurated a national school for training leaders –
the Florestan Fernandes School.7
By 2006, the MST was organized in
almost all the states of Brazil. The number of
land occupations increased again in that year:
there were 57 between January and March.
This was an increase over 2005, when there
were 41 cases between January and March
(compared with 56 cases during the same
period in 2004). Public policies dealing with
the movement have changed and are now
contradictory. The MST dialogues directly
with the federal government; it exerts pres-
sure and is heard. However, there are
few responses by the government to the
demands. The conflict has been growing
steadily as many leaders of the MST have
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SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN BRAZIL
been criminalized by the media and by the
justice tribunal because they had participated
in illegal actions (invasions of land). The
great annual MST March has continued, and
the media publicize it, but the popular inter-
est of civil society in it is not as great as it
was in 1997, the year of the first great March.
Then, thousands of the landless came from
their homes in the settlements and marched
on foot to Brasilia, the federal capital. In fact,
nowadays, the impact of the demands on
public opinion has diminished, as has sup-
port from civil society. Violence in the city,
including the risk of being robbed or
kidnapped at any time of day or night, has
resulted in urban dwellers changing their
attitudes. They now censure the actions of the
MST because of their fear of any actions that
threaten the social structure. The media pres-
entation of the MST during the recent past as
criminal has contributed to this change in
public opinion. While people recognize the
need and urgency of access to land by the
landless, they do not approve of the MST’s
methods. Furthermore, the MST has also lost
the support of many Brazilian intellectuals.
A curious point is that outside Brazil the
MST continues to have a good image. Many
international researchers have come to Brazil
to collect data about it. The MST has organized
a reception sector that shows visitors many
settlements. It is supported by many interna-
tional movements, such as Via Campesina
(a Latin-American rural movement, organized
in such societies as Bolivia, Ecuador
and Mexico), and by some NGOs. This sup-
port has contributed to the MST’s favourable
image abroad.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In Brazil, during the transition from the mili-
tary regime to democracy, social movements
were predominantly analyzed from the view-
point of Marxist theory and by theories
of identity or new cultural theories of social
movements. In the 1990s, there was an
347
increase in research on NGOs, the Third
Sector and new forms of collective initiatives
and public policy. The researchers extended
their analytical reference points and incorpo-
rated cultural analyses. The visibility of
forms of collective initiatives that work in
institutionalized spheres has been reduced.
The urban social movements declined in
importance during the 1990s, becoming less
visible in the streets. In the 1990s, with an
increase in mobilization in rural areas, the
landless movements, especially the MST,
extended their activities. In the opening years
of the 2000s, there was a revival of social
movements in urban areas, especially of the
movement for housing. Social conflicts have
returned to the streets and the media report
them. Theories of cultural identity are pre-
dominantly used in the analyses.
The networks of social organizations
around micro-projects for generating income
have increased, coordinated by NGOs. On
the one hand, this change is explained by the
economic crisis and high unemployment. On
the other hand, it is explained by the increase
of collective actions of solidarity. In this con-
text, the category of civil society takes first
place in analyses by researchers. This chap-
ter considers all the NGOs, the social move-
ments, the commissions, groups and entities
struggling for human rights and the defence
of those excluded because of economic,
gender, race, ethnic and religious discrimina-
tion as actors of civil society.
In contrast, the category of social move-
ments has been used more often to analyze
rural movements, such as the MST, the
Indian Movement and the ‘Quilombola’
Movement; and, in a broader sense, to ana-
lyze the mobilization of civil society in cam-
paigns against hunger and unemployment.
Our research concludes that we are living
in a new moment in the trajectory of Brazilian
‘associativism’. Now, the initiatives include
social movements, Forums, social networks
and NGOs. Most NGOs are changing their
names to simply ‘Third Sector’, but doing so
does not replace the form of social move-
ment which was typical of the collective
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348 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
actions of protest, resistance and struggle
that predominated in the 1980s (especially
since this form is still very strong in rural
areas). This process feeds on the conquests
made by social movements, mainly those
consolidated by law. But it has translated the
practices of those movements into practices
of a non-political nature, and reformulated
the objectives of collective actions, of strug-
gles against social exclusion generated by the
economic model, in favour of agendas that
seek inclusion and social integration into the
current economic model, within the moulds
proposed by the government and funding
agencies. In some cases, however, social
movements from the 1980s – for example,
the housing movement – have established a
fruitful dialogue with the new NGOs and
other civil associations, creating new Forums
and networks in the public sphere.
NOTES
1 ‘Associativismo’ is a Portuguese word which is
widely used in Brazilian sociology. We could define
‘associativismo’ as a tendency or action of members
of social groups, usually from popular classes, to con-
gregate in representative associations – unions, for
instance – or in social movements, or in non-govern-
mental organizations, for the defence of their inter-
ests. One alternative is to use the word
associativismo between inverted commas in an
English text. I have found one example in the World
Development Report 2006 (UNDP, 2006), that says:
‘In most countries, cooperatives and producer associ-
ations co-exist. Such is the case for instance in Brazil
where the “associativismo” is very active in the
Northwest and in the south of the country and is
taking root too in Cerrados’. In this chapter I will use
the word ‘associativism’ to express ‘associativismo’.
2 NGOs- (Non Governmental Organizations) are
juridical forms; they are institutionalized and non-
profit organizations. Civil associations are also institu-
tional forms, but not necessarily non-profit. A social
movement is a collective action organized by civil
society; it is not institutionalized.
3 In 1984, the military regime ended and democ-
racy returned to Brazil. Democracy was formally insti-
tutionalized with the new 1988 Constitution.
4 Without providing an exhaustive list, here are
some authors who deserve special mention: Charles
Tilly, Jean Cohen, Andrew Arato, Sidney Tarrow,
Jeff Goodwin, George Yúdice, Hank Johnston,
Bert Klandermans, Aldon Morris, Joshua Cohen,
Joan Scott, John McCarthy, Anthony Oberschall,
Doug McAdam, Margrit Mayer, John Logan, Robert
Putnam and Pierre Hamel.
5 In Brazil, campaigns, protests, marches and the
like, are called ‘mobilizations’.
6 Neighbourhood associations, composed of local
citizens organized on a voluntary basis, have organ-
ized such collective initiatives as cooperatives. These
associations are different from NGOs, which are insti-
tutionalized, and which can help the associations to
organize the cooperative, for example.
7 Florestan Fernandes was a famous Brazilian
sociologist. He was a Marxist, member of the
Workers Party-PT, elected federal deputy in the
1980s. He died in the 1990s.
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9781412934633-Chap-24 1/10/09 8:55 AM Page 351
Making Sense of Social
Justice and Social
Mobilization in Latin
America: A Discourse
Analysis
This chapter examines the responses given by
forty activists in El Salvador and Honduras to
five questions on social justice and social
mobilization. We are interested in collecting
and analyzing data on the social representa-
tions that frame the mobilized actors’ identi-
ties, perceptions, and normative orientations.1
Rather than seeking to obtain short and pre-
cise answers on specific issues, we aimed at
eliciting a more complex narrative. The
respondents’ discourse was analyzed by
means of a computer-assisted procedure. Our
approach is based on the assumption that
social representations reflect a commonsense
understanding of the social world, thus pro-
viding the actors with a meaningful organiza-
tion of reality (Moscovici, 1984). This is not
an overly deterministic approach, but it refers
to the social and historical dimension of
24
Victor Armony
thinking and knowing (Billig, 1993). In this
perspective, we follow McAdam, Tarrow,
and Tilly in ‘betting that particular cultural
understandings and practices can produce
quite general effects’ (2001: 346).
As Melucci and Lyyra (1998: 210) have
underscored, ‘A concrete social movement is
always a complex and heterogeneous process
that unfolds within a field of opportunities
and constraints and contains a magma of
empirical components’. The growing use of
qualitative approaches to study social mobi-
lization stems in part from the rising interest
in culturalist explanations among sociologists
and political scientists. Even when culture is
not considered the main explicative factor,
researchers will now often take into account
the actors’ discourse and perceptions, some-
times resorting to very detailed ethnological
9781412934633-Chap-24 1/10/09 8:55 AM Page 352
352 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
observations (Auyero, 2003). Cultural ele-
ments, which are by definition highly com-
plex and socially situated (i.e., they are
rooted in history and subjectively actualized
in everyday life), add to the ‘magma of
empirical components’ that makes every
social movement unique. How can we then
associate particular cultural understandings
with general effects?
We have first to consider the objective
transnationalization of social activism along
the lines of an emerging ‘masterframe’ of
‘global social justice’ (Della Porta and
Tarrow, 2005: 12). This has led both to an
ideological convergence among social move-
ments and to extended chains of argumenta-
tion, that is, discursive linkages between
local conditions as directly experienced by
actors and more general issues. This, of
course, is not a new phenomenon: a common
Marxist masterframe allowed activists in
very different cultural contexts to link every-
day injustices to the wider – and more
abstract – issues of ‘class struggle’ and ‘the
proletariat’s historic mission’. However, we
need to point out an important difference: the
emerging masterframe, as opposed to the
sternly universalist and positivist Marxist
one, actually puts cultural particularism – on a
national, ethnic, group, and even personal level
– at the centre of people’s narratives. In brief,
we see a global call to assert local identities.
But that is only part of the whole picture.
It is obviously true that the ‘local’ argument
has acquired social and political legitimacy,
that movement leaders meet and develop a
common vocabulary at international forums,
and that organized civil society tends to
adopt the anti-globalization and human
rights rhetoric. However this simplistic per-
spective (‘activists talk the activist talk’)
does not suffice and should be comple-
mented by a sociological analysis of social
representations. As Pierre Bourdieu, building
on Émile Durkheim’s theory of social repre-
sentations, points out, the social order is
maintained through the correspondence of
‘objective and mental structures’ (Bourdieu,
1994). By methodically observing the way in
which individuals frame their worldview, we
get much more than information on their
intentions, interests, actions, and environ-
ment. As we will see, certain regularities in
their discourse reveal the presence of cogni-
tive structures that have been internalized.
This paper’s goal is to analyze relevant data
about current social mobilization in Latin
America and also to show the heuristic
potential of this particular approach.
While there is ample evidence of the trans-
formation of movement activity since the
1970s, McAdam, Sampson, Weffer, and
MacIndoe point out that almost all of the
work on changes in social mobilization has
been ‘speculative in nature’ (2005: 5). This
gap must be filled with more ‘event
research’, as these authors suggest, and also
with more and better ‘discourse analysis’.
We contend that the systematic analysis of
discursive patterns can help to unveil social
representations in a way that quantitative
polls and qualitative in-depth case studies
cannot (Abric, 2003). People freely and
spontaneously create unique narratives to
make sense of their world, but they do so by
referring to a limited and socially determined
set of available cognitive and normative
frames (Snow and Benford, 1992). Much
more empirical research is still needed in
order to gain a better understanding of the
mechanisms through which the individual
and the collective coalesce in social mobi-
lization. By ‘treating individual statements as
texts’ (Hawkesworth, 2003: 533) and, partic-
ularly, through the observation of recurrent
word choices and their articulation in con-
ceptual networks, we can explore ‘the way a
given structural situation is defined and expe-
rienced and the meanings that will be
attached to actions’ (Oliver et al., 2003: 12).
SOCIAL MOBILIZATION IN EL
SALVADOR AND HONDURAS
Several new movements have emerged in
Latin America during the past decade, ranging
9781412934633-Chap-24 1/10/09 8:55 AM Page 353
SOCIAL JUSTICE IN LATIN AMERICA
from the Zapatistas in Mexico to the landless
rural workers in Brazil. While each of these
movements has particular features, it is nev-
ertheless possible to observe a number of
common traits, as well as a clear-cut contrast
between them and the insurgent or resistance
movements of the Cold War era. The case of
Argentina’s Piqueteros – picketers who
block highways and bridges – is particularly
telling. They form a movement of mostly
urban unemployed and impoverished men
and women who sometimes resort to civil
disobedience tactics in order to capture
the attention of the government, the mass
media, and public opinion. But their funda-
mental drive is to achieve autonomy and self-
organization (Armony, 2004). These new
social movements are more focused on ethical
issues and operate within the parameters of
what Maria da Glória Gohn (2000: 36–7)
calls an ‘individual citizenship’, linked to the
notion of ‘social rights’ – particularly
through the idea of social ‘services’ – and
to the actors’ subjective experience. As
Boaventura de Sousa Santos puts it, ‘the
emancipation that they fight for is one that
aims at transforming [their] everyday life [...]
here and now and not in a distant future’
(2001: 178).
The surge of citizen mobilization in Latin
America has led to a renewed interest in the
symbolic dimension of social protest and the
subjective aspects of social activism.
Although resource mobilization theory
(McAdam et al., 2001) is quite helpful in
regard to the understanding of how social
movements rise, develop, and succeed
(or fail), its focus on organization, strategy,
and outcomes tends to exclude the systematic
study of discourse. Protest movements that
have been emerging in Latin America since
the mid-1990s defy conventional wisdom
about social mobilization. They show many
features that are usually found in the so-
called New Social Movements (Della Porta
and Diani, 1999), but they also display some
very distinctive traits. For example, the rela-
tionships between reason and emotion or
between material conditions and subjective
353
interests appear to be less clear or direct
(Jordan, 2002). Some protest movements
seem to reach a critical mass through the
spontaneous aggregation of actors in the
streets and public spaces (which fits to a cer-
tain extent the category of ‘mass behaviour’),
with no leaders, no organization, or a highly
decentralized one, and with no specific polit-
ical aim. However, they have shown a sur-
prising level of cohesion in terms of the
actors’ stated motives, and they have given
rise to some innovative types of coordination
and cooperation. These features reveal both a
strong subjective component and a shared
representation of the issues at stake. These
become apparent in the actors’ discourse.
Interestingly, this transformation of social
mobilization in Latin America seems to
follow trends that can be observed in North
America. In an empirical study of the chang-
ing nature of movement activity in Chicago
over a 30-year period, McAdam, Sampson,
Weffer, and MacIndoe argue that ‘If socio-
economic disadvantage increased the likeli-
hood of protest in 1970, the reverse is true
today’ (2005: 15). Using data on some 4,000
collective civic events and public protests
between 1970 and 2000, they show that the
recent period is characterized by more rou-
tinized, less disruptive forms of demands.
Their research also suggests that the issues
motivating public protest activity have grown
more local over time. The data collected by
McAdam, Sampson, Weffer, and MacIndoe
‘lends empirical weight to those who have
theorized about the “institutionalization” of
protest and the rise of a “movement society”
in the US’ (2005: 16). While the differences
between North America and Latin America
are still obviously significant, it is interesting
to note that on both continents social mobi-
lization seems to be associated with a quest
for rights and recognition that is framed
in more local and individual terms, and not
necessarily or uniquely related to economic
claims (Auyero, 2003). Most current mobi-
lization in Latin America conveys a demand
for inclusion in the political and economic
system, rather than for its revolutionary
9781412934633-Chap-24 1/10/09 8:55 AM Page 354
354 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
transformation (Garretón, 2001). This
‘reformist’ citizen activism is fuelled by the
heightened expectations brought to the fore
by political democratization, and also by the
sense of injustice created by the perceived
disconnection between state and society
(Davis and Rosan, 2004).
In this chapter, we analyze the discourse of
forty social activists in El Salvador and
Honduras. They belong to different kinds of
organizations and movements: community-
based initiatives, labour unions, NGOs,
student associations, political parties, and
women’s groups. Some of them hold posi-
tions of leadership, while others are regular
members. The interviews were all conducted
in March 2004 by the same person. At that
time, El Salvador was going through an elec-
toral process: the fifth presidential election
since the democratic transition in 1979 and
the third since the 1992 Peace Treaty signed
between the government and the leftist guer-
rilla movement known as the Frente Farabundo
Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN),
to end a 12-year civil war that cost more than
70,000 lives. The FMLN, which had since
become a political party and entered the
political system, arrived second in the elec-
tion held on March 21, 2004. The right-wing
candidate of the Alianza Republicana
Nacionalista (ARENA), Antonio Saca, became
the new president with almost 58% of the
votes. Quite understandably, El Salvador is a
highly polarized society. Salvadorians have a
fresh memory of the civil war and, particu-
larly among FMLN supporters, of the vio-
lence exerted by death squads of the extreme
right not only on guerrilla fighters, but also
on ordinary citizens, progressive priests, and
union leaders.
Honduras is one of the poorest countries in
the hemisphere, but it can be seen as a rela-
tively stable society when compared to its
neighbours in Central America. While
Honduras has certainly been plagued by
numerous rebellions, civil wars, and changes
of government, it accomplished a democratic
transition in the early 1980s and has
since been spared the political conflicts that
deeply divided Guatemala, El Salvador, and
Nicaragua. However, a natural disaster dev-
astated the country. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch
severely damaged Honduras’ economy and a
full recovery is yet to be seen. Ricardo
Maduro, a USA-educated centre-to-right
businessman, was elected president in 2001.
He promised a crackdown on violent crime,
which many Hondurans believe is one of the
main problems in their country. Crime, con-
ducted mainly by youth gangs known as
maras, is obviously linked to the fact that
economic inequality is rife in Honduran soci-
ety. Poverty and unemployment are prevalent
among the majority of citizens. The neo-
liberal reforms carried out during the 1990s
sharply reduced the number of unionized
jobs and significantly weakened the labour
unions. The labour movement nevertheless
continues to play an important role in
Honduras. It probably embodies for most
Hondurans the essence of the popular move-
ment, more than any other organization,
including left-wing political parties.
El Salvador and Honduras represent two
different societal outcomes in the context of
common structural conditions. Both coun-
tries, much like their neighbours, are eco-
nomically dependent and their wealth is
distributed very unequally, with a majority of
citizens living in poverty. Despite Honduras’
comparatively better record, democratic
institutions are fragile in Central America
and the rule of law is far from being upheld
fully, particularly in regard to socially and
culturally marginalized populations. We chose
El Salvador and Honduras for the first phase
of our comparative study because of the sim-
ilarities and differences between them.2 On
the one hand, although Honduras is ‘poorer’
than El Salvador (in terms of per capita
Gross Domestic Product, 1990–97 average:
US$ 753 and US$ 1,392 respectively), these
two countries have a similar level
of human development (as measured by the
United Nations Development Programme:
Honduras ranks 117th and El Salvador ranks
101st out of 177 countries in 2004) and share
several demographic features (e.g., comparable
9781412934633-Chap-24 1/10/09 8:55 AM Page 355
SOCIAL JUSTICE IN LATIN AMERICA
population size and growth rate; similar age
structure, rural-urban distribution, and reli-
gious and ethnic make-up of the population.)
On the other hand, as we already pointed out,
their political history has followed quite dis-
similar paths. We do not intend to explain – or
even factor in – these differences here. Our
goal in this chapter is to show how social rep-
resentations in two neighbouring states with
distinct structures display common patterns.
A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
A five-question protocol was designed and
interviews were conducted on a one-to-one
basis. The sample was obtained through mul-
tiple snowballing (chain-referral) as well as
from contacts with networks of social
activists. (The interviews were conducted
under the author’s supervision by Rosa
Amelia Maltez, a graduate student at the
Université du Québec à Montréal.) In this
regard, the sample is obviously statistically
unrepresentative. However, we carried out
quantitative procedures on the respondents’
vocabulary in order to detect objective pat-
terns in their discourse. These procedures are
themselves statistically based and allow
probabilistic inferences about the subjects’
word choices. The questions in the interview
protocol were extremely simple and pur-
posely broad. Each of them contains one or
two key words that aim to trigger reactions
and associations: (1) What are the main
injustices in this country? (2) Who benefits
from them? (3) What should be done in order
to put the country on the right track? (4) Who
speaks on behalf of the people? (5) What is
your role in this movement? The first ques-
tion’s focus is on the notion of injustice, and
implicitly addresses the definition of ‘Us’.
The second question encourages the respon-
dent to elaborate on the issue of social and
political conflict, by naming the adversary.
The third question refers to the goals and
objectives of social mobilization, the fourth
to the issue of representation and cooperation,
355
and the fifth to the actor’s self-perception in
the context of social change. On the surface,
these five questions address concerns and
topics with which all members of social
movements are very familiar. In fact, in many
cases, the answers may convey elements
taken directly from the movement’s official
platform. But by giving respondents the
opportunity to elaborate and by telling them,
at the beginning of the interview, that we
seek their personal perspective, we elicit
what the respondents apparently believe to
be their own thoughts on these matters. These
particular questions lead respondents to
speak about social conflict and cooperation.
They mirror the crucial, timeless questions of
collective action: What is to be done? What
brings us together? Who is with us and who
is against us? We recorded an average of
4,000 words from each respondent, or
approximately 800 words for each of the five
questions in our interview protocol. The text
database contains in all 158,000 words.
Our method of discourse analysis is het-
erodox as it does not apply the usual criteria
found in most quantitative or qualitative
studies. Quantitative approaches usually
focus on electoral and political data, event-
analysis (including media coverage analy-
sis), and opinion polls in order to describe
and explain the behaviour of the mobilized
(or non-mobilized) individuals and groups.
These approaches provide robust data and a
comparative and cumulative perspective, but
they fail to grasp the complexity, heterogene-
ity, and internal logic of the activists’ repre-
sentations. Qualitative approaches build on
historical research, ethnological observation,
and in-depth interviews with key informants
in order to grasp the way actors define
and experience their actions and their envi-
ronment. These approaches provide insight
into activists’ discourse, but they (usually)
fail to produce robust data and a comparative
and cumulative perspective. In-depth semi-
structured interviews can sometimes strike a
balance between the quantitative and qualita-
tive approaches, but they, for the most part, are
based on context-specific research objectives.
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356 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
Our approach aims at overcoming some of
these limitations (Duchastel and Armony,
1996). By asking simple and general
(non-context-specific) questions and empiri-
cally observing consistent patterns in the
interviewees’ discourse, we obtain robust
data from a comparative and a cumulative
perspective, while preserving to some extent
the complexity, heterogeneity, and internal
logic of activists’ representations.
We have applied to the interview transcripts
a computer-assisted procedure based on the
principle of ‘distinctive notions’.3 This
principle is theoretically linked to the con-
cept of paradigmatic preferences, which
refers to the recurrent linguistic choices
made by speakers when several similar
words are available to them. The paradig-
matic selection can be seen as a menu of pos-
sible choices between similar but not fully
equivalent words that can be used to fit a slot
in a given sentence. If a given individual con-
sistently uses the term ‘immigrant’ when
referring to alien residents, instead of other
semantically equivalent terms such as ‘new-
comer’ or ‘foreigner’, it is possible to infer a
paradigmatic preference (which can be, and
often is, involuntary and unconscious).
Interestingly, this phenomenon can be
observed through statistical means. Words
that are significantly overused or underused
by a group of speakers when responding to a
given question may reveal a meaningful
pattern of preferences within the stream of
discourse. A common criticism of this kind
of word-based statistical approach is that
words mean different things to different
people and in different contexts. While this
remark is in itself obviously true (language
is, by definition, fluid), it misses a crucial
point: this analysis focuses on the signifiers.
The fact that most respondents, with different
personal and cultural backgrounds, chose the
same words to respond to certain ideas tells
us about a shared disposition to frame social
reality in a particular way. The analyst does
not presuppose that this meaning exists; she
observes it as a social fact (see Laclau and
Mouffe, 1985).
This method was applied to the five ques-
tions in the two countries included in the first
phase of our research (El Salvador and
Honduras). The tables show the main distinc-
tive terms elicited for each question in each
country, that is, the words that the activists in
each country tend to prioritize when they
enunciate their response to a particular ques-
tion. The rationale behind this procedure is
quite simple and it is based on the same
assumptions underlying the commonly used
word-association technique. We aim at
observing recurrent, non-random patterns in
the subjects’ choice of words when they react
to a representation (usually conveyed by a
concept or a sentence). The columns show
the total frequency of each term (the number
of times it appears in the country database),
the partial frequency (the number of times it
appears in the answers to a specific ques-
tion), and the level of significance regarding
the difference between expected and
observed frequencies. If we observe that the
word x shows a significantly higher than
expected frequency in the answers to ques-
tion y, we consider that the word x is statis-
tically associated with the question y. All
terms that are semantically empty were elim-
inated from the tables, as well as those whose
overrepresentation is mostly due to their fre-
quent use by particular respondents. We set
the confidence limit (the chance that the
observed differences are due to an underly-
ing reason) at 99% (a z-value of 3). The terms
in the tables were sorted by statistical signif-
icance (the higher the z-value, the lower the
probability of a random difference), and
translated from Spanish into English. All
instances of the selected words were
observed in context in order to make sure that
they convey a relatively stable meaning.
Table 24.1 shows the results obtained from
the distinctive-notion analysis of the answers
to the first question: ‘What are the main
injustices in this country?’ We observe a
strikingly clear pattern in terms of cross-
country and thematic coherence. The respon-
dents dwell on the notion of ‘injustice’,
and while they link it to all-encompassing
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SOCIAL JUSTICE IN LATIN AMERICA 357

Table 24.1 ‘What are the main injustices in this country?’

EL SALVADOR HONDURAS
WORD TF PF Z WORD TF PF Z
health 112 70 13 health 105 70 14
hospitals 15 15 8 education 106 68 13
employment 21 16 5 access 46 35 10
lack 29 20 5 doctor 22 21 10
access 18 13 4 application 32 26 9
problem 49 26 4 lack 66 41 8
impunity 19 14 4 services 39 27 7
doctors 19 13 4 insurance 33 24 7
causes 12 8 3 service 18 16 7
fees 14 10 3 hospitals 13 12 6
conditions 55 26 3 distribution 11 11 6
services 35 19 3 illnesses 24 18 6
poverty 36 19 3 population 43 27 6
months 18 12 3 perpetrate 26 19 6
wages 30 16 3 wealth 13 11 5
justice 43 23 3 countryside 39 24 5
day 45 22 3 children 25 18 5
budget 16 11 3 attention 19 15 5
perpetration 15 10 3 protection 13 11 5
maquilas 45 23 3 hospital 11 10 5
university 44 22 3 area 26 18 5
coffee 16 11 3 justice 74 39 5
area 44 22 3 city 33 21 5
education 130 54 3 hours 20 15 5
system 76 34 3 hands 19 13 4
conditions 59 30 4
housing 30 19 4
privatization 12 10 4
rural 27 17 4
wages 43 21 3
cities 12 9 3
poverty 56 27 3
man 12 9 3
production 31 18 3
industry 15 10 3
model 12 9 3
bad 30 16 3
TF: Total Frequency – number of times a given word appears in the activists’ discourse as a whole;
PF: Partial Frequency – number of times a given word is used by activists to respond to a specific question;
Z: Level of significance of the difference between the expected partial frequency and the observed partial frequency

ideas, such as the national interest and the
common good, most of them make an
explicit connection with the subjective con-
cerns of ‘ordinary people’. They might have
given similar answers to the question
‘What’s wrong with this country?’ but the
notion of ‘injustice’ clearly elicited the focus
of their discourse on social issues that have a
direct bearing on everyday life. The most dis-
tinctive notion in both samples is ‘health’.
We also see in the vocabulary a particular
focus on the accessibility of medical services
through terms, such as ‘access’, ‘doctors’,
‘hospitals’, ‘insurance’, and ‘services’. In El
Salvador, as in most Central American coun-
tries, public services, including basic govern-
ment functions such as policing and the
administration of justice, are generally
scarce, if not simply absent in rural areas.
This statement is an example of this sense of
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358 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
state-society distance expressed by several
respondents:
... we find that many injustices are perpetrated in
this area, our people don’t have accessible health
services, there are no medicines in the hospitals
(Case S5. Male leader of a student association in
El Salvador).
We also observe in the answers to the first
question a number of recurrent references to
the distribution of wealth, education, poverty,
and employment. However, even if the indi-
viduals in our sample were contacted prima-
rily because of their participation in a social
movement or community-based initiative, in
several cases they tend to provide examples
of problems taken from their own personal
experience:
... speaking of wages in these maquilas, you earn
the same minimum salary that is not enough for
anything. They make us work from seven in the
morning to seven in the evening with the same
salary, because the extra hours get lost when you
claim them; they say to you that you’re mistaken
(Case S3. Female worker and union organizer in El
Salvador).
... the moment we need [a doctor], it becomes
quite difficult for us to have access to them even in
hospitals, because they are concentrated in the
bigger hospitals. For us, to come from the coun-
try’s interior, sometimes it is even difficult to get a
means of transportation (Case H17. Male leader of
a peasant labour union in Honduras).
Both men and women tend to spontaneously
frame the idea of injustice in a narrative in
which the access to health and other social
services summarizes and illustrates the
denial of citizenship. While respondents of
both genders display this tendency, it is inter-
esting to note that female respondents use
politically charged categories such as
‘people’ or ‘government’ to answer this first
question significantly less often than their
male counterparts.
The second question (‘Who benefits from
this situation where injustices prevail?’) aims
at bringing the respondents to name and
describe the antagonist, a key representation in
any socio-political narrative. Table 24.2 shows
that ‘they’ are essentially ‘the rich’, the ‘busi-
ness people’, the ‘banks’, the ‘capitalists’,
and the ‘oligarchy’. These are, of course, the
usual suspects in countries such as El Salvador
and Honduras, where the financial resources
are concentrated in the hands of a few fami-
lies. But it is interesting to note in the respon-
dents’ discourse, a link between the perceived
‘systemic’ forces that create social injustice –
namely the ‘transnationals’ – and their expe-
rience and perception of the maquila, both
a reality and a symbol:
... [in the maquilas] the human being is not seen as
human; the business people and the government
only see an object of production (Case S16. Female
union leader in El Salvador).
The participants – with no significant
difference between men and women –
consistently point to the unfair conditions
they find at the maquilas – low wages, long
hours, lack of social benefits – and deplore
the fact that these businesses do not behave
as responsible corporate citizens. They do
not pay enough taxes; they only take their
self-interest into account, etc. Although this
discourse would be considered perfectly
normal in a North American setting, it
reveals an intriguing phenomenon in Latin
America. The maquila or maquiladora is a
labour-intensive assembly plant wholly or
predominantly owned by foreigners. The
maquilas manufacture products for export,
usually using parts and materials shipped on
a duty- and tariff-free basis from the market
to which the finished product is returned.
Their ‘foreignness’ is obvious to the workers
they employ and to the communities where
they are implanted. It is hardly surprising that
the maquilas have come to embody the
symbol of globalization in many Latin
American countries, particularly in Mexico
and Central America. A key aspect of the
maquila is that young women represent a
large proportion, sometimes the majority, of
its workforce. A particularly interesting phe-
nomenon is that the maquila’s foreignness
paradoxically contributes to foster higher
expectations regarding labour rights and
work conditions. They are perceived as
taking advantage of local corruption and
laxity, but social activists measure the
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SOCIAL JUSTICE IN LATIN AMERICA 359

Table 24.2 ‘Who benefits from this situation?’

EL SALVADOR HONDURAS
WORD TF PF Z WORD TF PF Z
them/they 244 92 15 transnationals 40 29 16
rich people 56 34 13 businesses 93 43 12
transnationals 21 19 13 owners 37 23 10
owners 26 18 9 them/they 205 66 9
big 67 31 8 profits 17 12 7
families 42 23 8 allowances 22 13 6
businesses 64 29 7 taxes 18 12 6
ministry 45 22 7 banks 17 10 5
capitalists 17 12 6 maquilas 58 22 5
oligarchy 11 9 6 Supreme Court 18 10 5
public servants 19 12 6 funds 18 9 4
bank 16 10 5 (they) should 10 7 4
business people 19 11 5 big 73 23 4
controls 13 9 5 (they) pay 26 11 4
banks 15 10 5 business people 34 14 4
dollar 16 9 4 control 12 7 4
same 32 14 4 work 218 52 4
colonies 23 11 4 justice 74 21 3
class 29 14 4 wants 33 11 3
pay 19 10 4 public servants 14 7 3
financial 10 7 4 major 16 8 3
works 10 7 4 (they) sell 11 6 3
(they) control 10 7 4 same ones 54 17 3
work-related 17 8 3 maquila 53 17 3
wealth 18 8 3 laws 36 13 3
capital 17 8 3 money 37 12 3
dollars 43 14 3 workforce 12 6 3
(they) want 17 8 3
Salvadorians 41 15 3
few 22 9 3
millions 25 11 3
trade 22 9 3
exploitation 20 9 3
maquila 20 9 3
taxes 29 12 3
TF: Total Frequency – number of times a given word appears in the activists’ discourse as a whole;
PF: Partial Frequency – number of times a given word is used by activists to respond to a specific question;
Z: Level of significance of the difference between the expected partial frequency and the observed partial frequency

maquila’s actors against their own ‘foreign’
standards:
... the owners of the maquilas, the transnationals
that, with our work, obtain more profits than they
would in their countries, because over there they
have to do what is fair, what the law says (Case
H10. Female participant in a peasant movement in
Honduras).
It is the third question (‘What should be done
in order to put the country on the right track?’)
that brings the respondents in our sample to
focus on the political realm (‘government’,
‘politicians’, ‘president’, ‘state’, etc.), as we
see in Table 24.3. While it was not expected
that this question would elicit radical terms
such as ‘revolution’ or ‘class struggle’, it
is still remarkable to find an extensive
vocabulary related to an essentially prag-
matic perspective: ‘measure’, ‘plan’, ‘policy’,
‘problem’, ‘project’, ‘proposition’, ‘solu-
tion’, ‘solve’, ‘to talk’, ‘to think’, ‘to try’, etc.
A key distinctive notion in the social
activists’ discourse is that of ‘change’, which
appears in several forms (i.e., the verb and
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360 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

Table 24.3 ‘What should be done in order to put the country on the right track?’
EL SALVADOR HONDURAS
WORD TF PF Z WORD TF PF Z
change 89 42 11 sectors 134 51 9
debt 13 11 7 everyone 186 64 9
FMLN 93 36 7 development 80 34 8
ignorance 14 10 6 (to) change 25 16 7
(it) needs 28 14 5 democracy 22 15 7
crisis 20 11 5 government 296 82 6
(we) want 27 14 5 civil society 24 14 6
(we) need 22 12 5 (to) demand 11 8 5
problems 52 21 5 vision 16 10 5
measure 30 15 5 change 29 14 5
(to) live 14 8 4 political 39 18 5
sectors 39 15 4 project 43 18 5
in front of 44 17 4 society 67 25 5
(to) work 43 17 4 (to) think 22 11 4
allow 10 7 4 difficult 46 17 4
policies 57 20 4 (we) think 18 10 4
solution 10 7 4 (to) work 40 16 4
centre 24 11 4 changes 40 17 4
government 281 70 4 possible 20 11 4
solve 14 8 4 (we) should 19 10 4
needs 28 12 4 to be able to 192 52 4
population 93 27 3 new 10 7 4
(to) talk 34 12 3 plan 31 14 4
(they) can 39 13 3 people 264 65 4
state 86 24 3 will 14 8 4
constitution 26 11 3 politics 84 23 3
(to) begin 11 6 3 real 15 7 3
(to) try 12 7 3 (we) want 52 18 3
democracy 24 10 3 (we) need 22 10 3
changes 25 10 3 popular 57 17 3
development 26 11 3 own 13 7 3
politicians 64 21 3
president 33 13 3
proposition 23 9 3
situation 94 26 3
TF: Total Frequency – number of times a given word appears in the activists’ discourse as a whole;
PF: Partial Frequency – number of times a given word is used by activists to respond to a specific question;
Z: Level of significance of the difference between the expected partial frequency and the observed partial frequency

the singular and plural noun). We also see in
both samples the terms ‘democracy’ and
‘development’. In what would have been
denounced by the left as ‘reformist’ language
not long ago, the respondents have tended to
frame their narrative in terms of ‘lacking’
(the word ‘lack’ itself is a distinctive notion
in the answers to the question about injus-
tices in both samples) and the need for
‘more’ and ‘better’:
... a significant change that would produce a
better environment ... to hope for a stronger left ...
with the help of faith ... and democracy, well, we
would have something better ... (Case S13. Male
participant in a political movement in El Salvador).
Many respondents identify themselves with
the ideological left (and several women with
the ‘women’s movement’), and they hope for
a major change in politics. But in most
instances, they put forward a desire for better
governance rather than for a project of struc-
tural transformation:
I believe that it’s there where we could begin to
change our country, to have a stable and engaged
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SOCIAL JUSTICE IN LATIN AMERICA 361

government, and then to create public policies ...
so things can be reversed and it becomes possible
to work efficiently, and to get involved with the
people’s health ... their basic needs ... (Case S5.
Male leader of a student association in
El Salvador).
The fourth question (‘Who speaks on
behalf of the people?’) raises the issue of col-
lective identity and political representation.
The idea of the ‘people’ is given in public
discourse in Latin America. Never precisely
defined, it usually refers to the majority of
the population as it stands outside – and
against – the ruling classes, that is, the rich
and powerful groups and families (some-
times seen as intertwined with foreign inter-
ests and thus alienated from the national
community). But this dichotomy becomes
extremely complex in the actual political
dynamic. The popular sectors in Latin
America have historically engaged in diverse
‘multi-class’ alliances, which may include
the intellectuals, the army, nationalist entre-
preneurs, etc. Certain members of these elites
have actually become the ‘representatives’ of
the people at different times and in different
contexts. While the first question deals with
the representation of ‘Us’ as victims of injus-
tice, the fourth question brings the respon-
dents to express their perception of the
‘popular’ sectors as organized actors in the
socio-political arena. Table 24.4 shows that
the national situation affected the kind of
response we got. In El Salvador, for example,
the presidential election made activists more
aware of the right-left divide and of the political

Table 24.4 ‘Who speaks on behalf of the people?’

EL SALVADOR HONDURAS
WORD TF PF Z WORD TF PF Z
the Church 57 44 24 the Church 61 53 35
voice 31 25 15 labour unions 42 28 14
the poor 106 53 15 voice 27 21 13
organizations 85 44 14 leadership 32 22 11
leadership 26 21 13 the poor 94 37 8
leaders 27 20 11 Catholic 14 11 7
Catholic 19 15 9 Bloque popular 31 17 7
Monseñor Romero 17 13 8 organizations 119 41 7
FMLN 93 32 5 proposals 14 11 7
ballot 19 11 5 truth 431 102 6
obtains 11 8 5 role 28 15 6
(to) change 30 15 5 force 36 16 5
plan 35 16 5 movement 88 27 4
(to) vote 14 8 4 I 232 57 4
(Handal) Schafik 16 9 4 actions 30 11 3
(to) mention 20 10 4 CGT 28 10 3
the left 65 23 4 (we) believe 59 17 3
(we) can 72 23 4 our 57 16 3
defense 13 8 4 labour union 47 14 3
leader 13 8 4 parties 31 12 3
churches 11 7 4 NGOs 20 9 3
message 11 7 4 ability 18 8 3
politicians 35 14 4 leaders 16 8 3
unions 16 7 3 we 460 95 3
(we) see 42 15 3 (ordinary) people 190 44 3
the right 57 18 3 (I) believe 104 27 3
party 124 32 3
campaign 13 7 3
TF: Total Frequency – number of times a given word appears in the activists’ discourse as a whole;
PF: Partial Frequency – number of times a given word is used by activists to respond to a specific question;
Z: Level of significance of the difference between the expected partial frequency and the observed partial frequency
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362 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
process itself, But among the main distinc-
tive notions common to both countries and to
both genders, the Catholic Church and ‘the
poor’ stand out. The social and political
importance of the Catholic Church in Central
America, as well as the ideological message
of the Theology of Liberation, obviously
explains these results in part (Cleary and
Steigenga, 2004). But it can also be seen as
another expression of the mounting loss of
confidence in the political institutions, some-
times even including the leftist parties and
the labour unions. The connection between
the church and the poor is seen as a funda-
mental social bond.
I consider that the church also has a leadership ...
speaking on behalf of the poor ... but perhaps
mostly at a spiritual level ... the church often
captures the message of the majority of the poor
through the closeness it has with them (Case S14.
Female member of a municipal council in
El Salvador).
... the Church is for us, at least in this region, our
saviour, not only for our sins but also for the
assaults that ... are carried out against us; she
raises her voice on our behalf, when they see that
an injustice is being committed ... against us (Case
H8. Female member of a local development organ-
ization in Honduras).
For the most part, this bond is described in
terms of local politics, everyday life, and
community issues. In this context, the ideas
of cooperation and group solidarity are
prevalent. We have seen so far that the
respondents’ discourse tends to be structured
around notions, such as health, education,
social services, wages, workplace conditions,
and (pragmatic) change. The churches
(mostly Catholic, but also Protestant) are seen
as key elements in a quest for social justice.
The answers to the fifth question (‘What is
your role in the movement?’) further
illustrate this focus on community work,
as opposed to a more militant stance.
Table 24.5 shows that in both countries this
means speaking of ‘struggles’, but also of
collective work, organization, and learning.
Interestingly, it is in the answers to this ques-
tion that the language becomes feminized.
The most distinctive notion is ‘women’ in
both samples, and we also observe several
instances of gender-specific terms. This phe-
nomenon is explained by the fact that it is the
women in the samples who introduce a dis-
tinctive vocabulary in their discourse. It is
not necessarily a ‘women’s discourse’ or a
‘discourse on women’, as the focus is gener-
ally set on issues that affect men, women,
and their families:
... we believe that with our help men and women
can attain other levels of organization, and other
economic levels, and that they can have solidarity
among themselves, and that they can have a
better life, by improving their way of thinking,
their consciousness (Case H6. Female leader in a
labor union in Honduras).
Some terms, such as ‘children’ or ‘home’,
are traditionally linked to the experience of
women. But other correlations are less easily
explained. For example, Table 24.6 shows that
the words ‘rights’, ‘spaces’, and ‘organization’
are used significantly more by women than
men in our samples. A more ‘subjective’ enun-
ciation also seems to characterize women’s
discourse (i.e., the more frequent use of the
first person singular pronoun in their
responses). Although we cannot generalize at
this exploratory stage, it appears that women
contribute a different vocabulary and, more
fundamentally, a somewhat different represen-
tation of citizenship that increasingly perme-
ates the activists’ discourse. In a study of
women’s participation in past revolutionary
movements in Latin America, Julie D. Shayne
showed that traditional notions of femininity
simultaneously enhanced and limited the value
of their contribution (Shayne, 2004: 160). It is
not yet clear if this will also be the case with
contemporary social movements, but our data
seems to support the hypothesis that women’s
participation has also made inroads into citizen
mobilization at the discursive level.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
We have suggested in this chapter that cur-
rent forms of mobilization in Latin America
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SOCIAL JUSTICE IN LATIN AMERICA 363

Table 24.5 ‘What is your role in the movement?’

EL SALVADOR HONDURAS
WORD TF PF Z WORD TF PF Z
women 198 86 19 women 260 106 16
working 39 24 10 organization 99 49 12
communities 30 17 7 federation 30 19 7
work 187 57 6 land 41 23 7
struggle 72 28 6 men 21 14 6
project 51 20 5 instruction 10 9 6
(to) instruct 10 8 5 struggle 72 30 6
(we) work 17 11 5 teachers 18 13 6
capable 10 8 5 labour union 35 19 6
students 26 12 4 succeeded 24 14 5
university 13 8 4 peace 12 9 5
instruction 13 8 4 our 99 36 5
important 28 12 4 groups 26 15 5
popular 17 9 4 support 37 18 5
our 38 15 4 process 37 18 5
groups 18 10 4 comrades 44 20 5
we (fem.) 12 8 4 structure 16 10 4
(I) can 18 9 4 woman 51 20 4
(I) feel 16 7 3 rights 74 26 4
aid 31 11 3 answer 27 14 4
organization 40 15 3 working 29 14 4
necessary 18 8 3 departments 17 10 4
our (pl.) 60 18 3 projects 34 16 4
organizations 85 25 3 peasant (adj.) 11 8 4
area 44 16 3 they/them (fem.) 62 20 3
support 25 10 3 department 10 6 3
labour union (adj.) 25 11 3 (we) try 11 6 3
social 125 33 3 we 460 110 3
new (pl.) 13 7 3 Visitación Padilla 10 6 3
we (fem.) 42 17 3
struggles 10 6 3
succeed 32 14 3
actions 30 12 3
communities 34 13 3
agricultural 14 7 3
(to) solve 18 9 3
basis 16 8 3
national 75 26 3
(we) struggle 12 7 3
struggling 11 6 3
TF: Total Frequency – number of times a given word appears in the activists’ discourse as a whole;
PF: Partial Frequency – number of times a given word is used by activists to respond to a specific question;
Z: Level of significance of the difference between the expected partial frequency and the observed partial frequency

are associated with a shift in social represen-
tations. Goals, means, and strategies cer-
tainly changed during the 1990s, but today’s
activists seem different from those in other
time periods at a conceptual level also. Our
approach does not aim at confirming this
shift or measuring its scope. We are interested
in observing how the individuals involved in
social mobilization perceive and give mean-
ing to their own actions. We consider that
recurrent vocabulary choices are due to
underlying reasons, and that those reasons
are to a great extent socially determined. We
conducted a computer-assisted discourse
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364 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

Table 24.6 Activists’ distinctive vocabulary by gender (El Salvador and Honduras)
WOMEN MEN
WORD TF PF Z WORD TF PF Z
women 458 429 99 people 471 277 8
we (fem.) 54 53 14 service 31 27 6
they/them (fem.) 95 80 11 situation 185 118 6
I 550 360 10 activities 22 19 5
maquilas 103 83 9 price 27 22 5
woman 94 77 9 university 51 38 5
men 49 45 9 actions 47 36 5
maquila 73 60 8 workers 201 123 5
workers (fem.) 66 56 8 same/equal 68 47 5
companies 157 116 8 (the) left 67 47 5
children 65 54 8 (we) consider 28 23 5
code 48 43 8 marginalization 15 13 4
owners 63 52 7 federation 37 27 4
teachers 20 20 7 (we) call 21 17 4
goal 20 20 7 services 74 50 4
comrades (fem.) 30 28 7 really 120 73 4
rights 181 128 7 president 68 45 4
production 42 36 6 persons 191 110 4
insurance 61 49 6 issues 25 20 4
violence 35 31 6 interests 50 35 4
human 41 35 6 conflict 18 15 4
(I) say 130 92 6 (we) struggle 18 15 4
job 405 257 6 aspects 15 13 4
hours 31 27 5 situations 33 24 4
(we) see 132 90 5 oligarchy 12 11 4
spaces 40 33 5 face 16 14 4
worker (fem.) 28 24 5 epoch 13 12 4
communities 64 48 5 peasant 56 38 4
rural 16 16 5 faith 19 16 4
municipalities 15 15 5 (to) give 94 59 4
organization 139 94 5 causes 13 12 4
votes 17 15 4
TF: Total Frequency – number of times a given word appears in the activists’ discourse as a whole;
PF: Partial Frequency – number of times a given word is used by activists to respond to a specific question;
Z: Level of significance of the difference between the expected partial frequency and the observed partial frequency

analysis in order to detect patterns of word tended to make an explicit connection

use. The fact that the research participants
tended to organize their narratives around
specific terms provides us with an insight
into their social representations. Even though
there is a growing interest in the symbolic
dimension of social mobilization, few sociol-
ogists and political scientists dwell on
social representations as objects of analysis
per se. Our goal is to contribute to fill this
research gap.
This chapter presented some results from a
cross-country study. The answers to the five
questions in our interview protocol showed
certain clear patterns. We saw that respondents
between the idea of justice and the subjective
experience of ‘ordinary people’, including
themselves. They identified the foreign
investors who own the maquilas as the bene-
ficiaries of the unjust economic system and
by doing so they again linked the larger
picture – neo-liberal globalization, market
liberalization – to their everyday life. We
have seen that social activists focus on self-
organization, learning, and a desire for ‘more’
and ‘better’ rather than ‘something else’.
They trust the church, but not necessarily the
political parties. Very few traces of a national-
ist stance were observed in their discourse.
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SOCIAL JUSTICE IN LATIN AMERICA
Our objective in this research is three-fold.
First, we aim to demonstrate, by means of
statistical procedures, that the ‘magma of
empirical components’ (Melucci and Lyyra,
1998: 210) and the ‘particular cultural under-
standings and practices’ (McAdam et al.,
2001: 346) that underlie social mobilization
follow some general patterns even at the
most subjective level. In this regard, our
methodology enables us to obtain robust data
on the activists’ discourse. These results can
be used, along with other types of data
(polling, event-analysis, etc.), to trace
changes and describe ‘cultural’ tendencies in
social movements. ‘Subjective’ information –
when not collected through sampling – is too
often dismissed as either non-reliable or only
relevant to a specific context. We have shown
that, by asking simple and general, non-
context-specific questions and empirically
detecting patterns in the interviewees’ choice
of words, we can observe the social represen-
tations that frame their identities, percep-
tions, and normative orientations. Second,
our analysis seems to confirm the trend
towards cultural particularism in social
mobilization. We see, in the activists’ narra-
tives, the centrality of the ‘here and now’ and
the focus on ‘transforming everyday life’
(Santos, 2001: 178). However, this phenome-
non does not necessarily translate into pur-
ely ‘spontaneous’ or mostly ‘fragmented’
activism. Our research reveals a significant
degree of cohesion in terms of the actors’
shared representations of the main issues at
stake. As we said, these representations are
not uniquely related to economic claims.
They convey a demand for inclusion in the
political and economic system, rather than
for its revolutionary transformation. The
hypothesis of the ‘institutionalization’ of
protest and the rise of a ‘movement society’
in Latin America, even if there are still sig-
nificant differences when compared to North
America, is supported by our findings. Third,
our approach is particularly suited for com-
paring different groups within the social
movements. Different vocabularies mean
different ways of framing social reality.
365
Obviously, not every choice of words reflects
a significant divergence in people’s world-
view. However, systematic preferences
when selecting words to articulate it may
indicate a distinct perception of self and of the
issues at stake. In this regard, a particularly
interesting aspect to analyze is gender-based
differences in discourse.
If we consider that one of the innovative
aspects of the current forms of social mobi-
lization in Latin America is the framing of
grievances through the language of rights,
and that preliminary evidence shows that
women produce a discourse that is more
strongly connected to the idea of ‘rights’ than
that of men while linking it to life-world
themes; we can speculate that women’s par-
ticipation in sex-integrated social movements
may have a causal effect on the way in which
social mobilization is framed. Specifically,
this means that the female activists’ focus on
life-world themes and rights claims could
contribute to further the shift towards ‘citizen
mobilization’ and away from other forms of
mobilization that focus on political issues
and are prone to frame their agenda in terms
of antagonistic confrontation. Citizens’ move-
ments seek recognition of individual and
group rights, rather than trying to impose a
specific program of overall social transforma-
tion. They stress on intra- and inter-group
cooperation, but they assign a particular value
to autonomy, both individual and communal.
Does this shift towards a less disruptive,
more routinized, and more individualized
mobilization spell the end of conflict as the
main factor of social change in Latin
America? The answer is, of course, no.
However, conflict, as well as cooperation,
becomes more institutionalized through the
notion of citizenship. The notions of citizen-
ship and dignity were not often explicitly
invoked, but they appeared to permeate the
respondents’ narratives. Their central demand
is to be treated fairly by the state and by the
market. The very idea that fair conditions at
the workplace and proper services provided
by the state should be normally expected
constitutes in itself a new phenomenon in
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366 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
Latin America. But is this a process of de-
politicization? It could actually be argued
that we are witnessing the emergence of new
forms of political action, based on a more
individualistic – but not necessarily egotisti-
cal (self-centred) – conception of emancipa-
tion and empowerment. More research is
needed to explore the changing links between
citizenship and subjectivity. Discourse analy-
sis is a particularly useful tool to this end.
NOTES
1 This project is funded by a Standard Research
Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada.
2 This research will include four more countries:
Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, and Guatemala.
3 This procedure was carried out using
Lexico3, a software program developed by André
Salem at Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle –
Paris III (France).
REFERENCES
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représentations sociales. Ramonville, France:
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Armony, Victor (2004) L’énigme argentine.
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Auyero, Javier (2003) Contentious Lives. Two
Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the
Quest for Recognition. Durham: Duke
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Billig, Michael (1993) ‘Studying the Thinking
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David V. Canter (eds.) Empirical Approaches
to Social Representations. Oxford, UK:
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Bourdieu, Pierre (1994) Raisons pratiques. Sur
la théorie de l’action. Paris: Seuil.
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Cohen, Jean L. and Arato, Andrew (1999) Civil
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Colburn, Francis (2002) Latin America at the
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Globalisation’, in J. Mittelman (ed.)
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‘Social Movements in the Mexico City Airport
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279–93.
Della Porta, Donatella and Diani, Mario (1999)
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Della Porta, Donatella and Tarrow, Sidney
(2005) Transnational Protest and Global
Activism. People, Passions, and Power.
NY: Rowman & Littlefield.
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Garretón, Antonio (2001) ‘La transformación
de la acción colectiva en América Latina’,
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Cortez.
Hawkesworth, Mary (2003) ‘Congressional
Enactments of Race–Gender: Toward a
Theory of Raced–Gendered Institutions’,
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529–50.
Jordan, Tim (2002) Activism! Direct Activism,
Hacktivism and the Future of Society.
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Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal (1985)
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
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McAdam, Doug, Sampson, Robert J., Weffer,
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‘“There Will Be Fighting in the Streets:” The
Distorting Lens of Social Movement Theory’,
Mobilization, 10: 1–18.
McAdam, Doug, Tarrow, Sidney and Tilly,
Charles (2001) Dynamics of Contention. NY:
Cambridge University Press.
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SOCIAL JUSTICE IN LATIN AMERICA
Melucci, Alberto and Lyyra, Timo (1998)
‘Collective Action, Change, and Democracy’, in
Marco G. Giugni, Doug McAdam and Charles
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Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 203–27.
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Strawn, Kelley D. (2003) ‘Emerging Trends in
the Study of Protest and Social Movements’,
in Betty A. Dobratz, Timothy Buzzell and
Lisa K. Waldner (eds.) Research in Political
Sociology, 11: 213–44.
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Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2001) ‘Los
nuevos movimientos sociales’, Observatorio
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Shayne, Julie D. (2004) The Revolution Question:
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9781412934633-Chap-25 1/10/09 8:56 AM Page 368
Industrial and Labour
Studies, Socio-Economic
Transformation, Conflict,
and Cooperation in KwaZulu
Natal
‘There is gold in the workers’ brain’. (Motto, Nissan
Motor Corporation)
‘they took the gold from the holes where
the walls are singing
there is none in our brain, there is;
bile, there’. (Terence Miya-ex Mineworker)
I will argue that both the slogan of the Nissan
Corporation, so popular in new managerial cir-
cles and the black miner’s response and lament
are wrong. Instead I will attempt to show how
more complex than a precious clump are the
legacies and pressures that ruminate in work-
ers’ cultural formations and brains; I will also
attempt to show how difficult it will be to find
a way into a culture of participation and
growth, and, how social analysis can con-
tribute to clarifying the decisions that will have
to mark our lives in these times of change, here
in KwaZulu Natal (KZN).
25
Ari Sitas
INTRODUCTION
For a brief period of approximately 20 years
the platform was there for ordinary black
people to express not only their grievances
and anger but also a rich trove of popular
wisdom, self-determination and ingenuity.
The rise of a labour movement created the
conditions for anticipation as ordinary
people got caught between a past that had
become unlivable and a future that had not
been born. Furthermore, the Apartheid state
and its repressive policies made sure that
people mattered and were central to the
emerging politics of liberation. As most stud-
ies of labour problems in the 1970s and
1980s have commented: the survival of trade
unions necessitated the development of demo-
cratic shop steward structures, the circulation
9781412934633-Chap-25 1/10/09 8:56 AM Page 369
COOPERATION IN KWAZULU NATAL
of leaderships and tight forms of popular
accountability.
Trade unionism and its regional features
have been extensively researched in broad
overviews describing its growth and assess-
ing its successes and failures. Their modern
narratives usually start from the province of
Natal: the Durban strikes of 1973, the growth
of industrial trade unions, their democratic
forms, their struggles for recognition and
their confident surge into a political challenge
against Apartheid (Basckin, 1991; Friedman,
1987; Lambert and Webster, 1988; Maree,
1986; Murray, 1987; Sitas, 1990.)
By the 1990s, not only were trade unions
present in 80% of all the firms with
more than a thousand employees (Labour
Monitoring Group, 1988) but, also, as two
large-scale social surveys (Ginsburg et al.,
1995; Orkin and Pityana 1992) demon-
strated, there was depth and substance in the
democratic beliefs of these worker leaders.
This, in KwaZulu Natal, did not vary despite
the high proportion of shop steward leaders
with migrant worker roots and with home-
steads in the countryside. Whereas a clear
picture of shop stewards, their beliefs and
priorities has emerged, less has been written
on the self-motivation and cultural energy of
another kind of leadership: a cultural core
which was particularly strong in KwaZulu
Natal until 1992 (Meer, 1987).
Indeed much of the cultural energy in creat-
ing a labour movement subsisted on forms of
rhetoric, performance and communication,
deeply embedded in Zulu traditions and sym-
bolism (Bonnin, 1987; Sitas, 1986, 1987,
1988). It has been estimated that approxi-
mately 1500 members of the Congress of
South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in
Natal were active between 1985 and 1992 in
such energetic work. Furthermore, the cultural
formations and networks that pre-existed trade
unionism, what sociology terms ‘informal
organizations’, betrayed not only a silent and
subterranean resistance against managerial
authority (Sitas, 1985) but also a deep-seated
culture of mistrust (Hemson, 1979) and social
distance from managerial prerogatives.
369
We are now witnessing, though, a transfor-
mation of the trade union movement in South
Africa from a social movement into an
ambiguous new entity, in a province marked
by violence, dissent and intolerance. We are
witnessing, too, a new language of participa-
tion and cooperation. As ordinary citizens we
need to ask about the prospects of the tide
turning into a cooperative relationship; about
the prospects of success for a new manage-
rial initiative that speaks of innovation and
change. What can we say about the priorities
of the Reconstruction and Development
Programme (hitherto-RDP), which demands
the self-motivation of ordinary people to
‘drive’ it? How can this cruel laboratory of
social relations yield a new society? Our
studies have the unfortunate task of answer-
ing these difficult questions.
THE DEFINITION OF POST-APARTHEID
PRIORITIES AND THE BLACK LABOUR
‘DEFICIT’
Corporate capital, organized labour, the
Government of National Unity (GNU) and
the Reconstruction and Development Pro-
gramme (RDP) all seem to agree: a democratic
future demands a productive and prosperous
economy. The secret for achieving this, we
are told, lies in the motivation, productivity,
work ethic and discipline of our predomi-
nantly black work force. This belief is also
nurtured by scholars and policy-makers
whose different approaches converge on the
need for a productive and disciplined
labour force and within that new-sought
discipline, the central role human capacities
will have to play: ‘the ability to survive
and succeed in the new world … depends
not on the amorphous notion of “competi-
tiveness”’, notes Michael Porter (1990: 6),
‘but on the productivity with which a
nation’s resources (labor and capital) are
employed’.
The consensus that such an effort by pre-
dominantly black people, which calls for the
9781412934633-Chap-25 1/10/09 8:56 AM Page 370
370 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
transformation of aptitudes and attitudes,
hinges on four frames:
(a) Necessity: the new globalized world
economy demands a new competitive capacity.
Therefore, as neo-liberal economists insist,
labour needs to develop a new sense of disci-
pline, indeed some have gone far enough to
call for what amounts to, in the words of
Michel Foucault (1979), a new ‘disciplinary
regime’ that would develop in tandem with a
new productive culture. Without it, local,
regional and national economies will buckle
under the productivity-driven miracles of the
East. As Peter Berger argued recently the East
had found an economic culture, which brought
about modernization and a ‘secularity of its
own’ (1987: 162). Oriental Confucianism with
its ‘respect for superiors, its collective solidar-
ity and its emphasis on discipline’ (Berger,
1987: 163) has created a new dynamo in the
world economy, without undergoing Western-
style ‘individuation’ (Berger, 1987: 170).
(b) Nation-Building: the new South Africa
demands a move from a culture of adversari-
alism between capital and labour, between
white power-blocs and black people, to a new
system of cooperative bargaining based on
‘corporatist’ relations between the state, capi-
tal and labour. The glue for this new ‘growth’
and ‘development’ or to use a more scientific
description, the ‘synergy’ between compet-
ing interests is to be provided by the
Reconstruction and Development Programme
in the name of the national interest.
Of course as Mike Morris has argued
(1991: 34), ‘the composition … of the national
interest is precisely a site of struggle between
the various contending classes and social forces
in any historical situation’. Nevertheless, such
struggles are seen to be postponed given the
RDP’s holistic, moral and consensual
approach to growth. Very few people would
deny the need for meeting basic needs, devel-
oping our human resources, restructuring the
economy and democratizing our society, in
short, burying Apartheid’s legacy with deter-
mination and vigour.
At a micro-level, managements have been
receptive to the RDPs priorities too. As recent
research has shown (Kruger and Sitas, 1995),
such a sense of cooperative bargaining is
held in high regard in most managerial cir-
cles in the largest corporations of KZN. As a
human resource practitioner in one of these
giants asserted (Kruger and Sitas, 1995: 11))
with enthusiasm:
to look at how people have changed and how the
paradigms are beginning to change themselves, all
this ... elasticity! The old ... is starting to burst.
Soon a new one will come through the gap with a
new colour mentality, a new way of doing things.
At the moment it is mainly subliminal than out in
the open.
Despite the ‘subliminal’ nature of the
‘new’, growth and development is seen to be
the consequence of serious motivational
strategies for worker participation. ‘We need
to motivate our workers to be part of the pro-
ductive effort’, asserted a senior HR Director
in KZN and added with conviction that,
‘when a black man clocks in the morning,
he’s clocking out, in his mind’. The new
paradigm, the new ‘glue’ is the latest mana-
gerial rage.
The need for a new motivational approach
has been trumpeted further by the Government
of National Unity: no lesser man than Nelson
Mandela has argued that motivation, respon-
sibility, self-discipline, all embedded in the
‘Masakhane’ campaign, were central for the
delivery of the RDP and the building of a
democratic ‘rainbow nation’.
(c) Current Incapacity: Both the competi-
tive demands of a new world economy and
the need to build a developed country are
faced with a devastating weakness: our
defective human resource capacities. As the
RDP stated (1994: 58), racial domination cre-
ated nothing short of ‘destruction, distortion
and neglect’. The black population lacks the
skills, suffers from illiteracy, and lacks tech-
nological education and training. Nothing
short of a human resource revolution would
be able to create the human capital for inter-
national competitiveness and economic
growth.
As Manuel Castells stated too, in his remark-
able work, The Informational City (1989: 15),
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COOPERATION IN KWAZULU NATAL
the … capacity of labor to process information and
generate knowledge is, more than ever, the mate-
rial source of productivity, and therefore economic
growth and social well-being. Yet this symbolic
capacity of labor is not an individual (my emphasis)
attribute. Labor has to be formed, educated,
trained and retrained, in flexible manipulation of
symbols, determining its ability constantly to repro-
gram itself …
(d) Good Practice: The latest ideas in
managerial thinking, and indeed the latest
from the main government administration
schools, seem to have turned away from
looking at profitability as a chemical adjust-
ment of ‘factored’ prices, or injections of
cash. They are convinced that the qualitative
transformation of socio-cultural relation-
ships, and a more participatory culture on the
shop floor is good for business.
Much of the new managerial leadership
argues that workers cannot be treated as a
commodity or a unit of production any more.
Following some Japanese models of work
organization they argue that workers must be
seen as a human resource for productivity
and innovation and that their participation
is central to managerial decision-making.
They are responsible for the new forms of
authority – not only the iron cage of bureau-
cratic control but also the soul cage of partic-
ipative management.
Finally, to quote a senior executive in
KZN: ‘… human beings are all diverse and
one had to become far more flexible in
your approach to problems, and people
were invariably at the base of those prob-
lems…’. They are ‘not just objects to be
shuffled around’. This was not only good
practice but also a rational decision based
on technical innovations, which in turn
demanded multi-skilling, on the spot deci-
sion-making and a new decentralized com-
mand structure.
Despite the invocations and appeals from
managements and government captured by
the frames of necessity, of nation–building,
of incapacity and good sense, black workers
seem to be resistant to the framing. One has
witnessed, too, the growth among black
workers of a culture of militant ‘entitlement’.
371
Even in the most quiescent contexts, black
workers seem to be indifferent to manage-
ments’ efforts to introduce participative
schemes.
The new era, in turn, seems to have con-
structed a new creature: the black worker of
the new South Africa – at once a ‘resource’
and a ‘problem’, a ‘body’ and a ‘brain’ that is
‘untrained’ and a repository of ‘gold’ and
tacit knowledge, but also an unproductive
traditionalist and a modernizing partner,
something to be reshaped and someone who
must ‘reprogram itself’, a creature of feel-
ings and aspirations and a militant problem,
the nation itself and an obstacle to nation-
building. There is in front of us a developing
invention which, to summarize the media
pronouncements, must be at the same time:
‘patriotic’, ‘tolerant’ of wage-restraint meas-
ures, ‘putting’ others first who are more
needy, like the unemployed, ‘self-educated,
multi-skilled and flexible’.
The new ‘dominant language’ or ‘hege-
monic discourse’ demands a new ‘soul’, a
new voluntary surrender and discipline,
based on what Tito Mboweni has named a
‘sense of social partnership’ (1995: 26). It
demands that ‘the ordinary citizen needs to
internalize respect for human rights, for
democratic ways, for the rules of society’
(1995: 28).
The ‘discourse’ signposts a struggle
around ‘normative transformation’ (Sitas,
1984: 195). All of us are busy, in the interests
of reason, progress and transformation, con-
structing a new mechanism of inclusion and
exclusion, with very subtle discriminations;
we are unwittingly creating a new political
economy of aberration: the black worker
on strike, the young man who sees work as
another kind of slavery, the violent vigilante,
the idler, the criminal, the reluctant bureau-
crat, the revolutionary activist, the marginal-
ized, are among many more unlisted here,
the new pariahs, the exemplars of social
indiscipline.
According to Michel Foucault (1979: 138)
a warning becomes necessary, as ‘… discipline
increases the forces of the body (in economic
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372 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
terms of utility) and diminishes the same
forces (in political terms of obedience). If
economic exploitation’, continues Foucault,
‘separated the force and product of labour, let
us say that disciplinary coercion establishes
the constricting link between an internal
aptitude … The soul’, he concluded, ‘was,
the chain of the body’.
The claim that black workers need to
develop a new soulful orientation for eco-
nomic growth, for the RDP marks two shifts.
Firstly, such a participation is not seen as a
pragmatic/strategic or an instrumental neces-
sity but as a ‘value’ – it is the moral impera-
tive of nation-building. Secondly it marks a
shift from a focus on inequality and power in
this society to an appeal to ‘voluntarism’: to
the compliance, performance or failure in the
efforts of ordinary people. Our failure will be
counted, not so much on the scales of class,
power, race and access but on the effort of
ordinary people.
It is precisely here that sociology is asked
to both use and suspend its analytical tools:
to help in the motivation of the majority of
our people to ‘deliver’, and be silent on the
constraints that make motivation impossible;
conversely, to choose to speak the ‘unspeak-
able’ is seen to be damaging the motivational
effort.
COLONIAL MANAGERIALISM
Industrial sociology and psychology, the dis-
ciplines that constitute Industrial and Labour
Studies, were developed to deal with the
problem of ‘motivation’ in modern bureau-
cracies and mass production enterprises.
Their history in the advanced capitalist coun-
tries differs fundamentally from our own.
As engineers, planners and economists in
the West concentrated on the flows and
rhythms of the production process, and
defined the nature of work, its output and its
quotas, social scientists were enlisted to deal,
in the words of Harry Braverman, 1974 with
the ‘human machinery’. Their task was to
help workers adjust to the dictates of mass
production and help managements to fathom
new motivational strategies.
At first their founders were pragmatic
men, searching for influence, credibility and
funds for their ideas. They felt that the rising
scientific management movement that swept
through industry in the first 30 years of the
twentieth century was ignoring the ‘human
factor’. With their insights and methods,
industry could motivate a rather recalcitrant
labour force; through cooperation between
the University and industry one could create
a feedback process through which the new
cadre of personnel managers could expect to
be trained. In turn, these experts could become
effective handlers of labour problems.
It is precisely this interaction between
industrial sociologists and psychologists and
industrialists in the West that branded them
as ‘servants of power’. Instead of being seen
as scientists of work-related problems they
were seen to be the ideologues of adjustment
to the dominant norms and values of society.
Instead of questioning the nature of work, its
monotony and repetitive character, they
sought to adjust workers to its rhythms.
Instead, finally, of lending their craft to
human improvement, they sought commis-
sions and awards from the short-term priori-
ties of corporate elites.
Furthermore, sociology’s broader theoreti-
cal tradition claimed to be able to explain the
chemistry of capitalism’s success. Weber’s
idea that modernity could not only be
explained through economic causes but had
to grasp cultural and ideational factors – ‘the
part which religious forces have played in
forming the developing web of our … worldly
modern culture’ (1958: 90) led to problematic
conclusions. Capitalism’s emergence, its cal-
culating rationality and its accumulating
ethos was seen to be peculiar to Europe,
and this ‘emergence’ was due to the self-
discipline, asceticism and motivation of what
he termed its ‘Protestant Ethic’. Of course
there was the related claim that the Orient
remained the ‘enchanted garden’ of the
world, since powerful values embedded in
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COOPERATION IN KWAZULU NATAL
Confucianism and Buddhism became obsta-
cle to modernity. They did not facilitate the
self-discipline amongst entrepreneurs and
workers to achieve the savings, investment
and growth of Europe.
By the 1960s Weber’s explorations of
world religions, economic rationality and
development were turned into crude parodies
through theories of ‘modernization’. These
theories described a necessary evolution
from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ societies which
demanded a change in occupational roles
and cultural values, since as long as the com-
munal ties of the past marked the lives of
ordinary people, backwardness was to be
their lot.
The flattening of the world’s cultures and
their histories into a ‘traditional society’, or a
‘pre-capitalist’ mush, was not only ‘Euro-
centric’ in conception, empirically wrong,
and self-serving; it also missed the point that
other values could be more dynamic as envi-
ronments for accumulation than European
ones. Islam, Buddhism and Confucianism
have not been strangers to economic growth;
since World War II, such a claim would
sound preposterous.
In South Africa, social analysis was
marked by the many apologists of segrega-
tion and Apartheid. The notion of a culturally
backward black labour in South Africa,
marked by the chains of ‘traditionalism’ has
been common fare throughout the twentieth
century. Similarly, the connection between
race, culture, control and productivity has not
been new either. It has always been reworked
and re-presented as a peculiar problem and a
constant debate: the capacity of black people
to be modern, to be good workers, to be dis-
ciplined employees. It has been the dominant
monologue of white supremacy. Blade
Nzimande (1991) has fingered such ideas as
the core of our distorted minds and unfortu-
nately too our managerial commonsense:
‘The Native in industry is an incredible prob-
lem’, mused a Foundry Manager in 1946.
‘He’ was uncontrollable, disinterested in wage
incentives, making unreasonable demands
and ‘once you have nailed him down and he
373
finds that he cannot wriggle any longer out of
his work ... he simply walks out to find an
easier job ...’ (Brecknell, 1949: 1127).
The Board of Trade and Industries and the
Federated Chamber of Industries disagreed:
Natives possess a natural aptitude for the perform-
ance of repetitive tasks, which are the basis of
mass production manufacture. … The facts of
monotony and consequent fatigue, so important a
problem in mass production is virtually non-
existent as far as the Native is concerned, espe-
cially if he is employed on machines with rhythmic
motions (Federated Chamber of Industries, in
Greenberg, 1980: 191).
By 1959, W. Hudson (1959: 54), a person-
nel specialist could write through the pages
of Engineer and Foundryman that
there are signs that the genesis of African
Industrial Man has already taken place. The tradi-
tionalist may still survive in remoter areas. The
migrant labourer may represent a half-way house
in the development, a stage that may be accept-
able under certain tropical conditions. But in the
transition to industrialization, the urban African
worker has already passed the point of no return.
From the perspective of black intellectuals
in the 1940s and 1950s, the above opinions
must have felt like the dialogue of the deaf
and the blind. The notions of ‘African
Industrial Man’, of the tribal ‘Native’, of the
‘problem’ and ‘cipher’ was at the heart of
the ‘mass murmurings’ and conflicts of the
period. It was to the credit of Natal
University’s sociology department, through
the leadership of Leo Kuper, to have rejected
the Apartheid commonsense of ‘tribal
Africans’. Instead of an inferior culture
he spoke of colonial domination and cultural
pluralism. Instead of the ‘detribalized Native’,
he saw the frustrated aspirations of a black
middle-class; and as a liberal, he stared at the
‘mass murmurings’ of defiance and struggle
and highlighted the passive resistance tradi-
tions of the region. Instead of accepting the
fences between people that Apartheid
erected, he explored spatial patterns and
racial forms of urban poverty.
For our understanding of the sociology of
industry though we have to turn to the semi-
nal work of Pierre Van Den Berghe (1964)
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374 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
who found Caneville – the sugar plantation,
mill and the town that developed around it
(1964: 66), a ‘benevolent dictatorship’ with a
strict ‘hierarchy of races’ (1964: 73). He
unpacked for us the peculiar colonial man-
agerialism that marked the industrial heritage
of our region.
The widespread repression of the early
1960s marked also the decline of the ‘Natal
School’. Leo Kuper left for moral and politi-
cal reasons; his protégés Ben Magubane and
Fatima Meer went into exile, and spent many
years banned, respectively; Hilstan Watts
continued measuring poverty, but was left
unnoticed until the early 1970s when the
Security Police found his insistence that
there were poor black people, subversive.
At best a ‘pragmatic realism’ developed
which began to dialogue with power elites
about the need for reform. Through large
social surveys it tried to convince that the
aspirations of the black majority were for-
eign to Apartheid decrees. At the broader
level, the dignity black people and black
labour were imbued with in the Kuper
‘period’ reverted back to the crude cultural-
ism of management schools: ‘motivating the
Bantu to work’.
It was only after the Durban strikes in
1973, however, and the continuing challenge
of black worker militancy in the 1970s, that a
new sociological school arose, which has
been described as the New Labour Studies.
Its priorities were to ‘understand ... the subjec-
tive experience of work’ (Webster, 1991: 3).
As he explains:
in trying to find answers to why workers were join-
ing the new industrial unions in large numbers,
sociologists were drawn beyond the workplace to
an examination of working class cultural forma-
tions as well as powerful political traditions that
shape the attitudes and political behaviour of black
workers. These new directions brought the subjec-
tive experience of work into industrial sociology
generating a number of studies which analyzed
culture and working life and the relationship of
unions to new social movements – what has been
called social movement unionism (1991: 3).
Particularly in Natal, with its divided work-
forces and idiosyncrasies, New Labour Studies
sought to look at people and workers, not as
commodities, the muscle, the fibre, the
brain – they were not only a calculation or a
price, but a social force and therefore group-
ings with cultural significance, and individu-
als with private, social needs ‘and the
creative energy to participate fully in cultural
and political life’ (Webster, 1991: 3). Such an
emphasis moved from the abstractions, ‘factor
of production’, ‘abstract labour power’, to
view working people’s lives from the perspec-
tive of the concrete, the qualitative, what I
have termed, the ‘cultural formation’.
The emerging field was the result of a vari-
ety of ‘fusions’ between theoretical work,
moral critique, commitments to struggles for
worker rights, the mixing up of many anti-
Apartheid discourses and the challenge of
major socio-economic struggles in the area.
There were also echoes of Christian libera-
tion theology, and the communitarian tradi-
tions of Ethiopian and Zionist churches
brought to the projects through working class
intellectuals.
Our first contribution (Kruger and Sitas,
1995) was to understand a managerialism
which was bifocal. There was the world of
white managers, artisans and workers (and to
a lesser extent of ‘Indians’ and ‘Coloureds’),
which was governed by ‘modern’ statutes
and collective bargaining. There was also the
world of black workers, and ‘Zulus’ which
over and above the segregationist statute of
the Apartheid years, was also governed by
‘traditional’ authorities. This style of gover-
nance of people at work, we can label as
‘colonial managerialism’. A managerialism
that ruled African workers differentially and
elicited traditional forms of control to maxi-
mize its modernized benefits. A style similar
to Chakrabarty’s (1989: 177) description of
Bengali jute-mills in the first part of the
twentieth century, with its peculiar gover-
nance steeped in an imagined oriental tradi-
tion, its displays of power and opulence and
control.
What was peculiar about Natal’s industrial-
ization was the coexistence of ‘scientific man-
agement’ and bureaucratic forms of control
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COOPERATION IN KWAZULU NATAL
alongside such ‘indirect rule’, ‘tribal’ or
‘traditional’ forms of consent and coercion.
Black workers were not only denied labour
rights because trade unions were seen to be
an anathema to the factory owners – far from
it, trade unionism was seen as a necessary
headache among white, Indian and coloured
workers – but because they were seen to be
‘foreign’ to African culture and aspirations.
Our focus on managerialism was the first
contribution in industrial and labour studies.
The second, and my work has incessantly
chipped away at this, was to understand ordi-
nary people’s cultural formations and, as a
participant, to fathom the ‘creative energy’
that animated the trade unions throughout the
1980s. Before analyzing the significance of
this militant tradition, I will outline a series
of concepts that define the parameters of the
formation of this new consciousness.
THE SOURCES OF DISSONANCE,
ALTERITY AND RESISTANCE ON THE
SHOP FLOOR
The following lists the operative concepts,
used for an understanding of dissonance,
alienation and resistance.
First, I would like to posit a distinction
between ‘defensive combinations’ and ‘cul-
tural formations’. In the context of modern
institutional and organizational life, with its
work patterns, its repetitive tasks and routines,
people recoil from and refract pressures by
forming groups, networks and informal
associations. Defensive combinations are
so many practical ways of regulating the
rhythms of work, of regulating social interac-
tion, of regulating relationships to authority
and power. In the classic work on asylums by
Erving Goffman (1974) we were shown how
the patients coped in their total institution
and developed a public and a private world,
which regulated the perceptions and interac-
tions. ‘Defensive combinations’ might turn to
‘cultural formations’ if the regulation of
everyday life is underpinned by reciprocal
375
norms, values and symbolic markers, and
belonging to a group is not only driven by
practical and instrumental considerations.
Second, I would like to posit a distinc-
tion between ‘dissonance’ and ‘alterity’.
‘Dissonance’ denotes the relationship between
organizational goals and the practices that
result from ‘defensive combinations’. There
is always dissonance between the perform-
ance demands of an organization and the
actual rhythms of work on the shop floor.
Such dissonance, if not managed, creates a
‘drift’ between the definition of a ‘good
worker’ and the actual empirical sum of
workers and their actions in the engine room.
Consequently, organizational life becomes a
shifting terrain where managements try and
turn dissonance into productive engagement
by force or fiat.
‘Alterity’ denotes a relationship between
organizational goals and the actions of ‘cul-
tural formations’. Here, the organizational
goals and worker goals are distinct and
follow differential trajectories. Such a differ-
ence and indeed tension is not necessarily
conflictual, but it can lead to organizational
inertia. The cultural formations of ordinary
workers can always present the demands of
managements as ‘external’ to their aspira-
tions and logic.
The struggle to transform conditions of
dissonance and alterity into constant produc-
tive adjustment constitute the sphere of shop
floor politics.
Third, I would like to posit a distinction
between ‘domination’ and ‘hegemony’.
‘Domination’ is the ability of a group,
a power-bloc, a class, to exercise its will
with or without its subordinates’ consent.
‘Hegemony’ is the ability of a group, a
power-bloc, a class, to exercise moral and
intellectual leadership or authority and
through that gain its members’ or subordi-
nates’ consent. Consent might be unifocal:
involving a feeling of total ‘belonging’; it can
also be based on differentiation: involving a
feeling of being legitimately different –
e.g., despite poverty and obvious wealth, the
poor might come to think that they deserve
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376 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
their station. Hegemony, finally, as Belinda
Bozzoli (1991: 2) has argued, is a process, a
‘moving equilibrium in which spaces are cre-
ated, fought for and won by those at the
bottom from those at the top’.
Both domination and hegemony can exist
at the institutional level: this school, this fac-
tory, that church; or can exist at the broadest
level: the state, between states, across empires.
Fourth, social movements arise once the
webs that connect rulers and ruled, the pow-
erless and the powerful, get torn by crises, by
violations of expectations, by manifold
instances that might be intrinsic or extrinsic
to the relationship. They sustain themselves
as movements by mobilizing the dissonance
and alterity that exists, and coordinate in new
ways the defensive combinations and cultural
formations that subsist in ordinary people’s
lives. They sustain themselves better if the
process of coordination involves the mobi-
lization of physical and symbolic resources.
Through the latter they establish new relation-
ships and a counter-hegemony that begins to
challenge dominant norms and institutions.
This should be distinguished from move-
ments of revaluation – a radical attempt to
impose the imagined old norms.
Finally, the crisis and collapse of cultural
formations might lead to anomie, normless-
ness and despair.
Fifth, I would like to posit four related and
yet distinct ‘pressures’ that are crucial in the
genesis of cultural formations. These are
‘alienation’, ‘disvaluation’, ‘disoralia’ and
‘degendering’. I posit these as substitutes for
Marx’s all encompassing concept of alien-
ation or Durkheim’s 1984 anomie, as the
defining psychopathologies of modern times.
‘Alienation’ still echoes Marx’s argument
that modern capitalism created a world in
which workers were alienated from the prod-
uct of their labour and the work process
itself, which made them indifferent to the
priorities of capital and created unique psy-
chosocial pressures.
‘Disvaluation’ refers to a pressure that
demands of people not reciprocal, morally
grounded relationships but instrumental ones
based on hierarchy, exchange value and output
quotas.
‘Disoralia’ refers to a pressure, which
arises, from the distortion of symbolic, lin-
guistic and communicative interaction due to
the command language and practical intent
of organizational and civic life.
‘Degendering’ refers to pressure on cus-
tomary gender roles.
All these pressures, acting in concert,
propel people to recoil from them and in that
process group together with others to refract
their force and create communities of mean-
ing and practices that regulate everyday life.
In this sense, one has to concur with Bozzoli
that ‘consciousness [is] formed within and
against structures, rather than above and
around them’ (1991: 2).
With this elaborate process of conceptual
distinctions we can trace parameters of expe-
rience and conflict, of accommodation and
resistance. We can also explore how a chal-
lenge to managements and the apartheid state
subsisted within a ‘symbolic capital’ gener-
ated by ordinary black workers in Natal in
the context of their struggles for workers’
rights, democracy and a new communitarian-
ism. I argue that in the course of trade union
mobilization, black workers used whatever
practical and emotive means they had at their
disposal to create a new language and many
new images of resistance. In the process, a
shifting and volatile ‘discursive formation’ of
class, nation, ethnicity and gendering has
emerged which has helped the threading
together of an importantly new ‘horizontal
comradeship’.
More specifically, approximately a thou-
sand of them participated in the making of
plays, reviving oral traditions of perform-
ance, composed and sung, wrote and told sto-
ries as an aspect of their self-definition. Their
contribution in turn, has crafted many of
the ways their co-workers understood
their consciousness-in-the-making. As many
of Natal’s workers crowded inside union
offices, halls and then, stadiums, they could
not but come to touch and be touched by the
cultural energies around them.
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COOPERATION IN KWAZULU NATAL
The case study is based on the narratives
of 120 of these grassroots intellectuals. That
their emergence and ‘image-ing’ of the nature
of their experience has happened under
extreme conditions of conflict and ‘struggle’
needs little comment.
The core of the cultural leadership in the
trade unions came from all over the KwaZulu
Natal countryside. More precisely, 23% trace
their parental homesteads in the territories
of Northern Natal/KwaZulu, the heart of the
Zulu Kingdom of the late nineteenth century;
20% of them from Natal’s Midlands, 18%
from Southern Natal, 11% in the northern
interior areas around Paulpietsburg and
Newcastle. Only 6% came from any areas
adjacent to Durban. They reflected a wide net
of experiences from all over the region.
These parental homesteads experienced
the agrarian transformations and pressures of
the last century – the Midlands all the way to
Northern Natal in the interior were marked
by conditions of labour tenancy on white
farms, with major upheavals in the 1906/7
periods and the post 1960s period as labour
tenancy was abolished. The Northern territo-
ries experienced chief-regulated access to
land and migrations to the Reef and Durban
for a wage. The South homesteads share
experiences closer to those of the North; but
with an intensification of ‘betterment schemes’
in the late 1950s with large upheavals. Most
(95%) of their fathers were a migratory
labour force. In 60% of the cases, mothers
were responsible for homestead reproduction
without any moves to the urban areas.
Although their parental homesteads were
rural, urbanization was already underway
during their parents’ working life, as 39% of
them were born in townships. Still, the emo-
tional grip of the countryside was enormous
as 61% were born in the countryside and
underwent primary socialization there.
The majority (46%) of the black workers
in this case study were semi-skilled machine
and process operators. Another 26% – 13%
each – clerical workers and drivers, and only
6% of them were unskilled labourers,
4% domestic workers and 2% supervisors.
377
This compares well, with shop steward statis-
tics compiled in 1992, where the majority in
KwaZulu Natal, (48%), were drawn from
similar occupations (Meer, 1987). By contrast
72% of their parents were classified as
unskilled migrant workers.
In 1941, Baba Khumalo came from the
Underberg region to find a job in Durban.
His patriarch, who refused to enter the labour
market, sent his sons out for contracts and,
through the earnings gathered, kept his rural
homesteads intact. Whereas at first Khumalo
relied on kin and their networks to get jobs in
domestic service, in gardening and cleaning,
he found the job that was to keep him for the
rest of his years at a large rubber company.
The company shed its Indian workers after a
strike and proceeded to employ migrant
African workers. As one of the first mass
producing firms, it tested one of the beliefs of
the time: that ‘Natives’, because of their cultural
make-up and their need for money, were suit-
able for mass production. He was given a job
and found a bed in the municipal compound.
Khumalo’s descriptions of the work
process, its impersonal moments, and its
ruthless performance standards capture what
he termed ‘khalo’, the Zulu word denoting
pain and lament, grievance and lamentation,
in short, a series of feelings that could be
covered by the term for the experience of
alienation. These new workers, gathered
from all over KwaZulu Natal, soon estab-
lished networks of regulation, restricting
output, socializing new recruits and develop-
ing a series of defensive combinations.
Within them, an informal leadership, which
included him for standing up to a foreman,
created a perceived ‘dissonance’. Management
responded by appointing a series of tribal
representatives or izinduna to create channels
of communication between themselves and
the reluctant labour force.
The factory was a practical, instrumental
world though. As a Christian he found it dif-
ficult in the compound. On the one hand, his
own ‘manhood’ found an outlet in the boxing
clubs of central Durban. He became a cham-
pion middleweight fighter. On the other,
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378 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
he could not adjust to the traditionalist
machismo of the compound, which demanded
of him traditional Zulu rituals and bare-fisted
fighting. This, together with his talent for
guitar and his abhorrence of the bawdy
maskanda songs of the compound inmates,
drove him out of the total institution. He also
avoided the expanding shack lands of
Mkumbane with their vibrant drinking-house
or shebeenculture, and chose the rental of a
room from an Indian family in town and, as
his immediate cultural formation, a black
church. There his music was deployed for the
praise of the Lord.
In 1949, his Boxing Club mobilized his
prowess as a fighter to participate as a Zulu
in the Zulu–Indian carnage in Durban. The
resistance to Apartheid legislation between
1948 and 1954 ‘pushed’ him into the African
National Congress as ‘Luthuli’s soldier’. It
was his voice that led many gatherings into
the chants and songs of a mobilizing African
population. It was his voice that in turn raised
his status on the shop floor high enough to
tell the izinduna that unless they listened,
they would die. It was his status as a boxer
that elevated him higher with the rank and
file. After the repression of the 1960s, Baba
Khumalo continued to lead on the shop floor:
by then, dissonance had turned to alterity. In
the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was one of
the old men who led the factory into trade
unionism. His experience, his cultural reso-
nance and his seniority made him central to
both the organization of his union and the
growing cultural movement.
Baba Khumalo is just one example of the
thousands who created the ‘cultural capital’
of the movement. Such men (86% of our
group was male, due to black women’s prob-
lems in committing themselves for many
after-hours commitments) created a unique
self-definition.
The main themes of the symbolism were
as follows:
1 Exploitation and alienation : the hardship of
working life: being used; being beaten; being turned
into things; being chased about; being humiliated.
2 Disvaluation : the decline of respect, of commu-
nity and traditions, the role of traditional healers
or inyangas in the hostel; kinship feuds amongst
returning exiles; the woman who, despite advice
to the contrary, goes to the city, her loneliness,
alienation and madness; the movement of people
searching for land to settle their cattle; powerless
elders; problem of two wives; problems of deceiv-
ing husbands; the greed of the local black
middle-classes; Ethiopian religions of the poor vs.
other Christian sects.
3 Loss of voice : the violence of urban language,
English as power, the inclusivity of songs and
their participatory patterns; the transgressive, free
and easy interaction and activity of life in the
shanty-towns of Mkumbane; oral and epic forms
against the mundane command language of
the Mill.
4 Gender : men vs. women; the meaning of being
a man; the crumbling worlds of women on the
land; men as warriors; women as mothers of the
community and nation; women as militants and
heroines.
5 Struggle : perseverance like that of the Bible’s
Job; survival through tricking and sparring like
the Uhlakhanyana ‘trickster’ of traditional folk-
tales; buffooning the bosses and whites; union-
ism and heroism (but also the sending up of trade
unionists and their briefcases); solidarity or as it
is expressed in isiZulu: umadlandawonye.
6 Khalo : suffering, jail, exile, prison and lament
about deaths and mourning.
All those became symbolic markers to dis-
tinguish their grievance, and to mark out a
shift of cultural formations from dissonance
and alterity to a radical challenge of manage-
rial and Apartheid prerogatives.
The narrations of defiance in the plays,
poems, stories, songs and performances of
these people created a possibility for thou-
sands of ordinary workers to develop their
own languages of defiance and use elements
to transcribe their own experiences. Whereas
the political and organizational leadership
was given by the shop steward movement,
its emotive and cultural strains were given
by these creative brokers. The prominence
gained by these grassroots intellectuals with
their oral lore had its own price, however.
Table 25.1 provides an index for this over
six years.
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COOPERATION IN KWAZULU NATAL
Table 25.1 Culture activists in Natal’s trade unions: Index of hardships, 1986–92 (N = 120)
Type of hardship
1. Deaths
2. Homelessness due to persecution/incl. burning down of home
3. Assaults, skirmishes and violent combat/incl. hospitalization (but not death)
4. Unable to practice, rehearse or organize events in their community due to victimization or violence
5. Still active in cultural work
6. Job loss/retrenchment
7. Able to improve life-chances and jobs because of creative involvement
8. Still in their old jobs
9. Participation in strikes and stayaways
This crude index compiled from bio-data
is useful for some sociological observations:
there is no doubt that the majority were part
and parcel of a militant labour and political
challenge in the region. Eighty percent of
them participated fully in at least one strike
and one stayaway in the period from
1986–92. Those who did not were mostly
Inkatha Freedom Party members who
rejected the calls for stayaways and partici-
pated rather in what I have termed a move-
ment for revaluation, a counter-mobilization
against COSATU.
Second, most lost their jobs. Although in
some cases victimization was alleged, the
majority were victims of the recessionary
conditions, of the famous ‘downsizing’ of
lean production and its retrenchment poli-
cies. In approximately half of the cases of job
loss, protest by co-workers turned into a
strike, but the effort at reinstatement was
unsuccessful.
Third, violence seriously affected the
lives, the homesteads and the activities of
these people. Between 1986 and 1988 vio-
lence involved assassinations and raids on
homesteads, with people fleeing after such
attacks and not returning. From 1990 on, it
seems there was community self-defense,
fewer people fleeing and an increase of
people being hospitalized after ‘battles’.
However one examines this, it will remain a
shocking testament of the ruthlessness of the
Apartheid period and the ‘violence’ in Natal.
About 15% of the workers in this study
reported serious psychological paroxysms,
an incapacity to cope, depression, pessimistic
379
% experiencing it
6.6
18.3
50.0
39.2
38.7
23.5
17.5
40.8
80.0
reveries, and sleeplessness and anxiety –
phenomena which may be termed ‘anomie’.
Fourth, a small number experienced job
mobility through their prominence in cre-
ative and educational work. They emerged as
leaders and were employed in NGOs and
provided some of the leadership of mass
democratic movement organizations.
Nowhere in this group’s experience was
there any sense of promotion within manage-
rial structures. Rather the distances between
their orientations and managements were
enormous.
The group nurtured a shop floor culture
based on low trust of any employer initiative,
and a sense of distance that buttressed the
resistance to management ideas. They saw
the factory as a necessary evil. For most, it
was imposed by their migrant contract and
influx controls; for many of the younger gen-
eration it was a degrading place, a place to
run away from.
In short, black workers were caught in
work routines that were simple and repetitive
in a world that cared little about them; within
relationships that lacked a moral foundation,
within languages they did not speak and
which excluded them, within roles that were
foreign to them. Out of these elements, they
created a culture of solidarity.
Since the 1990s, there has been a trans-
formation of the institutional matrix that gov-
erned black lives in South Africa. Not only
have managerial practices changed, affirma-
tive action policies proliferated, new oppor-
tunities for black people to accumulate by
monopolizing resources and finally the
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380 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
installation of a Government of National
Unity led by the African National Congress
after the first democratic elections of 1994, a
government most of our subjects would have
supported. Furthermore, the mass gatherings
of the trade union movement declined, cul-
tural activity decreased as the trade union
movement turned from resistance to strategic
participation. Finally, there was the collapse
of most social regulation mechanisms that
buttressed the old influx control and migrant
labour system.
Whereas the period from 1986 to 1992
was defined by the patterns of conflict and
industry in the society as a whole, with its
tragic consequences to human life, the ‘soli-
daristic’ project of the trade union movement
seemed intact. The changes in managerial
strategies were almost imperceptible, and,
upward mobility for this grouping of workers
involved a move from the shop floor to
occupy positions in NGOs, or in the higher
echelons of the liberation movement.
The last two years of this period, though,
betray a rapid institutional change and a dis-
persing of some of the ‘solidaristic’ activi-
ties. There is indeed a fragmentation and
diffusion of the solidarity that they had been
creating throughout the 1980s.
Only half have remained in their old jobs
on the shop floor. Of these, most are shop
stewards. They therefore continue with the
legacies of shop floor democracy and prag-
matic adversarialism. All the men, though,
have been involved in company-sponsored
training and skilling programmes and exactly
half of them have been attending courses
after hours on their own initiative. Perhaps
this is where we will find ‘the repro-
grammed’ and ‘reprogramming’ labour force
of the future.
Moreover, whereas before 1992 upward
mobility was anti-systemic, post-1992
mobility is systematic. Since 1984, some of
the most talented of the worker creators were
being absorbed by the ‘mass democratic
movement’ inside the country, the growing
cultural organizations and NGOs to provide
them with leadership, by now most move
upwards from the shop floor inside a mana-
gerial human resource, etc. Five percent have
been promoted into personnel and training
functions and 5% have found jobs in the
bureaucracies of the public authorities and
the government. In addition, 5% have left
voluntarily to join friends or kin in business
ventures. Inter alia, these involve construc-
tion projects, trading and servicing.
True, 11% have been finding better employ-
ment opportunities in NGOs but save the two
involved in literacy and rural outreach pro-
grammes, the majority is in a precarious situa-
tion due to the NGO funding crisis.
For 12% the solution has been to return
to the countryside. Most of them are combin-
ing skills that they have learnt in the city:
selling, sowing, driving, budgeting for infor-
mal sector activities and rural cultivation;
accumulating cattle, growing vegetables and
subsisting.
But 38% lost their jobs. Whereas, 18%
have been reabsorbed in all kinds of other
activities, 20% remain unemployed or under-
employed, relying on others for their income,
and casual labour.
These figures are only indications of ten-
dencies. They show that alongside the soli-
daristic patterns of trade union life there is an
equally active process that is animated (not
by the community – 60% were involved in
the community, 5% are involved now) but by
the survival strategies of households and kin-
based economic units. Also, despite the con-
tinuation of solidaristic language, there is the
drive for self-advancement and self-training
among shop floor people.
CONCLUSION
The task at hand seems a daunting one. How
do we make the public theatre of transforma-
tion with its creative energies fit the aptitudes
and attitudes needed for ‘growth’. The obvi-
ous social science answer is a cynical one.
We cannot do this, unless the conditions
that produce it change. Its ‘fragmentation’ and
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COOPERATION IN KWAZULU NATAL
‘diasporization’ would mean spreading this
energy across a broader terrain and its invo-
lution into discordant cultural formations.
A managerial cultural revolution that
views black workers as a human resource is a
tremendous advance from the colonial man-
agerialism of the ‘old’ regime. But, resources
are there to yield their effort, their gold, their
bile, and such an instrumental view is self-
defeating. There is no solution unless partic-
ipation goes alongside with the recognition
of the centrality of cultural formations, their
autonomy and their negotiated participation
in defining the priorities of production.
But shifting the discourse of responsibility
for national priorities onto ordinary people’s
shoulders is problematic: their capacity to
correct themselves without transforming the
structures of inequality is very unlikely. The
glossing of all that with pseudo-cultural lan-
guage, ‘ubuntu’, African humanism and its
capacity to make profits for a couple of
bosses is self-serving nonsense.
On the one hand, managements are trying
to push beyond the institutional cooperation
embodied in collective bargaining to turn
what was a social movement with its disso-
nance and alterity into a confluence of inter-
ests. Managements have been far-reaching in
their innovations. They have taken the most
exciting of the ideas developed in the creative
wings of the trade union movement and
turned them around to serve the priorities of
productivity. Worker theatre has turned into
industrial theatre; workshops and political
role-plays have turned into problem-solving
practices; worker self-expression has turned
into self-empowerment and training. On the
other hand, the trade unions have lost the
ability to provide platforms for the expres-
sion of alternatives: the Baba Khumalos have
been silenced and the mobilizers of yesterday
are too unskilled for the new formal cooper-
ation. In the words of one of the trade union
movement’s finest, Alfred Qabula (1995: 9):
‘And when the dust of our struggle settled,
there was nobody there … we were the lad-
ders for people to climb new heights with
spiked shoes’.
381
On the shop floors, the talk is still of soli-
darity/‘umadlandawonye’ and unfulfilled
promises, of hatred, of the scars of violence
but also of the need for peace and growth.
If our craft brings us back to the concerns
of finite, vulnerable human beings, industrial
and labour studies has to lend its voice to
their ‘recoiling and refracting’ agencies. The
plight of the self-employed woman selling
plastic containers near the Durban station is
as worthy a topic of concern as the griev-
ances of an operator of the latest numerically-
controlled lathe. Despite the dilemmas of
work and productivity, and of human capacity
remains our chief concern – after all, we do
want to live in a real democratic country, we
do need prosperity – we cannot take the dom-
inant goals of power-elites as ‘given’.
Scholars of Industrial and Labour Studies
will have to be at war within their souls: a
war between a realization that at the heart of
participation, cooperation and innovation,
and the meeting of basic needs, there is a
demand for supportive involvement and a
commitment to a radical inquisition of the
real gains ordinary people make. Our worth
will not be counted by the applause of the
powerful but by the discomfort the honesty
of our craft sustains. The people of KZN
deserve no less.
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Abu-Lughod, Janet, L. (1989) Before European
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Economic Globalization and
Singapore’s Development
Policies: Competition,
Cooperation and Conflict
INTRODUCTION
Economic globalization is often understood
as a process of increasing ‘... integration of
national economies into the global economy
through trade, direct foreign investment (by
corporations and multinationals), short-term
capital flows, international flows of workers
and humanity generally, and flows of tech-
nology’(Bhagwati, 2004: 3). With regard to
direct foreign investment, also known as for-
eign direct investment (FDI),1 it is commonly
accepted that competition between corpora-
tions and multinationals drives them to ‘go
abroad’ either to acquire ‘cheaper’ and/or
‘better’ resources, or to penetrate new
markets. Hence, it is when firms actually
invest abroad that national economies
become more integrated. However, this chap-
ter argues that equally important is the
system of competition between nation-states
for FDI that also contributes to the process of
26
Alexius A. Pereira
economic globalization. In other words, the
eventual flow of FDI cannot be simply
understood as the manifestation of corporate
strategy but must take competitive state poli-
cies into account as well. This chapter will
use the case of Singapore to illustrate how its
development policies between 1965 and
2005, which focused on attracting FDI, were
not only dependent on the process of eco-
nomic globalization but also contributed to
the process.
FDI AND ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION
For purposes of this chapter, FDI is defined
as ‘… the process whereby firms from one
country (the source country) acquire owner-
ship of assets for the purpose of controlling
the production, distribution and other activities
of a firm in another country (host country)’
9781412934633-Chap-26 1/10/09 8:57 AM Page 385
SINGAPORE’S DEVELOPMENT POLICIES
(Moosa, 2002: 1). In this conceptualization,
FDI might involve the establishment of new
business units in another country, or the
acquisition of firms in another country. Most
studies agree that (capitalist) firms invest
abroad for two main reasons: (1) resource
acquisition and (2) market expansion (see
Dunning, 1998; Henderson et al., 2002). For
the issue of resource acquisition, firms go
abroad in search of ‘cheaper and/or better’
factors of production. Factors of production
are the elements necessary for producing
goods or to perform services. There are pri-
mary as well as secondary factors of produc-
tion; the former refers to factors that
contribute directly towards production,
including land, labour, raw materials and
capital. However, equally important are sec-
ondary factors, which include any element
that supplements the industrial production
processes, including state policy, fiscal
incentives, financial inducements, tariffs,
availability of infrastructure and political
stability (Dobson, 1997: 7). Studies have
shown that transnational corporations do not
merely seek out the lowest cost factors of
production. Instead, what is most important
is the balance between the quality of these
factors and the cost (see Hayter, 1997).
Hence, firms will invest abroad if factors are
either cheaper or better, preferably both, as
this would enhance their profits. There are
many reasons why the quality and cost of
factors of production vary from location to
location, including geographic, historical,
political and economic reasons. However,
transnational corporations will try to take
advantage of these differences as a strategy
to maximize profits. The second reason why
firms invest abroad is for purposes of ‘market
expansion’. Markets may include consumers,
but may also include other enterprises, which
have a demand for the product. It is very
important to firms to constantly expand their
markets, as this would greatly enhance their
profits. They might also seek to enter into new
markets to prolong the life cycle of their prod-
ucts. In many ways, these firms are operating
with a typically capitalist outlook. In the
385
search for optimizing profits, they will seek
to exploit resources and enlarge markets.
However, capitalism cannot flourish with-
out the input of the state. In Marxist theories,
not only does the state protect property rights
and uphold the law, so that firms have a
‘predictable’ and ‘calculable’ operating envi-
ronment; the state often ‘prepares’ and ‘disci-
plines’ labour as well (see Jessop, 2002).
While earlier Marxist theories centred on
understanding the relations of production
within a national economy, when these theo-
ries are utilized for explaining processes in
the global economy, they will require some
rethinking, particularly as capital will deal
with more than one state within the global
economy. This notion is central to the
process of FDI: its eventual destination
cannot be solely dependent on the strategies
of transnational corporations alone; govern-
ments can and do directly influence FDI
inflows (Howells and Wood, 1993). This is
because states have the ability to grant or
deny foreign investors access to local
resources and markets. Further, as recent his-
tory has shown, states will compete against
each other to attract FDI.
This position – FDI for development – is
the complete opposite of the earlier dominant
position, which was that of highly nationalist
and protectionist state dirigisme. In this era,
import substitution for purposes of grooming
domestic enterprises was viewed as the pri-
mary pathway towards modernization and
development (see Sachs, 1999). The shift
towards greater economic globalization
began (but was not yet dominant) in the
1970s. There was a political rather than an
economic agenda of ‘neo-liberal capitalism’
or ‘neo-liberalism’ furthered by leaders of
certain governments, such as the USA and
the UK.2 Under the guise of ‘Thatcherism’
and ‘Reaganomics’ – referring to the eco-
nomic policies of the UK Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher and USA President
Ronald Reagan – there was a strong push
from these countries to so-called ‘third world
countries’ to lower protectionist barriers
in favour of ‘free trade’. These ideas were
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386 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
supported by several international organiza-
tions, such as the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund, the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development, and
the World Trade Organization. These agencies
warned that developing nations had to lower
or remove economic barriers, or otherwise face
losing out in the potential growth that would
come from global free trade (Moran, 1998).
In this light, the neo-liberal ideology
would argue that FDI is an efficient means
for generating economic development and
growth in the local economy. For example,
FDI can bring the generation of employment,
foreign currency earnings, and the transfer of
technology or managerial techniques to the
local area (see Lall, 1996). These would be
some of the main reasons why states might
attempt to attract FDI intentionally. However,
given that there are often several countries
courting the same investor, competition is
generated. At the most basic level, states
would be competing on the basis of ‘compar-
ative advantage’, which refers to the pre-
existing and inherent aspects of a country
that would be of interest to potential
investors. For example, some countries might
have an abundance of natural resources,
while others might have large domestic con-
sumer markets. However, to enhance its com-
petitive position, a state might offer financial
and tax incentives or even direct subsidies
over and above granting access to resources
and markets. Studies have also shown that
states might seek to ‘manipulate’ access to
local resources and markets to enhance
competitiveness. For example, governments
may negotiate with local labour groups to
establish an attractive wage package that
would encourage transnational corporations
to locate operations in the country. Also,
some states might invest in national educa-
tional, health, housing and infrastructure
projects to improve the quality of human
capital in the country so as to attract FDI (see
Sklair, 1993, 1994). As will be discussed fur-
ther in the next section, manipulated advan-
tages are commonly known as ‘competitive
advantages’.
Yet, the crux of this analysis is that when
many governments begin to implement FDI-
attraction strategies, ostensibly for the pur-
poses of development, this not only creates
inter-state competition for FDI but also fur-
ther drives the process of economic global-
ization. With states competing for FDI, firms
will have an even wider choice over where
and how they might utilize their investments.
Viewed from a Marxist perspective, economic
globalization is therefore an extension of the
logic of capitalism. Capitalism is driven not
only by the entrepreneurial drive of firms, but
also with the complicity of states. Although
some would argue that economic globaliza-
tion has been underway for hundreds of
years, as manifested through colonialism and
empire-building across the world, many
believe that the 1980s was when it became
dominant. Also, with rapid advancements in
technology and logistics, and with the rapid
integration of financial markets around the
world during the decade of the 1980s,
economic globalization finally ‘took off’
with governments and corporations partici-
pating through international trade and FDI
(Sklair, 1994). All of these factors worked
together to cause an increase in the annual
volume of global FDI inflows at an average
of 28% per annum between 1986 and 2000
(see UNCTAD, 2004: 3).
Although overall the volume of FDI
increased significantly between 1970 and
2000, the reality is that competition for FDI
has also been increasing (Nunnenkamp and
Spatz, 2002; Oman, 2000). This is mainly
due to many governments, especially after
1980 and the fall of communism in Europe,
viewing FDI as a potential source of domes-
tic economic growth and development (Lall,
1996). There are concerns that this competi-
tion between national (and even sub-national)
governments would lead to ‘a race to the
bottom’, where society would suffer at
the hands of transnational corporations. For
example, some governments might intention-
ally suppress wages or remove worker pro-
tection rights in order to attract foreign
investments. Other observers have predicted
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SINGAPORE’S DEVELOPMENT POLICIES
that the competition could even lead to inter-
state conflicts, especially since there would
be tremendous domestic political pressure
for governments to deliver development
(Thomas, 2000). On the other side of the
debate, some – particularly agencies such
as the United Nations Commission for
Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the
International Monetary Fund, the World
Bank, the Asian Development Bank, as well
as ‘pro-globalization’ academics – argue that
competition encourages states to ‘improve
themselves’ so as to be attractive to potential
investors. For example, states might invest in
providing mass education locally, so as to
‘improve the quality of human resources’,
which might in turn be attractive to foreign
investors seeking qualified workers. This
process could potentially be a ‘win–win’
situation for the foreign investor and the local
population.
UNDERSTANDING COMPETITION
In order to understand the focus of this chapter –
inter-governmental FDI competition – it is
necessary to revisit some of the basic dynam-
ics of general business competition which
take place under regular ‘market’ structures.
In this market, FDI is set as the main com-
modity being ‘traded’. Therefore, in such a
conceptualization, potential investor firms are
viewed as ‘customers’, which demand
resources or market access, while states are
viewed as the supplying ‘clients’. While it is
true that there obviously will be competition
between customers (i.e., transnational corpo-
rations), this chapter seeks only to understand
and explain competition between ‘clients’
(i.e., governments).
The key to understanding this form of
competition is the concept of ‘competitive
advantage’, which suggests that all economic
agents should strive for unique characteristics
(‘differential advantages’) in order to distin-
guish themselves from other agents in
the eyes of the customers (Alderson, 1965).
387
In a business sense, this differential advan-
tage might be achieved through offering
better prices, selecting advertising appeals,
and/or product improvements and innovations.
Some even suggest that a good reputation
and earned trust can be advantageous as well.
Economic agents understand that business
success comes not just from achieving
competitive advantage but from sustaining it
over time.
A natural consequence of competition is
conflict. Here, ideas from Park and Burgess
from the 1920s, are still relevant:
[Competition and conflict] are forms of interac-
tion, but competition is a struggle between indi-
viduals, or groups of individuals, who are not
necessarily in contact and communication; while
conflict is a contest in which contact is an indis-
pensable condition. Competition, unqualified and
uncontrolled as with plants, and in the great
impersonal life-struggle of man with his kind and
with all animate nature, is unconscious. Conflict is
always conscious, indeed, it evokes the deepest
emotions and strongest passions and enlists the
greatest concentration of attention and of effort.
Both competition and conflict are forms of strug-
gle. Competition, however, is continuous and
impersonal, conflict is intermittent and personal
(Park and Burgess, 1969 [1921]: 236).
Implicit in the conceptualization is the
notion that competition is a ‘zero-sum’ game,
where there are only winners and losers.
Interestingly, Park and Burgess also offer
another concept that is particularly useful to
this analysis, the idea of ‘competitive cooper-
ation’ (Park and Burgess, 1969 [1921]: 188).
The basic notion is that although economic
agents are often viewed as self-interested
parties, they are also strategic creatures that
will plan and forecast whether cooperative
arrangements with other agents, often com-
petitors, might lead to outcomes which are
more beneficial to ‘going alone’. Cooperation
among competitors can take on many forms,
from the informal (strategic alliances) to
the very formal (legally binding equity joint
ventures).
At the very same time, it is important to
note that conflict is inherent in any form of
competition. From their somewhat function-
alist perspective, they argue that conflict is
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388 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
natural, and that a process of ‘conflict resolu-
tion’ will almost immediately follow (Park
and Burgess, 1969 [1921]: 241–2). Perhaps
drawing from Marx, who claimed that his-
tory was due to economic conflict as a result
of the struggle between classes, Park and
Burgess drew parallels with the struggle
between religious sects as well as ‘races’.
When analyzing conflict emanating from
economic competition, the authors adopted a
typically functionalist evolutionary perspec-
tive, suggesting that economic conflict will
always be a struggle between competitors,
whereby the strong will survive and the weak
will fall away, and that this is ‘good’ for the
market. Still, they warn of ‘predatory’ com-
petition, where sometimes the strong are not
necessarily those who are the ‘best’. As many
sociologists and economists have developed
the idea further, it is important to note that
competition need not always be free and fair.
There are likely to be ‘costs’ to competition,
as competitors might engage in ‘wasteful’
activities such as rent-seeking as a shortcut.
The ideas of Park and Burgess on compe-
tition, cooperation and conflict are directly
relevant to explaining and understanding the
nature of inter-governmental competition for
FDI. The following sections will use some of
these ideas and concepts in examining
this competition in a case study of Singapore,
which has relied on an FDI-oriented develop-
ment strategy for nearly 40 years. Indeed,
although it is a country with less than
4.5 million residents, it has ranked among
the top national recipients of FDI since the
1970s; for example, between 1999 and 2001,
Singapore was the sixth highest recipient of
FDI world-wide (UNCTAD, 2004: 10).
Although the analysis will oversimplify
several issues – by treating the Singapore
government as a single homogeneous
entity, assuming that all social agents (such as
national governments) have acted in an ethi-
cal, rational and fair manner, and reducing the
details presented to the barest minimum – the
overall thrust of the argument should still
be clear.
CASE STUDY: SINGAPORE
Weak competition
The government of Singapore adopted a
national development strategy that was
dependent on FDI soon after political inde-
pendence in 1965 (see Mirza, 1986; Pereira,
2000). Before independence, Singapore was
mainly a trading emporium supported by the
British colonial administration. In 1963, after
the British had announced that they were
going to eventually withdraw completely
from the region, Singapore joined Malaya to
form Malaysia. From Singapore’s perspec-
tive, this move was designed to give the
resource-scarce island an economic hinter-
land, which would help it survive. However,
due to political and economic differences
with the government in Kuala Lumpur,
Singapore was eventually expelled from
Malaysia in 1965 (Huff, 1994). Without
Malaysia, Singapore faced problems of a
stagnant economy and a rapidly growing
population. Thus, the government – led by
Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party (PAP)
– chose the most ‘pragmatic’ solution, which
was to turn to FDI in order to create jobs
quickly (Schein, 1996). The Singapore
government designated the whole island as
an ‘export processing zone’, introduced
favourable tax incentives to transnational
corporations involved in industrial produc-
tion, and offered prepared industrial infra-
structure, providing ready-built factories,
telecommunications, transportation links and
utilities. It also heavily disciplined local
labour through nationalizing labour groups
in Singapore, intervening in the wage negoti-
ation process to ensure that wages remained
highly attractive to foreign investors (rather
than local labour) and reforming labour laws
to make work stoppages illegal (Leggett,
1993). All these policies combined to create
a cheap, disciplined and ‘pro-business’ loca-
tion that would be attractive to transnational
corporations. The Singapore government –
frequently described as an archetypical
9781412934633-Chap-26 1/10/09 8:57 AM Page 389
SINGAPORE’S DEVELOPMENT POLICIES
‘developmental state’ (see Castells, 1992;
Huff, 1995; Perry et al., 1997) – was able to
introduce these policies because of its political
dominance within Singapore society. For many
years, the People’s Action Party held total con-
trol over Parliament (see Rodan, 1997).
Although Singapore lacked industrial
experience, and did not have a sizable con-
sumer market, many industrial transnational
corporations set up production sites on the
island, particularly those that wanted to relo-
cate lower value added production away
from high wage areas such as the USA,
Western Europe and Japan. Although the
state’s strategies were responsible for this
relatively high inflow of FDI, it was also
important to note that Singapore was one of
the very few countries within Southeast Asia
where American, European or Japanese com-
panies could locate production during that
period (1970–1980) (Pereira, 2000). Countries
such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand
were pursuing domestic import substitution
industrialization (ISI) strategies, which
meant that national economic policies were
intent on protecting domestic firms from for-
eign producers. Communist countries such as
China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and North
Korea, and heavily pro-socialist countries
such as India almost completely shut out
FDI. Thus, during that period, Hong Kong –
not fully an independent country – and cer-
tain enclaves in Taiwan and South Korea
were probably Singapore’s only serious com-
petitors for FDI. The Philippines was gener-
ally open to FDI, but remained mainly an
agricultural economy (Booth, 2004).
Singapore’s ability to attract FDI was aided,
therefore, by a relative lack of direct compe-
tition in the region (Pereira, 2000: 430).
Intense competition
By the 1980s, the political economy of Asia
had changed dramatically. Many Asian gov-
ernments had conceded that their domestically
oriented import substitution industrialization
389
strategies were either progressing too slowly,
or had failed altogether (see Booth, 2004).
These governments had observed the rapid
growth of countries that had adopted FDI-
oriented strategies. The exemplars were not
only Singapore and Hong Kong, but also
Ireland, Malta and Mexico (see World Bank,
1994). At the same time, there was an expo-
nential growth in the volume of capital seek-
ing to go ‘transnational’ (see Dicken, 1998).
The electronics sector was the most domi-
nant player in the global economy. Driven
by intense competition between firms, corpo-
rations began a global search for the most
cost effective locations for production (see
Henderson, 1994). Even industrial enter-
prises from newly industrializing countries
such as South Korea and Taiwan were seek-
ing to relocate in cheaper production sites,
adding to the growing volume of global FDI.
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter,
there was also an ideology of ‘neo-liberalism’
emerging from the USA and Western
Europe, where the political belief in ‘free
markets’ and ‘less statism’ became more
significant (Sachs, 1999). This led some gov-
ernments to lower economic barriers, not just
for trading purposes but also to attract
foreign investment.
In the late 1970s, many governments of
developing economies began experimenting
with FDI-oriented development strategies,
usually through the establishment of Export-
Processing Zones, Special Economic Zones,
or the Free Trade Zones (see World Bank,
1994). These zones were specially desig-
nated areas or estates, where foreign capital
would be permitted. Such zones were a strat-
egy to take advantage of global production
needs but still insulate the rest of the country
from foreign capital. Goods produced from
these zones could not be sold in the rest of
the country, thus still protecting domestic
industrial enterprises. The main benefits of
these zones were that employment was
generated (because industrial multinational
corporations required labour), and that foreign
income was generated (based on the wages
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390 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
paid to the local labour by industrial transna-
tional corporations). In Asia, such zones
began to emerge in Malaysia, Indonesia,
Thailand and even, since 1979, in communist
China (see Felker, 2003). Even India and
Vietnam, countries that were heavily protec-
tionist or communist, were opening up to FDI.
The consequence of the rapid adoption of
FDI-oriented development strategies in Asia
was that the competition for FDI intensified
significantly. Singapore – a beneficiary of the
‘first’ wave of FDI in Asia – was unable to
compete with the new industrial regions of
Asia, which included parts of China,
Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. Put
another way, Singapore’s initial ‘competitive
advantage’ was not sustainable. Labour costs
in Singapore, which were slowly rising
because of continued economic growth
between 1965 and 1980, became uncompeti-
tive when compared to labour less than
20 kilometres north and south of the island,
in Malaysia and Indonesia respectively. Land
costs were increasing as well, because of the
island’s limited space. In the emerging indus-
trial regions of Indonesia and Malaysia,
factory and land rents were reportedly only
10% of those in Singapore (see Kumar and
Lee, 1991). Thus, not only was Singapore
unable to attract new FDI, but industrial
transnational corporations that had stationed
their operations in Singapore since 1965
were beginning to move out to the emerging
industrial regions in Asia. This was poten-
tially devastating to the Singapore economy,
which was heavily reliant on foreign capital
for both economic growth as well as sustain-
ing employment since foreign industrial
enterprises contributed to over 75 percent
of Singapore’s output while employing
80% of the workforce during the 1980s (see
Huff, 1994).
In response to the increasing competition,
the Singapore government became more
innovative with its FDI-oriented strategy.
It realized that Singapore could not compete
solely on the basis of low wages for
industrial labour. It tried to differentiate
Singapore’s labour force from those in the
emerging regions. While labour in Malaysia
or China had extremely low wages, they were
not highly educated or able to undertake
complex industrial tasks. The Singapore gov-
ernment invested heavily in tertiary technical
education, especially in the industrial sec-
tors. The aim was to attract industrial
transnational corporations with high value
added activities to come to Singapore to
establish operations, or to encourage existing
enterprises to upgrade their operations. In the
1980s, the Singapore government built new
polytechnics and established an engineering-
oriented university (Nanyang Technological
University), in addition to expanding the
engineering faculty at the existing National
University of Singapore. With these moves,
Singapore’s highly educated workers were
generally ‘cheaper’ than their peers in the
USA or Europe. At the same time, this heavy
state investment in human resources meant
that Singapore had a ‘differential advantage’
over its neighbours, who were offering
low cost but mainly unskilled labour. This
eventually led to a new wave of transnational
investments within Singapore, mostly in
the semiconductor, petrochemical and preci-
sion engineering sectors (see McKendrick
et al., 2000).
Cooperation
At the beginning of the 1990s, the Singapore
government was worried about the possible
negative consequences of inter-state compe-
tition for FDI. While it had been able to move
ahead of the competition successfully, the
Singapore government realized that this was
perhaps only a short-term solution. It would
only be a matter of time before developing
nations such as India and China began to
compete for high technology FDI, mainly
because these countries were also rapidly
improving the quality of their human
resources. In addition to offering investors
cheaper high quality human resources, coun-
tries such as India and China could also offer
transnational corporations a massive consumer
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SINGAPORE’S DEVELOPMENT POLICIES
market, something Singapore could never
offer. Thus, the Singapore government came
up with an even more innovative strategy
involving cooperation with other national
governments to attract FDI jointly and thus
to pre-empt further head-to-head competi-
tion. This was made possible because FDI
could be ‘disaggregated’ (Dicken, 1998). In
the 1990s, transnational corporations became
more involved in ‘flexible production’,
where they divided production of a single
product over several countries to optimize
cost efficiencies. In other words, one televi-
sion set could be made up of components
assembled in different countries; for exam-
ple, the screen was made in China, the exte-
rior casing in Malaysia, the circuits in Japan,
the wires in Indonesia and the final product
was assembled in Singapore. The final prod-
uct could be sold anywhere in the world.
Furthermore, there might be a possibility that
individual components would not even be
made by subsidiaries of the parent company
in another country. The parent corporation
might subcontract components to third party
companies (these are known as OEM or orig-
inal equipment manufacturer companies),
and the process is sometimes known as out-
sourcing. National boundaries no longer
matter to transnational corporations in terms
of the product’s nationality; borders only
matter in that they represent different costs or
capabilities (Dunning, 1998).
The Singapore government observed the
process of increasing differentiation of FDI,
and adopted new strategies to take advantage
of it. Rather than compete with other govern-
ments for FDI, it entered into negotiations
with several national governments in the Asia
Pacific region to jointly cooperate on attract-
ing FDI. The plan was to split the FDI in a
manner that would benefit both governments.
For example, transnational corporations
could situate certain strategic tasks such as
Headquarters functions or other higher value
added production in Singapore, while locat-
ing their lower value added operations in a
cooperating country. Towards this end, the
Singapore government was fortunate in that
391
it generally had ‘excellent’ diplomatic rela-
tions with most countries in East and
Southeast Asia (Dent, 2003; Leifer, 2000). It
also had a good reputation as an effective
industrial developer and administrator; as
such, cooperating governments felt that they
could learn from Singapore’s earlier experi-
ence. Therefore, they were willing to cooper-
ate to jointly attract FDI. This new
cooperative strategy was the focus of the
Singapore government’s so-called ‘regional-
ization’ policy, introduced in 1990 (see Ho,
2000; Perry and Yeoh, 2000).
The Singapore government further intensi-
fied the regionalization policy by introducing
an innovative scheme known as the ‘regional
industrial parks’ programme. Here, the
Singapore government was directly involved
in the development and administration of
industrial parks in selected cities across the
Asia Pacific region. The logic was again
cooperative. Transnational corporations
would be able to enjoy low rent and labour
costs, as the parks were located in emerging
industrial zones. However, this estate would
be managed by the Singapore government.
This was attractive to transnational corpora-
tions, as they regarded the Singapore govern-
ment as being efficient and trustworthy in
industrial administration (see Schein, 1996).
These parks also promised to have ‘Singapore-
standard’ industrial infrastructure and admin-
istration, which was held in high regard by
transnational corporations. The cooperating
host government would benefit from all the
developmental effects of FDI (such as
employment creation and income generation
through wages). For its part, the Singapore
government hoped to benefit in part from
the sales of the industrial properties and the
management fees, and in part from the
higher value added investments that went to
Singapore. By 1995, the Singapore govern-
ment had launched eight industrial parks;
they were in Batam, Bintang and Karimun
(Indonesia), Suzhou and Wuxi (China),
Bangalore (India), Song Be (Vietnam)
and Rayong (Thailand). Each of these
regional industrial parks involved the direct
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392 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
cooperation of the respective national
governments.
By 2005, it could be argued that the
Singapore government’s regionalization
strategy had generally turned out to be rela-
tively successful for most of the parties con-
cerned, despite a few setbacks which will be
discussed in the next section. The main
beneficiaries have been the transnational cor-
porations, who have been able to ‘disaggre-
gate’ their operations much more conveniently
and effectively, thanks to the cooperation
between Singapore and the host govern-
ments. The local host governments too have
been fairly satisfied, as the parks have
been able to generate employment and other
developmental effects. Although the
Singapore government has reported that
these regional industrial parks have not made
any financial profits, the strategy is still
considered crucial to Singapore’s own
domestic industrial restructuring process as,
since the late 1990s, Singaporean small and
medium enterprises have also been shifting
lower value added operations to these parks
(see Chia, 2000).
Conflict
As mentioned in the previous section, the
regional industrial parks were generally suc-
cessful in achieving the original target, which
was inter-state cooperation to jointly attract
FDI. However, there was one case where
there was obvious inter-government conflict:
the Suzhou Industrial Park project, which
was a collaborative project between the
Singapore and China governments. This
project was located 60 kilometres west of
Shanghai, just outside Suzhou city. From the
Singapore government’s perspective, it was
the largest of its regional industrial parks, in
terms of geographical size as well as finan-
cial outlay (see Pereira, 2003). Between 1994
and 1997, the Suzhou Industrial Park was
one of the fastest growing FDI zones in the
whole of Asia, as multinational and transna-
tional corporations saw that it had China-level
costs (in terms of land rents and labour
wages) but Singapore-standard industrial
infrastructure and administration. Also, this
project had the strong support of two national
governments, which gave investors a sense of
long-term stability.
However, conflicts between the two gov-
ernments began to emerge soon after 1997.
This was in part due to the onset of the Asian
Financial Crisis. Even though the Crisis did
not affect China, it had the impact of signifi-
cantly reducing FDI in the whole region as
global consumer demand meant that transna-
tional corporations were more cautious about
investing in new factories around the world
(see Haggard and Low, 2002). With this decline
in the supply of FDI, the inter-governmental
competition in the whole Asia-Pacific region
intensified. Indeed, in some cases, even sub-
national governments competed against
national governments. This was the case in
the Suzhou Industrial Park, as it saw direct
competition for FDI from the neighbouring
Suzhou New District, an industrial estate
administered by the Suzhou Municipal
Authority. The Suzhou New District mod-
elled itself on the Singapore-developed
Suzhou Industrial Park. It claimed to offer
Singapore-standard industrial infrastructure
and administration as it had learnt by
‘observing’. More significantly, it could offer
even lower land rents than the Singapore-
developed Suzhou Industrial Park (see
Pereira, 2003).
The competition for FDI by the Suzhou
New District strained the Singapore–China
inter-governmental cooperation. Between
1998 and 1999, the Singapore government
asked the Chinese government to discipline
the Suzhou Municipal Authority, proposing
that any new FDI would go to the locally run
Suzhou New District only after the other
project was ‘fully filled’. Much to the frustra-
tion of the Singapore government, the
central China government in Beijing chose
not to take any action to ‘discipline’ the sub-
national government. The Suzhou Municipal
Authority remained defiant: it claimed that
there should be ‘free and fair’ competition
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SINGAPORE’S DEVELOPMENT POLICIES
for FDI. In 2001, the Singapore government –
frustrated by the seemingly ‘unfair’ competi-
tion – officially disengaged from the Suzhou
Industrial Park project. Although
it remains as a minority shareholder in the
project, it has effectively handed over
the administration of the Park to the Chinese
government (Pereira, 2003).
Competition, again
Although its regionalization strategy is still
in operation, the Singapore government
re-assessed its policy options for the future,
and eventually rolled out yet another large-
scale project designed to re-establish the
island’s ‘competitive advantage’. The
Biomedical Sciences Initiative, launched in
2003, has many thrusts. On paper, the
Singapore government claims that it is
hoping to eventually become a hub of
biotechnology production and research and
development (R&D). However, based on
what the Singapore government actively pur-
sued between 2003 and 2005, it became clear
that the strategy involved targeting ‘pharma-
ceutical FDI’. More specifically, the
Singapore government was encouraging
large pharmaceutical corporations to set up
production facilities in Singapore, along with
some pharmaceutical research and develop-
ment activities. Although the pharmaceutical
sector is generally distinct from the biotech-
nology or biomedical sector, there are many
overlaps. For example, pharmaceutical cor-
porations are known to invest and acquire
biotechnology companies that can contribute
to drug development. Regardless, as far as
the Singapore government is concerned,
pharmaceutical activities, along with medtech
(which refers to medical technology), are
considered part of the biomedical sciences
initiative.
What is interesting about the Singapore
government’s initiative is that the pharma-
ceutical sector is not normally known as
being ‘globalized’. Unlike, for example,
textiles, and the automotive or electronics sectors,
393
the large pharmaceutical corporations have not
been seen ‘going abroad’ to acquire cheaper
resources in the third world (Rugman, 2005).
The main reason for this is that there is ‘... a
set of stringent local and regional regulations
[which] prevent pharmaceutical companies
from adopting a global strategy’ (Rugman
and Brain, 2004: 13). These regulations
include national drug approval processes,
price controls and most importantly, quality
control. Hence, pharmaceutical corporations –
regardless of their size – tend to remain
regional or local3 rather than global (Rugman
and Brain, 2004: 24). While there is some
evidence that the large pharmaceutical com-
panies have attempted to export to new mar-
kets, products bound for a particular region
are often produced within that region. To illus-
trate, pharmaceutical companies do not pro-
duce drugs in so-called ‘low cost’ countries for
re-export back to the US consumer market (see
for example Rugman, 2005).
Against this economic backdrop, the
Singapore government tried to position the
country as a low cost but high quality loca-
tion for pharmaceutical production and
R&D. Late in 2001, before the Biomedical
Sciences Initiative was officially launched,
the Singapore government began to invest
heavily in building specialized infrastructure
and developing human resources with the
hope of attracting large pharmaceutical cor-
porations to set up production facilities, as
well as R&D activities on the island. The two
largest infrastructural investments were the
building of the Tuas Biomedical Park and the
Biopolis. The Park is a purpose built indus-
trial estate with ‘state of the art’ logistical
and technical facilities that can satisfy even
the most technologically advanced produc-
tion (paraphrased from Tuas BioMedical
Park marketing brochure4). The investments
made in the infrastructure preparation were
reportedly over US$0.6 billion. Thisincluded
high technology water treatment facilities as
well as logistics facilities. The investments
have paid off, as these sites have been
approved by the biotechnology corporations
as having the basic quality control, whereby
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394 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
products made in Singapore can be re-
exported to the first world (Singapore
Biotech Guide 2007/2008: 20).
Biopolis was launched as a multi-purpose
complex that could house both R&D activi-
ties as well as other corporate functions.
Costing US$350 million to build, and located
beside the National University of Singapore
Science Park, it is hoped that the complex
will eventually accommodate 2,000 biotech-
nology research scientists. The Singapore
government – fully aware that the biomedical
sciences sector requires specialized aca-
demic personnel (often with the minimum
of doctoral degrees in bioengineering or
a related science) particularly for R&D
activities – has also been investing heavily in
upgrading human resources. For example,
between 2001 and 2004, 276 postgraduate
scholars were awarded overseas and local
government scholarships to pursue doctoral
programmes in various aspects of biomedical
sciences, including pharmaceutical R&D
(A*Star, 2005: 8). According to the director
of A*Star,5 which is a statutory board tasked
with promoting the biomedical initiative,
each scholarship recipient is expected to cost
the government about US$0.6m (FDI
Magazine, 2003: 7). Although the state has
created many opportunities for young
Singaporeans to train to become biotechnol-
ogy or health sciences experts, it has also
gone ahead with a very liberal immigration
policy for experts (as well as postgraduate
students) in the pharmaceutical field, despite
the expression of concern about this policy
by the local population. After all, large phar-
maceutical corporations would be concerned
only about hiring qualified specialists regard-
less of their nationality.
While the state’s investments in infrastruc-
ture and human resources have been frequently
trumpeted by the Singapore government
around the world as a strategy to attract
pharmaceutical FDI into Singapore, there
were two other important policy instruments,
which were less publicized to the general
public. These instruments, drawn up
with foreign investors in mind, were the
‘intellectual property’ (IP) regime and the
‘bioethics code’. The strict IP regime was to
assure large biotechnology corporations that
their products would not be ‘pirated’ locally,
and would not face competition from locally
produced ‘generic drugs’. At the same time,
the Singapore government formed the
Bioethics Advisory Committee to draft a
comprehensive set of guidelines and to make
recommendations for changes to the law
(where necessary) on various aspects such as
stem cell, human tissue, and genetic research
(Singapore Bioethics Advisory Committee
Official Homepage). In addition to the high
quality infrastructure and the (growing) high
level of human resources, the IP regime and
overt bioethics code would serve to enhance
Singapore’s competitive advantage as a loca-
tion where large pharmaceutical corporations
could operate securely.
Between 2003 and 2005, many large phar-
maceutical corporations made substantial
investments in Singapore. In 2003 alone,
Singapore attracted over US$500m in bio-
medical – including biotechnology and
pharmaceutical FDI – related fixed asset for-
eign investments (Beh, 2004: 36); in 2004, it
rose to US$700m (Singapore Investment
News, December 2004 Special Supplement: 9).
These recent investments included the estab-
lishment of new production facilities by
several large global pharmaceutical firms
(see Table 26.1).
At the same time, several other corpora-
tions have established fairly large biotech-
nology or pharmaceutical research and
Table 26.1 Cases of biotechnology foreign
direct investment in Singapore (selected)
Company Investment
Schering-Plough Ltd1 US$230m
GlaxoSmithKline2 US$100m
Novartis AG3 US$200m
Pfizer4 US$375m
Sources:
1
Singapore Investment News, February 2004, p. 3.
2
Singapore Investment News, July 2004, p. 4.
3
Singapore Investment News, September 2004, p. 4.
4
Singapore Investment News, October 2004, p. 6–9.
Source: Singapore Economic Development Board,
http://www.sedb.com.sg/
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SINGAPORE’S DEVELOPMENT POLICIES
development investments. For example, in
addition to its manufacturing plant in Tuas,
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has invested US$70m
in a R&D facility within the same compound
(Singapore Straits Times, 5 November 2005).
This would be GSK’s sixth R&D plant, after
two in UK, and one each in USA, Italy and
Ireland. Novartis AG set up a R&D facility to
develop drugs for tropical diseases, such as
dengue fever and tuberculosis (Singapore
Investment News, August 2004). The other two
high profile pharmaceutical R&D projects
include operations by Eli Lilly, known as the
‘Lilly Systems Biology 2’ Centre, and
Schering-Plough’s biochemical R&D facility,
located at the University Science Park.
It would be a mistake to attribute the large
inflow of pharmaceutical FDI into Singapore
solely to the government’s Biomedical
Sciences Initiative. There were also other
exogenous factors that allowed Singapore to
enjoy ‘differential advantages’. For example,
the biotechnology policies of the two largest
countries in Asia, China and India, had a sig-
nificantly different focus. For both of these
countries, the focus was on developing
domestic biotechnology and pharmaceutical
firms. Hence, the aim in attracting FDI was
to encourage large biotechnology and phar-
maceutical corporations to establish joint
ventures with domestic firms with the aim of
acquiring capital and technology. The for-
eign investors, in exchange, sought access to
these (potentially) huge consumer markets.
The situation was very much the same in
Taiwan and to a lesser degree in South Korea,
because the latter country was not particu-
larly keen on FDI in the first place. Other
Asian countries, such as Malaysia and
Thailand, also have biotechnology policies,
but they are in the ‘infancy’ stage. Japan is
excluded from the analysis, as it is consid-
ered one of the ‘first world’ economies,
where FDI emanates rather than arrives.
As such, up to the beginning of 2006,
pharmaceutical FDI in both production and
R&D within Asia were mainly concentrated
in Singapore, but there was very little else-
where. Pharmaceutical FDI in mergers and
395
acquisitions were almost totally absent in
Singapore but significant in Asian countries
such as China and India. Hence, this some-
what ‘tacit’ division of labour has benefited
Singapore, as far as FDI competition is con-
cerned. Coupled with the Singapore govern-
ment’s provision of high quality infrastructure
and the growing pool of qualified human
resources, Singapore has been able to
re-capture the ‘competitive advantage’, at
least for the time being. Some critics (mostly
political lobby groups in the West) offer an
alternative explanation for the flow of
biotechnology and pharmaceutical FDI to
Singapore. They claim that Singapore has an
extremely ‘liberal’ bioethics policy even with
the bioethics guidelines. Hence, their argu-
ment is that Singapore’s high level of phar-
maceutical FDI was due to its competitive
advantage in lesser ‘morality’. In other
words, scientists and companies involved in
stem cell research that is banned in the ‘first
world’ have since flowed to Singapore (see,
for example, reports in Far Eastern
Economic Review 2003; Businessweek
(Online) 2005). In response to these criti-
cisms, it is worth noting that there are places
which have even less ‘morality’ than
Singapore as far as bioethics is concerned.
Yet, there does not seem to be any regular
flow of pharmaceutical or biotechnology for-
eign investments there. Hence, it is more
likely that pharmaceutical FDI has come to
Singapore because of the state-‘created’
competitive advantages, as well as the cur-
rent structure of the Asian regional economy.
Given that the Singapore government had
once gained and then subsequently lost its
‘competitive advantage’, and also given the
nature of economic globalization, the
Singapore government would be foolish to
assume that pharmaceutical FDI would
always flow into Singapore. When other
states decide to pursue a similar policy
agenda, and begin taking action to put in
place measures that will be attractive to large
pharmaceutical corporations, Singapore will
face competition that it did not face between
2000 and 2005.
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396 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
With regard to the issue of economic glob-
alization, as this mini-case study has also
shown, the pharmaceutical sector does, in
fact, have a global strategy. Firms would like
to acquire ‘more efficient’ – or simply put,
cheaper and/or better – resources from
abroad, in addition to seeking to expand into
new markets. Previously, local state regula-
tions had prevented this process. However, as
Singapore has shown, if the state creates the
right conditions for capital, which in this
case involved providing the adequate level of
infrastructure and human resources, then
capital will respond accordingly. It is a good
illustration of how capitalism and the state
jointly drive economic globalization through
competition.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
The purpose of this case study was to under-
stand the dynamics within inter-state compe-
tition for FDI, and also how this competition
in turn contributes to economic globalization.
With regard to the dynamics of competition,
an examination of the case of Singapore
between 1965 and 2005 shows how a govern-
ment, through its policies, was able to achieve
competitive advantage. However, sensing the
erosion of this advantage through the emer-
gence of new competitors, the state not only
attempted innovation to find new advantages
but also attempted to enter into cooperation.
As expected, conflict was found to inhere in
all competitive situations. Indeed, conflict
can easily emerge within cooperation, either
because of internal rivalry or external compe-
tition.
This case also shows that inter-state com-
petition was a critical factor in driving eco-
nomic globalization. Due to the policies of
the Singapore government in the 1960s,
many transnational corporations were able to
exploit cheaper resources in Singapore for
the purposes of cost savings. When other
Asian countries wanted to attract FDI for
purposes of local development, they began
competing against countries like Singapore.
This competition not only offered transna-
tional corporations even more choice for
investment locations but probably also even
cheaper resources. When the Singapore
government collaborated with other govern-
ments to jointly attract FDI, this gave
transnational corporations even greater
options. Finally, when the Singapore govern-
ment introduced the Biomedical Sciences
Initiative, as a strategy for regaining compet-
itive advantage, it showed that the pharma-
ceutical sector – a business sector that was
once considered not to have a global strategy –
immediately seized upon the new opportuni-
ties to acquire cheaper resources outside of
its home market.
This chapter concludes by revisiting the
most basic premise of capitalism, namely
that capital is not only driven by the entrepre-
neurship of firms but also requires the
involvement of the state. Under conditions of
economic globalization, where capitalism is
predominantly global rather than national,
global capital now requires the involvement
of competing states.
NOTES
1 In some cases, direct foreign investment is
treated as a component of FDI (see especially
UNCTAD website at http://stats.unctad.org/fdi/) for
purposes of national statistical accounting. However,
for this chapter, the two concepts will be used inter-
changeably.
2 There were also other contributing factors, such
as the devaluation of the US Dollar (Plaza Agreement),
for the rise of economic globalization. See Sklair
(1994) for a summary.
3 Regional here refers to the case of ‘the
European Union’ countries, or the North American
Free Trade Area (NAFTA) countries, while local refers
to specific countries including Japan, which is consid-
ered a ‘first world’ economy (see Rugman, 2004).
4 Found at website, http://www.jtc.gov.sg/Pro
ducts/industry+clusters/tuas+biomedical+park.asp
5 The following information is posted at A*Star’s
official website: The agency comprises the Biomedical
Research Council (BMRC), the Science and
Engineering Research Council (SERC), the Corporate
Planning and Administration Division (CPAD), the
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SINGAPORE’S DEVELOPMENT POLICIES
A*STAR Graduate Academy (A*GA) and the
commercialization arm, Exploit Technologies Pte Ltd
(ETPL). Both BMRC and SERC promote, support and
oversee the public sector’s R&D research activities in
Singapore. A*GA supports A*STAR’s key thrust of
human capital development through the promotion
of science scholarships and other manpower devel-
opment programmes and initiatives. ETPL manages
the Intellectual Property created by the research insti-
tutes and facilitates the transfer of technology from
the research institutes to industries. CPAD supports
the two Research Councils, A*GA and ETPL in per-
forming the functions of Finance, Human Resource,
Corporate Policy and Planning, Corporate
Communications, Legal, Information Technology and
Audit (http://www.a-star.edu.sg/).
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Beh, Swan Gin (2004) ‘Singapore Overview:
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Bhagwati, Jagdish (2004) In Defense of
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SINGAPORE’S DEVELOPMENT POLICIES 399

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9781412934633-Chap-27 1/10/09 8:57 AM Page 400
The Dynamics of
Local-Global Relations:
Conflict and Development
The ecological paradigm is presented as the
basic structure of one of the fundamental
dynamics of conflict and change. The struc-
ture of conflict is across levels of human
organization and aggregation that drives
change that comes from the environment, the
more encompassing level, affecting the
‘lower’, less encompassing, living systems
that resist such intrusions. This paradigm is
readily applied to the dynamics of local-
global relations, where the global influences
the local and the local the global. The global
today carries the elements of openness and
democratization that shape national, regional,
and local values, processes and practices.
How this happens is discussed at the end of
this chapter in the context of a large scale,
cross-national research program that assesses
democratic values and change and how polit-
ical leaders in local governmental units relate
to them.
The systematic study of relationships
among local and higher levels and neighboring
niches of living systems has long standing in
science as the ecologies of all living species.
27
Henry Teune
The formulation of this ‘revolutionary idea’
is relevant to one of the most important
changes taking place today among human
social systems – local and global – a process
with many different results that are chal-
lenged in controversies that extend beyond
traditional studies of international relations
to global issues of the environment, the
integrity of cultures, indeed, the basic human
relationships that are part of the development
of global human rights.
INTRODUCTION: THE ECOLOGICAL
PARADIGM
The concept of ecology entered modern
sociology in the second half of the nineteenth
century as one of its dominant theoretical
modalities. Ideas about ecology as a theoret-
ical framework have changed dramatically
since then. The conceptual history of ecology
begins as an idea about the dynamic relation-
ships between living and physical systems
9781412934633-Chap-27 1/10/09 8:57 AM Page 401
THE DYNAMICS OF LOCAL-GLOBAL RELATIONS
in the 1850s and is firmly attached to biolog-
ical evolution (Darwin, 1859). It is then
imported by early, secular social develop-
ment theorists (Marx, 1867; Spencer, 1862);
becomes a sub-field of sociology called
human ecology in North America (Park et al.,
1925); and finally bounces back to Europe as
social ecology (Dogan and Rokkan, 1969). In
about a generation, social ecology has moved
as a discipline from the national to the inter-
national and now to the global, the ultimate
social niche.1 From the point that ecological
analysis was opened as a paradigm for the
study of human change in general, it is now
being considered as a way to interpret theo-
retically the most important transformation
of the past several decades, the integration of
all human societies into a single human
social system.
An essential component of ecological
analysis is the definition of an environment –
a niche – that must be justified theoretically
and empirically. However conceived, the
world unto its ‘ends’ was always an ‘environ-
ment’ for the human race. In social ecology,
the neighborhood was defined as an environ-
ment within a city or settlement; the city, as a
space for population distributions by social
class in ‘capitalist’ development with its free
migration of people and capital; the region, as
formal and informal units determining the eco-
nomic functions of spatially aggregated cities;
and the country, as the powerful political entity
controlling basic social and economic relations
among groups and individuals. The progression
is from local niches, to regions as aggregates
of localities, to countries as aggregations of
regions, and, finally, to the dynamics of glob-
alization that makes the world a total physical,
living, and human system, ‘the ultimate envi-
ronment’ of theoretical relevance today.
Since the fifteenth century with its
European naval explorations, the world is
seen, mostly in outline form, as a changing,
single living system, focused on dispersions
of germs and plant and animal populations
invading world regions and localities mostly
through human carriers. Although the world
has been understood as a single physical
401
system with a common origin and history for
several centuries, our observational and ana-
lytical capacities still allow only a partial
understanding of the place of the earth in the
cosmos. Eventually our grasp of the world has
come to include the reality that our world
emerged from larger, more encompassing sys-
tems that continue to shape it both incremen-
tally by the impact of energy and matter and
episodically by massive intrusions from outer
space. Challenges abound in the study of the
evolution of species. Even now, the search
goes on for evidence of catastrophic events
from space millions of years ago that trans-
formed the configurations of living systems.
Understanding of the world as a single
human system is not within easy analytical
grasp, and research and teaching about it
remain ensconced in national sociologies.
While the global human system can be
addressed from the perspective of an interna-
tional sociology, the challenge of construct-
ing a global social science remains. Still,
politics about the virtues and vices of a
global human system are supplanting the
focus on the influence of particular civiliza-
tions and states that seek control and domi-
nance. An ideological struggle about a global
human system is taking place on the cusp of
a transformation from an international world
composed of states continuing to pursue their
interests in competition over limited
resources to a global system of growth and
development with cooperation.
The structure of the ecological paradigm
for theory and research has the following
fundamental characteristics: at least two levels
(environment and the encompassed entities);
at least two points in time; and at least one
relationship, conflict being the most common.
Implied are comparisons across systems and
across time. From this ecological perspective,
processes that increase complexity and change
as growth or decline at the global level both
incorporate and stimulate conflict dynamics
at the local levels.
In social ecology, as in any macro-social
analysis, the first question is the aggregation
rules of relevance for explanation; and
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402 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
the second, the relative and sufficient auton-
omy of the aggregates or systems being
examined from those encompassing them
(Hannan, 1981). This means, in the first case,
that explanations, for example, of the eco-
nomic growth of regions are significantly
different within a country to justify separate
regional analysis and, in the second case, that
regional economic growth in patterns is dif-
ferent from national economic growth. In
social ecology and its corollary of comparing
social, economic, and political systems, a
necessary assumption for comparing social
niches or systems is that their defined bound-
aries have some degree of independence
from higher level systems. Thus, questions
posed by the grand hypothesis of the world
as a total human system is the extent to
which changes within identifiable local
niches, cities, regions, countries, and corpora-
tions, for example, are sufficiently determined
by their own, autonomous internal processes
to be amenable to comparisons as ‘closed’
systems. Alternatively, the question is the
extent to which local conflicts are local
responses to those at higher levels, more
encompassing niches, including the global
system. Local conflicts and the processes of
dealing with them at least must be considered
partial responses to global influences, even if
that influence is expected to vary from very
little to a great deal.
The two core theoretical and empirical
issues for global ecological analysis, then,
for comparative across-level, across-time,
and across-system analysis in an evolving
global system – are first, what is local and
what is global, and second, what are the
dynamics by which those global-local rela-
tionships change? What is the ‘best’ level for
explaining the most variance, including
change? For example, does change in voting
participation occur because of changes in
individuals resulting from the spread of more
education nearly everywhere? Alternatively,
are changes in participation a result of the
homogenizing effects of reduced pressures
from social and economic groups reflecting
national trends of the weakening strength of
groups on individuals? Are these changes in
engagement in voting generational, a mixing
and weakening of the influence of cultures
on political behavior, or the political coming
together of transnational regions in Europe
and Latin America and elsewhere? Or does
globalization diminish the range of differ-
ences and choice on the left and right in
political party politics and thus dampen
the motivational intensity of political party
differences?
The challenge of local-global relationships
comes from (a) the reality that all observations
are micro or local, made within specific con-
texts and at specific points in time, and (b) the
necessity that all theoretical generalizations
must be connected to higher order systems
through inferences. Those inferences should
also include conjectures about influences from
neighboring systems as well as those about the
histories of systems – the legacies of the past
that explain current, and predict future states
of the system.
AN ECOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION
OF LOCAL-GLOBAL CONFLICT
The idea of ecology appears to have been
appropriated by many political groups con-
cerned with human destruction of the physical
and living environments. One consequence is
a reluctance to use the ecological paradigm
in social research. Still, as the ecological par-
adigm continues to acquire theoretical
prominence in the realm of biological evolu-
tion in research on genes, it is likely to regain
its position for understanding the main devel-
opmental dynamics of change stemming
from new forms of local-global social relation-
ships in the twenty-first century. Globalization
has brought about institutions, although still
weak and unsure, for addressing conflicts
among nations and some that are beginning to
deal with group conflicts that can escalate into
wars of genocide and terror. The traditional,
international and group conflicts involve
winners and losers in zero-sum contests.
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THE DYNAMICS OF LOCAL-GLOBAL RELATIONS
Globalization as development embraces
world prosperity rather than the total success
of some over others. The global, however,
has emerged as the new and the modern,
threatening traditional social orders based on
established patterns of belief and values. For
some groups, the enemy is global, intruding
everywhere. For those attached to the global,
the new institutions represent freedom and
opportunity, just as ‘new’ nation-states offered
an alternative to the restraints and limits of the
local or control by aliens from other cultures.
Relationships across levels of human
organization are inherently conflictual. First,
the higher level always has more variety than
any unit does at a lower level. It has all the
variety of any unit plus that of all other units.
The probability of higher levels of aggregation
yielding new types of diversity is greater than
that of lower level units with less variety
combining into something different. Higher
levels are also bigger and more powerful and
can absorb lower levels. The main cities in a
region, as centers of variety, have historically
functioned as centers of innovation. Second,
because higher levels have a greater capacity
simply to absorb variety from others, their rate
of change is faster. The more variety a system
has, the less disturbing is any novelty because
it is a small percentage of the total. Higher
levels seek to absorb the local by processes of
incorporation, often resisted by the lower
levels. Conflicts between a higher level center
and lower level localities are aggravated by
the spatial distances that carry a history of
conflicts between the center and the periphery.
As the lower levels adapt to change, they are
confronted with more change from higher
levels and, as noted, at an accelerating rate.
Nation-states have been established in almost
all parts of the world except those that are
least developed economically. Most of those
areas today have institutionalized processes
whereby local and national differences can be
resolved whether in regional governments,
new forms of decentralization, or negotiated
economic distributions. For the time being, at
least in most countries, the worst of national
conflicts with the local have been smoothed.
403
Local-global conflicts from intrusions
where the global invades the local with nov-
elty, more rapid processes of change, and
with resources that redefine and influence
local positions of wealth and standing also
bring prospects for local prosperity and
autonomy. Nonetheless, local resistance is
potentially violently destructive of the
global. Often the local resists or presses dif-
ferent priorities than the global. Although
local conflicts with the global can escalate to
violence, they often appear only symboli-
cally in demonstrations. The other side of
global intrusions, especially when they are
invited by local groups, are additions of vari-
ety to the locality as well as connections to
alternative, higher level systems that allow
the locality to bypass the controls of regions
and states. In the coming decades, local
conflicts with higher levels are likely to be
focused on the global, with the local attempt-
ing to enlist national authorities to help in
resisting global intrusions.
In sum, the transcendent dynamic of local-
global relations as a source of conflict is the
evolution of social (human) systems, incor-
porating the ‘classical’ ecological dynamics
of competition and conflict into processes
that tie globalization to developmental
processes. Globalization is a process that is
inclusive of all diversity through the integra-
tion of social, political and economic sys-
tems.2 This process differs from that of
empires, where populations are subordinated
to a center in limited ways, but generally
left autonomous in the pursuit of their own
culture.
During the past quarter of a century or so,
development has shifted from the national to
the global (Teune and Mlinar, 2000). For
over two centuries the state, with its varied
political economies, exercised hierarchal
control from a center which was justified by
economic growth and social justice and a dif-
ferent, often new, overriding political identity.
The state is, however, unlikely to regain its
role as the main engine of economic growth
and integration of small units into larger
systems. Although the state may control
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404 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
more of its populations relative to what it did
in the past, the global – corporations, courts,
international governmental agencies, new
transnational regions – has preempted national
autonomy in several domains, notably in
trade, finance, and human rights, and to some
extent, in environmental health policies.
Globalization, the consequence of decades of
development at local and national levels,
feeds those processes, speeding up develop-
ment (Teune, 2001).
GLOBALIZATION
As emphasized, globalization is the summa-
tion of the processes by which human
societies become integrated at higher, more
inclusive levels of aggregation, moving from
small groups, to tribes, to empires and states
with a higher level of integration, and finally
to the world as a total human system. The
processes of social and human development
for the past 8–10 thousand years have
yielded higher, more encompassing, levels of
human organization. Agricultural societies,
by occupying territory, have obliterated
nearly all hunting-gathering ones, often
through massive displacements and killing.
Hierarchical states attempted to incorporate
local religious, ethnic, economic and other
differences into singular identities of either
subjects or citizens, but with few exceptions,
incompletely. Most states today retain a
structure of differences among religious and
ethnic groups, as well as between rural and
urban populations.
By the end of the twentieth and into the
twenty-first century, many globalization
processes are underway, especially the trans-
formations of the remaining agricultural
societies into urbanized social orders based
on some mixture of industries, services,
information, and research. During those
same decades, a world of states had just
about come into its own as the dominant
form of successful human organization based
on individual citizens. States replaced the
older forms of ecological dominance of polit-
ical empires, based on enforced allegiance.
The world of states is being replaced by a
global political order, however incipient and
inchoate, with floundering institutions such
as the UN, the World Trade Organization, and
the International Criminal Court. Because
this began to happen before many areas of the
world had become fully integrated into the
hierarchies of their newly founded states with
stable and effective national governments,
local political order often broke down into
tribal, ethnic, and religious wars. Many of the
newly independent states were façade states,
pretending to have control through a working
bureaucracy and loyal army. In fact, they
were manipulated by religious, economic,
and ethnic interests that generated conflicts.
These divisions, threatening overt conflict,
often led states to engage in suppressing
cultures, classes, and ethnicities to maintain
order. Russia as a weak state is considered a
puppet of economic interests and several
Middle Eastern countries are in the hands of
religious leaders.
In the politics of empire, strong neighbors,
or the competing centers, invade localities
and either extract resources through local
intermediaries or simply incorporate local
groups, thereby absorbing local diversity
into the larger system. Using and mixing
many elements of diversity from their territo-
ries, empires may emerge as creative civiliza-
tions adding technologies, institutions, and
art to the human stock. The limit of empires
is their hierarchical control through domina-
tion. Developmental processes, in contrast
to these strictly competitive ecological
dynamics of dominance and control, feed on
variety, and the agents of developmental
change – new components and new relation-
ships – must nurture the creation of variety.
Development, emanating from the commin-
gling of populations and exchanges, at some
point becomes variety-intensive based on
innovation. This is reflected in the comings
and goings of innovation-driven researchers
into enclaves and groupings. The conse-
quence of integrating diversity is a structure
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THE DYNAMICS OF LOCAL-GLOBAL RELATIONS
for creating more diversity and the dynamics
of integrating it.
Thus, transnational regions have more
diversity than individual countries and hence
the tensions between the policies in Brussels
in the European Union and its member states.
The same pattern holds for the global and the
transnational regional, where the European
Union and North American Free Trade
Association act to protect themselves against
intrusions from the global in technology and
agriculture.
This theory of developmental change, gener-
ating changes in both the nature of the
components of the system and the relationships
among them, departs from classical theories
of development as economic growth and
its distribution in two ways. First, it includes
social and political relationships and values,
and not just goods and services of differential
value. Second, it brings technology, produc-
ing new objects, and ideas, and combining
and fusing them more efficiently and quickly,
into the heart of the developmental processes
of change rather than treating it as exogenous
(Teune, 1988a).
Eventually the developmental dynamics of
integrating diversity occurs almost entirely at
the highest possible level of human aggrega-
tion, the global system, providing access to
all variety anywhere on earth to everyone,
everywhere at decreasing costs. Hence, glob-
alization as development weakens the con-
straints of space and time, diminishing the
key social ecological theoretical variables of
competition over limited resources and
space. Development, as integrating diversity,
also eliminates the applicability of the logic
of equilibrium that is central to the classical
ecological processes of competition and
conflict in the spatially constrained dynamics
of invasion, dominance and succession.
Nonetheless, scarcity and dominance remain
implanted in the physical and social ecology
of the past in organizations and roads and
buildings, standing in conflict with processes
of development that produce access for
nearly everybody to practically any object or
idea without regard to either where they are
405
or to which community or political system
they belong.
Because local-global relations are
enmeshed in a set of dynamics of change
with the global impacting settled localities
more than the local impacts the global (or
sub-systems of the global), the process is
perceived as favoring the global as winners
and the local as losers. Whether local actions
can offset the global of the last few decades
is a major research challenge for the social
sciences as well as for investors. During
recent decades rapid technological advances
in transportation and communications,
making controllable territorial boundaries for
defense of countries and localities nearly
impossible, has favored the global even more
strongly.
What perhaps is different about contempo-
rary local-global relations is that variety
comes from everywhere, hence the pervasive
strangeness of all kinds of variety entering
the local at an accelerating rate. More than
that, nation-states have become yet another
local, despite being mostly unfinished in the
formation of their capacities to control.
Local-global relations are, then, funda-
mental in that transnational and global organ-
izations and institutions compete with lower
levels, and the lower levels have ‘collective
perceptions’ that they are being exploited and
destroyed by higher levels (or a response
reservoir from their histories that responds as
if they were). The conflicts are manifest in
anti-global political protests; populist, often
nationalistic, political reactions in political
movements and political parties; and in
terrorism against modernity, as represented
by the West and its symbols of agents of
change for a better life. Most of these overt
acts of conflict are reactions to global forces.
The successes of the resistance to globaliza-
tion often appear as a hodgepodge of status
quo arrangements or the restoration of past
conditions.
Whether and how global forces change or
destroy the local is a political matter of what
is right, that is, of acceptable means for the
global to enter the local. But it is appropriate
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406 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
to speak about ‘global wars’ not because vio-
lence is occurring everywhere, but because
of the structure of the conflicts between the
global and the local, whether or not they
break out in violence.
Among the many potential evils of global-
ization is the suspension or blockage of local
democratic processes in favor of, or in defer-
ence to, more encompassing and generally
more powerful systems, whether of a region,
a state, a transnational region or the world.
One consequence of globalization that is often
expressed is the fear that in order to succeed,
global actors will by-pass local institutions,
including local, democratic ones. To do so,
they cultivate anti-democratic and corrupt
local practices. More than that is the belief
that political participation, to be meaningful,
must be local and occur in an environment
free of threats from outsiders. Versions of
these arguments were part of many violent
efforts by national governments to assert
control of localities.
The data that will be presented later in this
chapter as an example of globalization’s
impact on the local governmental units sup-
port the contrary view: globalization expands
alternatives opened by higher level institu-
tions, not only increasing freedom of choice
for the local but also stimulating local
democratization through the acceptance of
diversity of cultures and practices. These new
connections include non-governmental
regional and international organizations and,
in some areas of the world, justice in the
form of courts and forums to redress national
violations of rights. Globalization also
empowers local populations by opening up
opportunities to challenge local authorities
and threaten to ‘vote’ by exiting. New choices
generated by globalization can be seen in the
rapid development and acceptance of a ‘third
tier’ of regions within Europe, many in
response to initiatives of local regions within
countries, accompanying advances in the
institutionalization of the European Union
(Bullmann, 1997). Regional bodies provide
voice and strength to interests that are not
heard in the national capitals or in Brussels,
the seat of the political center of the EU. In
any event, a shift of political issues to
global/regional levels has taken place, and it
is unlikely that the national will regain as
high a proportion of control over the local
ever again in the face of these alternative
regional and global institutions.
IDEOLOGICAL PROCESSES IN
GLOBALIZATION
Human societies sought their betterment not
only from exchanges with others but also by
simply taking from and dominating their
neighbors (Keeley, 1996). Integration of
societies was also brought about through
ideologies of peace and cooperation. These
ideologies were religious in nature, promising
better societies based on extramundane legit-
imacy and justice. All of the major systems
of belief in a new order of peace – Buddhism,
Christianity, and Islam – got caught up in
persistent internal factional fights and wars
with neighbors and lost their credibility as
unifiers and peacemakers.
Secular globalization processes must be
underpinned by ideologies, belief systems
that support their more inclusive social sys-
tems. Globalization processes of the last
decades of the twentieth century carried with
them the ideology of ‘liberal democracy’, an
open, inclusive, secular ideology which,
however associated with older kinds of impe-
rialism, stands as an ideology of human
development without commitment to any
particular group, civilization, or religion.
This general democratic ideology is based on
inclusion without commitment to a group,
which makes it difficult to target specific
enemies other than the general evils of the
global unknown.
The new global order based on this secular
ideology is being given shape by open insti-
tutions in major regional affiliations and
institutions in Europe, Asia, North America,
Latin America, and Africa. Some of these
already have a regional politics as is seen in
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THE DYNAMICS OF LOCAL-GLOBAL RELATIONS
a broader Europe in defense (North Atlantic
Treaty Organization, NATO), trade and
finance (European Union, EU), human rights
(Council of Europe, CoE) among others. The
global institutions, often referred to as ‘inter-
national’ institutions, are generally divided
politically into governmental and non-
governmental organizations. There are
‘global courts’, the International Court and
regional ones in most parts of the world, the
most active one being the European Court of
Human Rights. There are also some sem-
blances of global armies and police in the
UN and most recently a ‘broadened’ NATO.
Democratic order has penetrated, but this
change appears to have happened in a
moment, and seems to have become only
shallowly rooted in some places with ques-
tionable growth, as the case of Russia will
illustrate later in the chapter. Wherever
democracy is established, however thinly it
has penetrated, the potential for violent
conflict appears to have diminished.
Accompanying democratization and
global economic penetration was political
decentralization to localities and regions and
weakening state control of national
economies. After the democratic revolutions
in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and in
the years following, there were global disper-
sions of democratic values and knowledge
supporting ‘democratic’ change, indeed, rev-
olutions, reaching to Asia and Africa and
including the non-violent democratic trans-
formations in Georgia and the Ukraine
in 2004–05. Democratization in the 1990s
became a global ‘Second Democratic
Revolution’, about 200 years after the first
‘European’ democratic revolution in 1789.
The developmental dynamics at work in
global-local relations have redefined the
classical social ecological dynamics: centers
and peripheries, learning and adaptation,
dialectics among levels and rates of change,
and competitive games among levels of
human organization. These are at the core of
classical social ecology as conflicts that have
replaced the more basic, and mindless,
ecological dynamics of living systems of
407
predator/prey, growth/diffusion, and random
variation/adaptation (Teune, 1978).
Centers and peripheries
The most important fact about this period of
globalization is that the US economy
dropped from providing about half of the
world’s economic production around 1947 to
somewhat under 25% just after the beginning
of the twenty-first century. That percentage
will continue to drop only because of a
continued high growth rate in China relative
to the US. An indisputable indication of
globalization is the decentralization of
production and distribution. Globalization
undermines the view of a world system of
centers and peripheries, described by Lenin
as empires and in other interpretations as
‘dependency’ with capitalist centers control-
ling underdeveloped countries and regions.
A longer-term perspective on globalization
and development is the dispersal of world pro-
duction, the localization of national capitals,
the rise of varieties of enclaves of innovative
people and organizations, and the emergence
of networks of ensembles of sectors of activ-
ities that mutually enhance creativity and
productivity. As globalization continues, the
world is being re-structured into an urban
world of multiple centers that defines a
global political economy (Teune, 1988b).
The estimate is that nearly half of the world’s
population is urban. The impact of diminish-
ing differences between centers and periph-
eries is to promote globalization as integration
rather than as dominance.
Learning and adaptation
Ecology can be used as a theoretical para-
digm to analyze long-term processes of learn-
ing and adaptation, resulting in improved
capacities for more learning and at a faster rate.
To date, humans have been the triumphant
learning species.3 The occupiers of a niche
‘learn’ to cope with their environment by
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408 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
selecting out those of its members who do
not survive long and by providing advantages
in reproduction to those who do. This is one
version of ecology as conflict and adaptation –
a mechanistic one of ‘mindless’ learning.
Another, of course, is conscious adaptation
to cope better with changes in the niche.
Globalization contributes to learning and
adaptation to differences and modes of com-
munication, accelerating the capacities of
localities to become part of a global economy
and institutions.
Dialectics: levels and rates
The dialectics of development derive from the
fact that higher levels of aggregation have
more variety and diversity than lower levels
and that the greater the variety, the more likely
new variety will be generated. Developmental
processes generate structures of conflict in
the processes of local adaptations to global-
ization, often creating volatility in local
markets and politics. As national markets
become globalized, volatility increases in the
short run but they become more stable over
time as the production and integration of new
variety spreads. Conflicts arise from the
introduction of novelty that divides the local-
ities, and causes scissions in groups and
individuals within them, between those that
have and do not have access to the new and
‘global’. Thus, at least the perceptions of
local conflicts that matter should have
increased at the local levels that have
recently opened to the global.
Competitive games
Conflicts between the local and the global
parallel those much studied between the local
and the national. One way of looking at
locally organized efforts to deal with the
global is to treat them as an ecology of games
(Long, 1958). Leadership, collective action,
and local interests come into play. The logic
of local collective action is to maintain
relationships that sustain local interests. The
regional, national, and global each have
interests in enhancing their control of the
local in order to access local resources
through forced appropriation or purchase.
This situation comprises a set of competitive
games among these levels of interests. The
engagement in this form of conflict should
stimulate local politics once open democratic
practices are allowed.
LOCAL-GLOBAL RELATIONS AND
THEIR IMPACT ON LOCAL DEMOCRACY
This analysis will conclude with a look at
one of the greatest penetrations of the global
ideology of democracy into the values and
practices of local political leaders – the
beginning of the ‘global democratic revolu-
tion’ of the 1990s and carrying on during the
opening years of the twenty-first century.
The Democracy and Local Governance
Research Program began in 1990 in order
to examine these processes. It is one of the
large cross-national, comparative research
projects started after the end of the Cold War,
directed to examining the impact of a mas-
sive change in world order on local gover-
nance and democracy (Teune, 2003, 2006).
The general hypothesis is that globalization
provides an impetus to local democratic
institutions, values, and practices. These
would be linked to pressures on the local
toward openness to higher level systems:
regional, national, and global. The impact
would depend in part on the democratization
processes at national governmental level and,
of course, on the local differences in levels
of development and the position of local
governments in terms of the ease of entry of
global associations.
The research is built on national samples
of local political units ranging in population
from about 25,000 to 250,000, cities and in
some cases counties having cities as their
center, that are of significance for political
participation and for the delivery of social
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THE DYNAMICS OF LOCAL-GLOBAL RELATIONS
services. Local political leaders were targeted
for interviews – mayors, deputy mayors,
council members, political party leaders,
and, if appropriate, heads of governmental
administrative entities. A sample of about 15
was selected in each locality.4
Data have now been gathered in 29 coun-
tries, mostly in Eurasia but also Brazil and
the US. In several countries, especially those
that are former communist countries, data
have been collected at two or three points in
time. Two countries – Poland and Russia –
for which data are now available into the
twenty-first century will be the focus of
analysis in this chapter, with comparisons
with Sweden, an established democracy.
Data will be presented on the values and
behavior of local political leaders from
these three countries which reflect different
experiences with globalization and demo-
cratic governance. The data are taken from
the beginning, the middle and the slowing
down – 1991–2003 – of the most extensive
globalization and democratization periods in
human history.
The results of the research show that the
global has an impact on local democratic
values and practices everywhere but the
impact varies depending on past exposure to
globalization and alternatives open to politi-
cal leaders at the local level. The three coun-
tries discussed here vary widely in their past
general exposure to globalization and local
democratic politics. Sweden, of course, is
global and has options open to the global
both in Europe and elsewhere. Poland had
more exposure to globalization both before
and after the demise of its communist politi-
cal system, and had alternatives, at the time
of this study, in the expanding European
institutions, most importantly, the European
Union. Russia, the successor state to the
former Soviet Union, had little general expo-
sure to the global and nearly none to demo-
cratic political experiences. Nonetheless, all
of these countries have been impacted in
some ways by globalization. The expectation
from the general increase in exposures to
globalization and democratization during
409
the 1990s is that local leaders in Sweden,
already at a high level of local democratic
engagement, would move slightly forward in
their support for democratic values and prac-
tices; Poland would move forward somewhat;
and Russia would vacillate, moving negatively
in some ways and positively in others. In
terms of overall commitment to democratic
values, those expectations are supported.
In terms of seeing conflicts in a developing
and strengthening democratic environment
globally and nationally, the perceptions of
conflicts among local leaders, even the intense
ones that interfere with local political deci-
sions, increased significantly in regard to local
conflicts between 1995 and 2001(03) in
Poland and Russia; whereas in Sweden there
was a negligible increase in perceived local
conflicts. Regarding social tolerance neces-
sary for the value of democratic inclusion
(willingness to have various groups as neigh-
bors), there was a dramatic drop in intolerance
among local political leaders between 1995
and 2001(03) in both Poland and Russia. This
suggests that the impact of the global demo-
cratic changes in the 1990s was more endur-
ing in the social than in the political domains.
The institutionalization of the behaviour of
seeking support from many groups in the
locality when making decisions, however,
significantly declined from 1995 to 2001(03)
in Poland and Russia, but increased in Sweden
as it moved to decentralization during that
decade. These findings are presented in some
detail in what follows.
Poland and Russia were both dramatically
impacted by their rapid exposure to the
global system in 1989–1990. Poland was an
involved participant in European affairs prior
to the collapse of its communist political
system. Once it became clear that it would be
admitted to NATO and the EU, Poland insti-
tuted major political changes. It also had
experimented with different kinds of local
governance, and, when a new constitution
came into effect in 1990, chose a system with
decentralization and local autonomy that
is compatible with European standards as
developed by the EU but with more central
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410 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
control over regional government than in
most other countries of Europe.
Since Russia established a new political
regime in 1993, its official position is that its
political system is democratic. Even after a
shift was made (after the re-election of Putin
in 2004) to more centralized political control
in a strong presidential system by a law cur-
tailing direct elections of governors of
regions in favor of appointment by the cen-
tral government, the official interpretation is
that Russian democracy is compatible with
the democratic standards subscribed to by
members of the EU.
Data about what happened to the democratic
values, beliefs, and practices of local political
leaders from 1995 to 2001–03 will be high-
lighted, with Sweden as a contrasting ‘control’
country. (Sweden stands out as the ‘most dem-
ocratic’ country of all the 29 countries in this
study on nearly all the comparative measures
used in this research.) The evidence is that the
big changes in the newly ‘globalized’ countries
occurred at the very beginning of the demo-
cratic ‘revolutions’, during the early 1990s.
These changes were accompanied by signifi-
cant turnovers among the people occupying
the full range of positions of local government,
following changes in the incumbents and insti-
tutions at higher levels of government.
After the ‘shocks’ of institutional and lead-
ership changes associated with the political
collapse of the ‘last great empire’, the Soviet
Union, there is continued impact of the
global on the local leaders’ perception of the
importance of foreign investments. When
asked about the impact of the global on their
localities in terms of investment, exports,
imports, pollution, foreign workers, there
Table 27.1 Demscore1 (mean score)
1991
Poland
Russia
Sweden 0.45(N=440)
1
mean of nine items each with ‘agree’, ‘tend to disagree’, ‘disagree’ as possible answers.
Note: Ns are for individual leaders nationally and are the same for all tables.
was a perception of much more foreign
investment, some increase in tourists, and in
Russia, of foreign workers. There is little
increase in perceived impact from the global
media, but the democratic values of tolerance
changed remarkably during this time.
A few of the variables highlight the
changes from 1995 to 2001 in Poland
and from 1995 to 2003 in Russia. The main
macro difference of specific political rele-
vance to globalization between these two
countries was that Poland in 2001 was in the
midst of preparations for joining the EU,
scheduled for 2004, and moving to greater
global engagement, while in Russia there
were clear signals that the Presidency would
be strengthening central institutions at the
expense of regional and local autonomy. That
process appears to have continued from the
time of the study throughout the terms of
office of President Putin.
Democratic values
The democratic values of leaders in two
countries have changed significantly within
this short time frame, increasing in Poland
and dropping in Russia. To measure this, a
Demscore was constructed from three items
from each of three democratic value scales –
political equality, pluralism (acceptance of
conflicts) and minority (vs. majority) rights.5
Although many refinements are possible and
alternative scales were carefully explored,
this nine item scale turned out to
be the broadest and clearest measure for
differentiating among the 16,000 or so lead-
ers interviewed across many cultures and
1995 1999 2001(03)
0.10(N = 448) 0.13(N =443)
−0.10(N = 1068) −0.16(N =719)
0.48(N=438)
9781412934633-Chap-27 1/10/09 8:57 AM Page 411
THE DYNAMICS OF LOCAL-GLOBAL RELATIONS
time points in the Democracy and Local
Governance research program.
The Polish leaders stay with the global
democratic orientations they had previously
embraced, despite turnovers of leaders, while
the Russian leaders responded to the initia-
tives of President Putin to increase central
control with a reduction in their commitment
to democratic values, even as their global
democratic values of tolerance of ‘marginal’
social groups increased. Both countries
remained relatively open to foreign economic,
media, and other influences, especially
investments, although Poland was poised to
join the European Union in 2001 and Russia
was on the periphery of these European and
globalizing changes.
Messages about the nature of democracy
from Brussels and Moscow are different.
Polish political leaders moved toward
becoming like the most democratic leaders in
Central Europe, while those of Russia appear
to be drifting toward the value configurations
characteristic of their past and their counter-
parts in Central Asia. The data show some
European pull and a drift away of the periph-
ery, in this case Russia. Swedish leaders
stand firm.
A standard question widely used to indi-
cate commitment to democracy is trust in the
people. That question showed some sharp
changes over the time period examined
depending on relationships with the European
Union (trust in most of the people = 1). Trust
dropped in all three countries, but substan-
tially so in Russia where disagreements have
probably not only become more intensive
among people but also acknowledging them
is more acceptable.
Local political leaders were asked what
groups they would not want as neighbors.
Fourteen were listed, including right and left
Table 27.2 Trust in people: percentage yes1
1991 1995 1999 2001(03)
Poland 44 40
Russia 30 23
Sweden 92 90
1
yes most, of the people =1.
411
political people, criminals, and addicts. A high
rejection of those with AIDs and homosexuals
in both Poland and Russia dropped between
the time periods, as did the percentage for
Roma in Poland. (The percentages in Sweden
were negligible and the question about the
Roma was not asked there.) This is one indi-
cation of the ‘sticky’ but very basic nature of
the social rather than political values of
democracy. Indeed one of most dramatic
impacts visible in these data is the staying power
of globalization’s impact on the acceptance of
diversity among Russian local political leaders.
Local autonomy, leader influence,
and localism
What was the impact of globalization on
local autonomy? The general assumption is
that local democracy requires substantial
local autonomy and even the autonomy to
expand local responsibilities. One of the gen-
eral hypotheses of the research was that a
rapid diminution in national authority
through democratization and opening up of
countries through globalization would
expand local autonomy, or at least the per-
ceptions of autonomy by local political lead-
ers. Nothing like that happened. Indeed,
there is nearly no change. In fact, Sweden,
which is formally centralized, has local polit-
ical leaders who believe that they have as
much autonomy as any country (about the
same as in the US in 1991). The local leaders
in Russia saw no change during the first
Table 27.3 Group not wanted as neighbors:
percentages1
1995 2001(03)
Poland
AIDS 44 21
Homosexuals 48 34
Roma 31 14
Russia
AIDS 50 38
Homosexuals 57 29
Roma 21 25
1
Each mention = 1.
Note: Sweden, less than 1% for AIDS and homosexuals.
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412 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

Table 27.4 Having local autonomy: mean1 Table 27.6 Local priorities vs. national
1995 1999 2001(03) priorities – mean score1
Poland 0.56 0.56 1991 1995 1999 2001(03)
Russia 0.56 0.58 Poland 0.17 0.11
Sweden 0.65 Russia 0.29 0.32
1
’Have local antonomy’ = 1, asked about 13 policy areas, Sweden 0.13 0.15
1
including education, employment, pollution, housing, etc. Answer options: ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’; positive = local.
Note: Not asked in Sweden in 1991.

years of a re-centralization. In Poland local
leaders perceived a drop in autonomy, most
probably because there was an increase of
central authority over the provincial level of
government with the appointment of, rather
than previous election of ‘governors’.
Using a three-point scale, a general ques-
tion was asked about how much influence the
local leaders had in each of 14 policy areas.
Many of the areas were similar to those for
the arenas covered in the question about
autonomy – housing, education, taxation.
Self-perceived influence went up in Poland, a
country in which globalization was accelerat-
ing, surpassing even the levels in Sweden in
both years. It remained unchanged in Russia,
at levels exceeding Swedish responses in 1991.
A plausible interpretation of these results
was an increase in the politicization of issues
at the local level in both Poland and Russia
and in the knowledge of the local political
leaders in both countries about the direction
of local governmental reform toward local
self-government throughout the European
Union.
Localism was one of several multi-item
value scales. It is based on four agree-disagree
items reflecting local vs. national priorities:
national goals should not have priority over
local ones; local community problems
should be first; no community can progress
without national priorities; locals should not
worry about national problems. The Polish
leaders became less, although still relatively
highly oriented to the local, and the Russian
leaders slightly more focused on the local,
with no change among the Swedish leaders
even though Sweden was in the process of
loosening central governmental control
throughout this period.
Conflict, however measured, is generally
the most powerful predictor of a number of
differences among localities and countries.
The general hypothesis was that globaliza-
tion and democratization would increase the
perception of conflicts in localities. The
increase in globalization does indeed appear
to lead to higher levels of conflict in these
countries. This is true in both Poland and
Russia, where issues became politicized
locally rather than repressed or moved to
regional and national levels of government.
One likely reason for mentioning conflicts as
detrimental to local political decisions is that
after an initial period, local political leaders
learned that it was acceptable to admit that
conflict existed. Under communism, con-
flicts had been seen as a pathology of capital-
ism, not socialism. In Sweden, the perception
of conflict interfering with getting things
done is relatively low and has barely
increased since the 1991 Swedish study.
Paralleling an increase in conflict is a drop
in the ‘civic’ and political support groups
sought out by political leaders. The question
was: from what groups ‘do you seek support’

Table 27.5 Influence across policy areas: Table 27.7 Conflicts interfere with public
14 areas action – mean1
1991 1995 1999 2001(03) 1991 1995 1999 2001(03)
Poland 0.83 0.89 Poland 0.90 1.18
Russia 0.66 0.65 Russia 0.67 1.07
Sweden 0.60 0.73 Sweden 0.40 0.39
1
Scoring of answers: ‘very much’ =2, ‘some’ =1, ‘none’ =0. 1
Scoring of answers: ‘very much’ =2, ‘some’ =1, ‘no’= 0.
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THE DYNAMICS OF LOCAL-GLOBAL RELATIONS
Table 27.8 Number of support groups
sought across 16 groups – mean1
1991 1995 1999 2001(03)
Poland 4.82 3.95
Russia 3.40 2.86
Sweden 5.96 6.29
1
Mention of each group sored as 1.
when making decisions and each leader
was given a list of 16 such groups, ranging
from friends to political party leaders and
higher administrators. There was a signifi-
cant drop in both Poland and Russia, and, in
contrast, an increase among Swedish leaders
who were among the highest of all leaders in
29 countries in seeking such support. It is
expected that learning processes will
increase the number of groups sought out for
support over time.
CONCLUDING COMMENTS
Local-global dynamics open up the local
to influences from a wider range of other
systems. Those processes of globalization
and openness have been associated with the
democratization of countries and localities
since the 1990s. Opening up to the global has
also meant reducing national control over
local populations. This has allowed for at
least the expression of conflicts within local-
ities, both old and new. But in general, the
consequence of globalization has been
greater autonomy for the local political
expression of conflicts, if only in regard to
the national governments.
Democracy with its value of inclusion of
differences and acceptance of conflicts sup-
ports what may prove to be one of the most
important events in recent human history of
the whole world joining together in a single
economy and society of shared values, a com-
munity of democratic societies. That hope
emerged in the first blush of the 1989 revolu-
tions in communist countries of Europe and
subsequent political revolutions in Eurasia.
Since then democracy has become defined
as a global requirement for states to be ‘good
413
citizens’ of the world, certainly of the European
Union, NATO, and the Council of Europe.
The actual impact of democracy on societies,
of course, is mixed. Whatever the future
story of democracies in a globalizing world,
it will include the engagement of local com-
munities and a strengthening of their voice in
national and global affairs. Global and local
conflicts are a consequence of the recent
encapsulation of world regions into a global
system. The local, ruled by petty elites and
intolerant of difference, rather than being a
conflictive impediment, to development as it
was during the years of the formation of
modern states, may become a liberating, cut-
ting edge social entity of innovation and
change in global systems. The local, aligned
with global institutions, may by-pass the
national as an important arena for reducing
conflicts and managing violence.
NOTES
1 A partial history of social ecology is discussed in
Teune (1992). Hamm (1992) gives a brief history of
social ecology in the International Sociological
Association. These presentations were made at the
XI World Congress of the International Sociological
Association (1986), New Delhi.
2 This discussion is based on Mlinar and Teune
(1978) and Teune and Mlinar (1978). Alternative con-
cepts of development include social and economic
changes of a variety of types that focus on inclusion,
integration and growth. See Sen’s concept of devel-
opment defined as freedom (Sen, 1999).
3 The most comprehensive contemporary use of
the ecological paradigm to explain human and social
development through learning and throughout
human history is Kenneth Boulding (1978).
4 The data, questionnaires, codebooks, and other
general information about this research are available at
www.ssc.upenn.edu/dlg. The basic design and instru-
mentation are also given in Jacob et al. (1993). In addi-
tion to other general publications, a number of country
reports have been published in English and other lan-
guages. The number of localities included in the
random samples used here were: Poland, 1995,
30 poviats (local governing units with a town center
and adjoining countryside); 2001, 30 poviats, including
reorganized poviat towns; and Russia, 1995, 73 rayons;
2003, 49 including the rayons in the 1995 sample. In
Sweden, the 1999 study was based on 20 communes,
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414 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
as was the study in 1991–92. The web page referred to
is updated from time to time. One update on this
research with new theoretical perspectives is Stefan
Szücs and Lars Stomberg (2006). Both were also directly
involved in the two Swedish studies referred to in this
report. Special thanks go to Ms. Tatania Iskra for organ-
izing the Polish data with Dr. Krzysztof Ostrowski of the
Pultusk School of Humanities; Prof. Zahn Toschenko of
the Russian State University of Humanities for the 1995
Russian study and Prof. Gali Galiev of the Academy of
Labor, Bashkortostan, Russia for the 2003 research.
5 The following nine items are scored additively
as indicated below into a simple score, called the
Demscore, based on four point agree-disagree
response categories. The Demscore provides a rough
but comprehensive measure of democratic values
separating local political leaders in all the countries
surveyed, without use of the many nuances called for
in more detailed country by country comparisons.
A. Pluralism
1 Public decisions should be made by unani-
mous consent. (−)
2 Preserving harmony in the community should
be considered more important than the
achievement of community programs. (−)
3 A good leader should refrain from making
proposals that divide the people even if
these are important for the community. (−)
B. Minority rights
4 The rights of minorities are so important that
the majority should be limited in what it can
do. (+)
5 Any individual or organization has the right
to organize opposition or resistance to any
government initiative. (+)
6 The government has the responsibility to see to
it that rights of all minorities are protected. (+)
C. Political equality
7 Few people really know what is in their best
interest in the long run. (−)
8 It will always be necessary to have a
few strong, able people actually running
everything. (−)
9 Certain people are better qualified to run
this country due to their traditions and
family background. (−)
In addition, a number of other democratic value
scales were constructed based on these and other
items, yielding the dimensions given below, but
including transparency (honesty in public affairs) and
political responsibility.
REFERENCES
Boulding, Kenneth E. (1978) Ecodynamics: A
New Theory of Societal Evolution. Beverly
Hills, CA: Sage.
Bullmann, Udo (1997) ‘The Politics of the Third
Level’, in Charlie Jeffery (ed.) The Regional
Dimension in the European Union: Toward a
Third Level in Europe. London: Frank Cass.
pp. 3–19.
Darwin, Charles (1859) On the Origin of Species
by Means of Natural Selection. John Murray:
London.
Dogan, Mattei and Rokkan, Stein (eds.) (1969)
Social Ecology. Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Hamm, Bernd (1992) ‘Introduction’, in Bernd
Hamm (ed.) Progress in Social Ecology.
New Delhi: Mattel Publications. pp. 1–10.
Hannan, Michael T. (1981) Aggregation and
Deaggregation in Sociology. Lexington, KY:
Lexington Books.
Jacob, Betty M., Ostrowski, Krzysztof and
Teune, Henry (eds.) (1993) Democracy and
Local Governance. Honolulu, HI: University
of Hawaii.
Keeley, Lawrence H. (1996) War Before
Civilization. NY: Oxford University Press.
Long, Norton E. (1958) ‘The Local Community
as an Ecology of Games’, American
Sociological Review, 44: 251–61.
Marx, Karl (1867) Capital. Otto Meissner:
Hamburg, Germany.
Mlinar, Zdravko and Teune, Henry (eds.) (1978)
Social Ecology: From Equilibrium to
Development. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage
Publications.
Park, Robert, Burgess, Ernest and McKenzie, R. D.
(1925) The City: Suggestions for the Study of
Human Nature in the Urban Environment.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sen, Amartya Kumar (1999) Development as
Freedom. NY: Knopf.
Spencer, Herbert (1862) First Principles.
Holt: NY.
Szücs, Stefan and Stromberg, Lars (eds.) (2006)
Local Elites, Political Capital, and Democratic
Development: Governing Elites in Seven
European Countries. Weisberg, Germany:
Verlag.
Teune, Henry (1978) ‘Social Ecological Theories
of Change’, paper presented at the IX World
Congress of the International Sociological
Association. Uppsala.
Teune, Henry (1988a) Growth. Newbury Park,
CA: Sage Publications.
Teune, Henry (1988b) ‘Growth and Pathologies
of Giant Cities’, in Mattei Dogan and John
Kasarda (eds.) The Metropolis Era: A World
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THE DYNAMICS OF LOCAL-GLOBAL RELATIONS
of Giant Cities. Newbury Park, CA: Sage
Publications, 1: 351–76.
Teune, Henry (1992) ‘Current Issues in Social
Ecology’, in Bernd Hamm (ed.) Progress
in Social Ecology. New Delhi: Mattel
Publications. pp. 11–26.
Teune, Henry (2001) ‘The Developmental
Consequences of Globalization’, paper pre-
sented at the Joint Meetings of the Interna-
tional Studies Associations. Hong Kong.
Teune, Henry (2003) ‘Democracy, Globalization,
and Local Politics’, paper presented at
the International Seminar on Equality and
Justice in Globalized Societies, International
Sociological Association. Mexico City.
415
Teune, Henry (2006) ‘The Consequences of
Globalization and Local Democracy’, in
Chung-Si Ahn (ed.) New Development
in Local Democracy and Decentralization in
East Asia: Korea in Comparative Perspective.
Seoul, Korea: Seoul National University Press.
pp. 3–22.
Teune, Henry and Mlinar, Zdravko (1978) The
Developmental Logic of Social Systems.
Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
Teune, Henry and Mlinar, Zdravko (2000)
‘The Developmental Logic of Globalization’,
in Jose Ciprut (ed.) The Art of the Feud:
Reconceptualizing International Relations.
Westport, CT: Praeger. pp. 105–122.
9781412934633-Chap-28 1/10/09 8:58 AM Page 416
Negotiating Identity,
Conflict, and Cooperation
within a Strategic Model
of Address
INTRODUCTION
Within the field of sociolinguistics, broadly
defined to include works on ‘language and
society’ or ‘language in context’ in the disci-
plines of sociology, linguistics, anthropol-
ogy, psychology, communication, (critical)
discourse analysis, gender studies, pragmatics,
philosophy, etc., the issues of identity con-
struction, conflict and cooperation have long
research histories, as exemplified by Atkinson
and Heritage (1984), Coates (1986), Giles
and Powesland (1975), Grimshaw (1990),
Gumperz (1982b), Kondo (1990), LePage
and Tabouret-Keller (1985), Myers-Scotton
(1983), Sacks (1992), Schiffrin (1985),
Scollon and Scollon (1995), Tajfel and
Turner (1979), and van Dijk (1980). Their
definitions have been variously shaped by
these disciplines, and technical definitions
have evolved. However, as this chapter will
demonstrate how these issues can impact the
28
Sandi Michele de Oliveira
selection or interpretation of address forms,
as opposed to furthering a particular social
theory, their use here approximates their
non-technical definitions.
‘Address forms’ are taken to mean both
pronouns of address (glossed as ‘you’) and
nominal forms (names, titles) used in direct
address. Personal and social identities are
considered from strategic as well as repre-
sentative angles, as each is present in the
communicative process. Conflict is viewed as
occurring when ‘participants take alternative
positions on the same issue (whether reconcil-
able or mutually exclusive)’ (Leung, 2002: 3),
i.e., when speakers do not share a common
view or goal and choose to make this differ-
ence clear, whereas cooperation occurs when
speakers use conversational strategies to
minimize distance and/or seek a common
goal. Therefore, conflict and cooperation are
considered opposing forces in conversation,
although studies focusing on these phenomena
9781412934633-Chap-28 1/10/09 8:58 AM Page 417
STRATEGIC MODEL OF ADDRESS
have developed definitions for each which
are broader and not necessarily in opposition.
Competition, the third concept in the theme
of this volume, is not considered here, as it
appears to be a different sort of element in
conversation: a conversational goal which,
depending on the strategic goal of the
speakers, may involve both strategies of
cooperation and of conflict. For instance, in
order to enhance one’s personal advancement
(competition), a speaker may decide to insti-
gate conflict with a competitor she feels is
inferior and to demonstrate a cooperative
spirit with those in higher positions, choos-
ing the conversational strategies accordingly.
In this article the term ‘strategies’ follows the
rationale set out by Brown and Levinson
(1978: 90):
We continue to use the word ‘strategy’, despite its
connotations of conscious deliberation, because
we can think of no other word that will imply a
rational element while covering both (a) innovative
plans of action, which may still be (but need not
be) unconscious, and (b) routines – that is, previ-
ously constructed plans whose original rational
origin is still preserved in their construction,
despite their present automatic application
as ready-made programs.
As the title of this chapter indicates, con-
flict and cooperation are viewed as dynamic,
negotiable items in the communicative
process that can be created or avoided
through the judicious use of address forms.
Exemplified here are some of the ways
speakers can maximize or minimize conflict
and cooperation with interlocutors through
their selection of address. The establishment
and maintenance of address form relation-
ships are presented within the framework of
a model of negotiation that portends to pres-
ent the complexity of the communicative
process more accurately than previous
models. De Oliveira Medeiros (1985), an
ethnographic study of European Portuguese
address, presents the original formulation of
this model. Portuguese is distinct from many
other languages in that nominal forms, FN
(first names), LN (last names), nicknames,
titles (social, professional, administrative,
etc.) can be used as pronouns in direct
417
address, contrasting with other languages in
which nominal forms can only be used to
attract the attention of a particular hearer or
characterize the relationship between the
speaker and hearer. Nominal forms, often
referred to as vocatives (Leech, 1999), or
alerters (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989), are crucial
to the analysis of social relationships in any
language. The term ‘vocative’ is more widely
known and is therefore the term used here.
After the presentation of the model and an
exemplification of ways in which conflict and
cooperation can be achieved through address-
ing strategies, it will be demonstrated how
the model can be applied to other languages,
even those whose pronoun system is not
nearly so complex as the one in Portuguese.
THEORETICAL MODELS USED TO
ANALYZE ADDRESS
When Brown and Gilman (1960) 1972 published
their ground-breaking work on address forms,
the fields of sociolinguistics and discourse
analysis were not yet recognized as disciplines
in their own right, the essentialist paradigm
was still in place, and speech patterns were
viewed primarily as reflections of the
speaker’s demographic profile, considered her
identity. Classifying relationships along the
vertical dimension of Power and the horizon-
tal dimension of Solidarity, Power is defined
in a way to include unequal professional rank,
age, educational or socioeconomic status, as
well as the affective considerations of respect,
deference and the desire to maintain distance,
and situational considerations of formality or
protocol. Solidarity is defined loosely as
‘symmetric relationships’, emphasizing com-
radeship or equal rank/status. Affective factors
are also included (trust, intimacy, solidarity),
as are situational (informality). Focusing on
binary pronoun systems, such as tu (T)
vs. vous (V) in French, they associated T with
solidarity and V with power.
The Brown and Gilman model has been
powerful in the sociolinguistic literature,
9781412934633-Chap-28 1/10/09 8:58 AM Page 418
418 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
probably due to the idea that complex social
relationships are reducible to either the verti-
cal or horizontal dimension; that is, people
are either similar or different and, if different,
that there must be a way to rank those differ-
ences. Since so many features are included in
each dimension, researchers have the possi-
bility to choose the specific aspects of power
or solidarity which their data appear to repre-
sent. Further, as the design of the model
derived from a study of languages with a
binary or tertiary pronoun system, the inade-
quacies of their model are not immediately
apparent (duality of dimensions, duality of
address). However, not only is the model
ill-suited to languages with a more complex
address form system, no recognition is given
either to the ability of speakers with little
personal power to make use of situational
power or to the fact that individual pairs of
speakers can negotiate address form patterns
which do not conform to societal expecta-
tions. Additional methodological problems
are not referenced here but are addressed in
de Oliveira (1995a).
Brown and Levinson (1978) use this
model as the foundation for a system of
politeness strategies they present as ‘univer-
sal’, combining considerations of Power,
Solidarity and Social Distance with notions
of face and speech acts. Since they view
address forms as part of a limited number of
strategies, as opposed to an integral feature
of communicative process in general, theirs
is not a model of address. Still, their work
merits mention here, as a large number of
studies on address have examined address
from this viewpoint. In recognizing that
speakers have goals which they attempt to
attain through the use of conversational
strategies, they have developed a model
which is more sophisticated than that of
Brown and Gilman (1960). However, they do
not provide any new theorization of Power
and Solidarity, using instead the definitions
developed nearly two decades earlier. They
continue to assume that specific forms can be
mapped onto specific functions (for example,
that use of a V-form implies formality or
respect and use of a T-form, informality or
intimacy) and thus seem unaware that speak-
ers substitute new interpretations of forms
for the conventional ones when they negoti-
ate a pattern of address which is unconven-
tional relative to societal norms, and
the hierarchical decision-making structure
appears to negate the flexibility of the
individualization of the strategies.
The paradigm shift from essentialist to
constructivist notions of identity started in
the 1980s, with the earliest studies examin-
ing the negotiation of identity through
address being Myers-Scotton (1983) and
de Oliveira Medeiros (1985). Despite the
blossoming of constructivist thinking in soci-
olinguistic research generally, with an ever-
increasing awareness that speakers can use
discourse processes to underscore or disguise
aspects of their social or personal identity, or
even construct new ones, both the Brown and
Gilman and the Brown and Levinson models
continue to serve as the reference points for
studies regarding address, probably because
so many researchers do not theorize address
or consider aspects not taken into account in
these models.
A STRATEGIC, COGNITIVE MODEL OF
NEGOTIATION
A comprehensive model of address must be
able to incorporate and account for the vari-
ety of forces that motivate address form
selection. The model outlined here is based
on the analysis of observational, question-
naire, and interview data personally collected
during two decades of fieldwork in Portugal
examining both actual usage and informants’
judgments regarding address. As a resident
of the community of study for nine of the
20 years of the study, both participant and
non-participant observation was undertaken
in a wide variety of social environments.
Questionnaire and interview data were col-
lected at regular intervals during the period
(1982–83, 1993, 1998 and 2003) from a total
9781412934633-Chap-28 1/10/09 8:58 AM Page 419
STRATEGIC MODEL OF ADDRESS
of approximately 2,000 informants. Both the
questionnaires and interviews were ethno-
graphic in nature, designed to gain an under-
standing of aspects of address not usually
considered in address form studies, such as
the cognitive processes speakers used to
select appropriate forms and to interpret the
forms used with them, reasons for changing
from unmarked (expected) forms to those
considered unusual by conventional norms,
variation in use at the level of the individual.
The presentation of the data includes both
qualitative description and frequency of
response statistics, as appropriate, both for
the original study (de Oliveira Medeiros,
1985) and follow-up studies (de Oliveira,
1995b; de Oliveira, 2005).
After continued considerations of power
and solidarity, as well as other forces under-
lying address choices (Braun, 1988; Brown
and Levinson, 1978; de Oliveira, 1997;
Spencer-Oatey, 1996; Taavitsainen and
Jucker, 2003), the importance of the con-
struction and negotiation of identities within
address form relationships is confirmed. It
portrays the types of decision-making or cog-
nitive processes guiding speakers to their
eventual choices. Other mapping attempts,
such as Ervin-Tripp (1972), chart the choices
of an ‘idealized’ speaker; such representa-
tions seem to imply a specific decision-
making hierarchy, despite a disclaimer
stating that the chart is but a single represen-
tation of the communicative possibilities.
Here, no particular factor or consideration is
viewed as the ‘first’ to be made, and dis-
claimers are unnecessary. Further, individual
variation is not viewed as an anomaly but a
natural feature of human communication.
The multidimensional model is too com-
plex for complete presentation here, as it
incorporates the forms people use, the strate-
gies that guide them, and speakers’ motiva-
tions and conversational goals in the three
stages of their relationship: the initial con-
tact, the negotiation of an address form rela-
tionship and the eventual renegotiation(s) of
the relationship. To date, the problems asso-
ciated with its representation on a single page
419
have not been resolved; therefore, it com-
prises a series of two-dimensional diagrams,
some of which are presented in this chapter.
Interaction takes place on one of two
conversational planes – one governed by
conventionalized notions of appropriateness
(or protocol), the other by the individual rela-
tionship established by each dyad of inter-
locutors, who sometimes negotiate address
usage others find unusual. Informants men-
tion reverting, temporarily, to conventional-
ized forms in the presence of certain others
(a difficulty for researchers of actual usage,
rarely acknowledged), to appear to be ‘correct’.
Hymes (1974: 111) refers to a speaker’s adher-
ence, or not, to linguistic norms as ‘marked-
ness’, expected linguistic choices being
‘unmarked’ and unexpected choices ‘marked’.
Recognizing that speakers choose whether to
adhere to address norms on either plane, four
distinctions were coined to account for
marked or unmarked usage on each: marked
conventionalized, unmarked conventional-
ized, marked negotiated and unmarked nego-
tiated (de Oliveira, 1985: 136). This distinction
is critical for interpreting usage, as it sets the
parameters for judging markedness in usage.
In other types of behavior we see examples
of this in statements such as ‘Oh, don’t worry
about her – she’s just being herself’, which
informs the hearer that we know that by con-
ventional norms her behavior would or might
be considered unusual, but it is within her
normal limits.
The cognitive strategies used to evaluate
the relevant social and situational factors are
combined with negotiation strategies to pro-
duce a wide range of address form patterns.
By viewing this model in the context of the
complex Portuguese address form system,
the inadequacy of previous models becomes
clear. Table 28.1 presents a simplified schema,
the forms organized according to their con-
ventionalized interpretation. A distinction is
made between the explicit ‘V-pronoun’ você
and use of the third person singular form of
the verb, without an expressed pronoun, rep-
resented as [você], a linguistic convention to
indicate that the verb form used is the one
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420 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

Table 28.1 Simplified schema of the address form system in Portugal

9781412934633-Chap-28 1/10/09 8:58 AM Page 421
STRATEGIC MODEL OF ADDRESS
corresponding to the pronoun você, but the
pronoun itself is not expressed. It is referred
to as the ‘zero form’ (a grammatical refer-
ence) in recognition of the lack of pronoun,
or the ‘avoidance tactic’ (a reference to strat-
egy), since its neutral interpretation makes it
the ideal choice for speakers unsure of the
appropriate form to use. With this ‘tactic’,
they can temporarily avoid defining their
relationship with the other. This gives them
time to evaluate the relationship and to hear
how they are addressed by the other. Further
explanation of the categories and the forms
can be found in de Oliveira (2005, revised
from 1994). In the third column are the con-
ventionalized semantic features associated
with each form, which appear in square
brackets according to conventions adopted
from phonology. The plus and minus signs
indicate the presence or absence of the fea-
ture; for example, [−Formal] indicates a lack
of formality associated with this form’s use
in conventionalized exchanges.
When adults make initial contact (Stage 1
of a relationship), conventionalized notions
of politeness apply. In many cultures V-forms
(pronominal and/or nominal) are required.
Unmarked conventionalized usage tends to
maximize the possibilities for cooperation
and minimize conflict with the hearer, pre-
cisely because the speaker is following soci-
etal expectations. However, address need not
be reciprocal, even when a V-form is used,
since the categorization of forms is done on
the basis of the grammatical relationship
(pronoun/verb) and not on the semantic
interpretation. Thus, V-forms exist in several
categories of varying degrees of (convention-
alized) formality. The form selected as con-
ventionally appropriate serves as the
reference point for future negotiation. While
speakers may negotiate a different address
form during their first contact, with a strategy
such as ‘Please, that sounds so formal’,
often this is left to a subsequent encounter.
In fact, each successive encounter offers the
opportunity to (re)negotiate address change. In
Stage 2, the speakers sense that a relationship
is growing and consider signaling that
421
change through address. At this stage, both
T- and V-forms are possible, as is reciprocal
and non-reciprocal address.
Once a speaker feels that the address forms
being exchanged no longer adequately repre-
sent the developing relationship between the
two, she may make use of one or more strate-
gies of negotiation, thus instigating a move
from conventionalized to negotiated usage. If
the strategy is unsuccessful – that is, if the
other speaker does not feel greater affinity or
wish to acknowledge it through address, con-
ventionalized usage continues. If, on the other
hand, the strategy is successful, the speakers
effectively move the conventionalized pat-
terns, determined by societal norms, into the
background, while highlighting the individual
relationship they have or seek. Once a new
pattern has been negotiated, a pool of
unmarked negotiated forms is established (a
combination of pronominal and nominal
forms). Speakers may renegotiate the address
form one or more times, a process taking
place in the negotiated plane. Temporary
shifts in usage (marked negotiated usage)
may occur for a variety of reasons, such as
anger or conversational goals.
Additionally, a factor external to the rela-
tionship can result in a temporary shift to a
conventionalized form; this may be due to the
demands of protocol and/or the presence of
certain other people. When this happens, the
socially conventionalized plane is superim-
posed, in a sense, on the negotiated plane.
When speakers decide that the reason for the
change no longer exists, they resume use of
their unmarked negotiated forms. Apparently
speakers have a number of behavioral rules in
their heads: for instance, they know the prag-
matic rules governing protocol (and the situa-
tions requiring it); they recall the form(s) last
used (even after a period of months or years),
and they know which third parties, when
present, will affect their sociolinguistic choice.
The two planes of interaction, conventional-
ized and negotiated, and the distinctions
between unmarked and marked forms repre-
sent the top layer of the model (the forms
themselves).
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422 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

The second layer of the model demon-
strates the strategies that speakers use which
lead to the choice of one form rather than
another. Those strategies differ, or may
differ, in accordance with each stage of the
speakers’ relationship. In Stage 1 speakers
must determine an appropriate unmarked
conventionalized form; Figure 28.1 presents
some of the considerations made. The
sample factors are grouped into visual signs,
auditory signals, internal factors (those relat-
ing to the affective considerations of the
speakers or hearers), and external factors
(those imposed by society, such as protocol,
or established within society, such as relative
rank).

Negotiated Plane

Sample visual signs:

Non-linguistic clues of H’s desire for
greater closeness
STAGE 2: H’s manner of dress
Establishing an Sample auditory signals:
address form Paralinguistic clues of H’s desire for
relationship greater closeness
H has initiated a renegotiation strategy
Sample internal factors:
The desire to show solidarity
The desire to show respect
The desire for reciprocity in address
The desire to increase/decrease the
affective distance
Sample external factors:
The way H is ‘known’

Strategies for Negotiation

maintaing distance strategies
Unsuccessful Successful
(culturally Negotiation Negotiation (culturally
determined) Strategies Strategies determined)

STAGE 1: Conventionalized Plane

Addressing
strangers Sample visual signs:
Apparent relative age, SES,
educational level
H’s manner of dress

Sample auditory signals:

The way others address H
The way H is introduced

Sample internal factors:

The desire to show solidarity
The desire to show respect
The desire for reciprocity in address

Sample external factors:

Specific protocol in effect
The way H is ‘known’
Relative rank

Coding: S = speaker H = hearer SES = socioeconomic status

Figure 28.1 Stages of address form relationships

9781412934633-Chap-28 1/10/09 8:58 AM Page 423
STRATEGIC MODEL OF ADDRESS
As indicated above, negotiation strategies
can be successful or unsuccessful. If success-
ful (that is, if the hearer recognizes that the
speaker is attempting to negotiate a new rela-
tionship and signals agreement by using a
new form or by not signaling displeasure at
the use of the new form), the relationship
moves to Stage 2. If not, the speakers con-
tinue to use the conventionalized form(s).
However, even when the address pattern is
unchanged, a cognitive difference exists rela-
tive to Stage 1: speakers need not evaluate
the factors to determine the form. Instead,
they retrieve from memory the form previ-
ously used. Here, to simplify the representa-
tion, an arrow is merely drawn back to the
conventionalized plane. As the outward
address pattern would be the same, this sim-
plification does not grossly distort the
communicative picture.
Even if speakers are receptive to the use of
forms which do not draw attention to status
differential, they are not obliged to respond
positively to the attempts at (re)negotiation
proposed by others, and there are verbal and
nonverbal cues that speakers use to commu-
nicate their desire to maintain the address
status quo. Thus, underlying Stages 1 and 2
is another layer of analysis, which includes
the strategies that native speakers use to
determine the status of a stranger and thus be
guided to an appropriate first form. These
strategies surely vary from culture to culture,
but there are undoubtedly some commonali-
ties. In the box below the strategies is the list
of forms, ranked according to the degree of
formality or intimacy of their conventional-
ized interpretation, the least formal appear-
ing first. Figure 28.2 presents the strategic
level of the interaction on the socially con-
ventionalized plane, with sample strategies
from European Portuguese. Figure 28.3
presents the negotiated plane, in parallel
fashion. While most readers are unlikely to
absorb the details related to Portuguese,
hopefully the precision of description will
help in an overall understanding of the types
of information and detail which might be
included in studies of other languages.
423
In the negotiated plane, address forms
cannot be ranked according to conventional-
ized considerations of formality or status, as
a form’s interpretation can become separated
from its conventionalized meaning. Thus, the
pragmatic or semantic interpretation of forms
(as T or V) changes according to their use.
The analogy of an accordion helps visualize
the negotiation process. Imagining Figure
28.3 as a box, the two left and two right
columns are part of the fixed structure, and
there are markings along the side correspon-
ding to the conventionalized interpretation of
the forms. The list of forms is the accordion,
placed so that the accordion expands and
contracts horizontally within the box. As the
accordion is played (as the negotiation
process takes place), compression and
expansion take place. During compression,
forms normally separated by great distance
are brought together, symbolizing the fact
that people can negotiate the use of a form
whose conventional interpretation is more
‘intimate’ than the speakers’ social status dif-
ferential might indicate. Conversely, people
with a very close relationship may never
‘play’ the accordion, preferring forms whose
conventionalized interpretation is more dis-
tant than their relationship would appear to
‘merit’.
Below this layer of strategies lies a third,
comprised of the factors and motivations
shaping the decision-making process. More
specifically, this level includes the personal-
ity, societal and familial socialization
processes, identity construction and conver-
sational goals, consideration of face needs,
etc., all of which will ultimately determine
the types of strategies speakers will use
and the pool of forms from which selections
are made. Evidence that differentiated pools
of forms exist comes from the informants,
who state that certain forms, such as
‘senhora dona FN’, sound ‘too heavy’ and
they do not use them. If true (informants are
not always reliable in recounting usage),
such forms are simply not in their personal
address form pool, despite being in that of
others.
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424 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

These strategies are determined

within the context of a
particular language and culture.

Strategies used for selecting a first form may result in the selection of a form of almost any level.
Unmarked conventionalized usage (with adults) results in use of the title of H’s greatest status

(In situations of protocol, a marked conventionalized form is one that does not adhere to protocolar norms.) SAMPLE STRATEGIES FROM EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE
A marked conventionalized form would be the rejection of social norms of appropriateness.

Strategy 1: Rely on a third party to provide relevant information regarding the

education and/or social class of the stranger.

Strategy 2: Observe how others address H and choose an initial form one from
the highest category heard.

Strategy 3: In the absence of other information, use manner of dress as a

guideline in addressing the stranger.

Source: Adapted from Oliveira Medeiros (1994: 35-36)

Level Address Form(s)

Situations of PROTOCOL would require forms of Level 6 or 7.

1 TU
(As an initial form, likely restricted to children
[to approx. age 16], or school colleagues)
2 FN, LN or NICKNAME [FN = First Name, LN = Last Name]

↓
(The same as for tu.)
3 VOCÊ

↓
(Usage of você as a first form varies highly and is rare;
it would not be chosen in instances of protocol, nor when
the speaker knows the hearer has a title.)

↓
4 [VOCÊ]
(On the conventionalized plane use of the 3rd person singular

↓
form of the verb without a pronoun can be part of a
wait-and-see strategy while the speaker
collects information on the status of the hearer.)

↓
5 SENHOR(A)
(Use of o (a) Sr(a) can be a stylistic option to avoid the
“heaviness” of continual title use.) ↓
6 TITLES
↓

6a Social titles
6b Academic titles
Professional titles
↓

6c
Administrative titles
known by S.

6d
(On the conventionalized plane, men would be addressed
↓

as Title + LN [not FN] at the first meeting.)

7 VOSSA EXCELÊNCIA
↓

(Use is rare in oral form, and titles incorporating o Sr.

have gained in popularity [e.g., o Sr. Presidente];
however, situations of protocol may require its use.)

Figure 28.2 Strategic level of the conventionalized plane

ADDRESSING CONFLICT AND speakers make. On the conventionalized

COOPERATION plane, both a positive public face and cooper-
ation are achieved through the speaker’s
In considering conflict and cooperation in deliberate use of unmarked conventionalized
the light of the negotiation of address, it forms. This is, after all, the idea behind
becomes clear that they are not static aspects politeness – to ‘cooperate’ with social norms.
in the communicative process, but elements Using Table 28.1 as the point of reference,
in play through the strategic choices the being cooperative means seeking reciprocity
9781412934633-Chap-28 1/10/09 8:58 AM Page 425

STRATEGIC MODEL OF ADDRESS 425

STRATEGIES FOR RENEGOTIATING AN ADDRESS FORM RELATIONSHIP

(N.B. Explicit use of você is one of the most offensive mechanisms for marking anger, despite its central location in the chart.)
The speakers negotiate usage they find comfortable for the
The greater the distance between the unmarked form and the marked, the greater is the impact of the marked form. developing relationship. The pattern(s) may follow conventionalized
norms of usage, or they may fall outside them.
SAMPLE STRATEGIES FROM EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE
Marked negotiated usage tends to be in the direction of greater conventionalized formality.

Strategy 1: Suggest use of new form: Wouldn’t it be easier if we address each other
by tu?

Strategy 2: Ask to use the new form: “Do you mind if I address you by tu?”

Strategies used for renegotiation generally take the relationship to a more intimate level
Strategy 3: Ask H about address preferences. (S hopes H will respond by agreeing
to a form signifying greater intimacy.)

Strategy 4: Invite H to use a new form: “(If you like,) [Y]ou may address me by
tu.”

Strategy 5: Verbally clue change to a new form: “I’m going to begin addressing
you by tu,” giving H an opportunity to object.

Forms indicating greater familiarity (você and V.Ex.(a) a being exceptions)

Source: Adapted from de Oliveira (1994: 38-39)

Level Address Form(s)

1 TU
(Once speakers have negotiated use of tu,
level 1 and level 2 forms co-occur.)
2 FN, LN or NICKNAME [FN = First Name, LN = Last Name]

3 VOCÊ
(Usage is highly idiosyncratic; e.g., it can denote anger or to disambiguate
when the intended referent is unclear.)
4 [VOCÊ]
(In this plane use of the 3rd person singular form of the verb
without a pronoun can be a stylistic option to serve as a
placeholder for a more formal form,
without the “heaviness” of continual pronoun use.)

5 SENHOR(A)
(Use of Sr(a) can be a stylistic option to avoid the
“heaviness” of continual title use.)
6 TITLES
6a Social titles
6b Academic titles
Professional titles
6c Administrative titles
6d
(One difference in the negotiated plane over the conventionalized is
greater use of Title + FN,
rather than LN, with men.)
7 VOSSA EXCELÊNCIA
(On the negotiated plane, use of this form
would most likely be interpreted as ironic.)

Figure 28.3 Strategic level of the negotiated plane

in address, using a form in the same category indicating greater formality and distance),
or in as close a category as possible. Portuguese speakers choose forms which are
Speakers intending to provoke conflict may as far removed as possible in either direction,
choose a marked form. While one may and have been known to use even tu to make
assume that it would be from the highest their point, which is to clearly distinguish
numbered category possible (conventionally between this usage and the expected form.
9781412934633-Chap-28 1/10/09 8:58 AM Page 426
426 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
However, just as other types of conflicts can
provoke social, political, economic or even
physical consequences, so too can the use of
a decidedly marked form, depending on the
gravity of the social infraction and its inter-
pretation by others.
The richness of the negotiated plane, given
its individual character, makes it more inter-
esting to analyze. The variability in prag-
matic interpretation reveals how the desire
for conflict or cooperation can affect address
form use. Cooperation is evidenced by the
choice of forms accentuating agreement and
inclusion. This can be as straightforward as
choosing the form or forms the speaker
knows the hearer most likes to hear. There
are also forms (diminutives, nicknames and
other terms of endearment, as well as forms
such as colega [colleague], camarada [com-
rade], ‘my friend’, whose very nature signals
a similarity of situation. When speakers of
American English hear a question along the
lines of ‘So, what’s new, old friend, old pal?’
they are probably tempted to ask the speaker
what he wants. The use of these terms imme-
diately points to the long relationship the two
have shared, which appears to confer legiti-
macy and perhaps commitment on the hearer
to respond to a request for ‘cooperation’ in
the sense of help (a loan or some other type
of service). For many speakers, use of these
address forms is so closely connected to the
presumed request, that the supposedly sub-
stantive part of the exchange, asking for news
about the other, may not even be internalized
as a question. Another strategy for building
cooperation is to attempt to renegotiate a
change in the unmarked pattern of address,
towards forms whose conventionalized inter-
pretation denotes greater intimacy.
Strategies for displaying or creating con-
flict can be overt or subtle. Overt expressions
of conflict include the overuse of titles
(delivered perhaps with a certain ‘bite’),
which we might classify as over-adherence to
the norm, or the omission of such titles when
their use would be expected. People express
extreme anger by selecting a form as distant
from the unmarked form as possible, as in
‘Your Excellency wanted it WHEN?’ More
subtly, speakers can choose forms which may
be considered annoying without being
noticeably offensive to the ears of outsiders.
For instance, speakers may use address forms
or nicknames which they know are displeas-
ing to the hearer. The variability in the
semantic interpretation of forms, and the
recognition that speakers can negotiate pat-
terns of address which fall outside conven-
tional norms, means that the speaker who
wishes to provoke conflict in a subtle fashion
has several tools at her disposal. In other
words, each form has its conventionalized
meaning, but it also carries the possibility for
a number of negotiated meanings; this flexi-
bility in use allows for creative addressing
strategies.
Two forms whose use is particularly flexible
are colega (colleague) and the Zero Form
(Avoidance Tactic), Level 4 of the schema in
Table 28.1. Conventionally, colega is inter-
preted as a form of cooperation, emphasizing
the shared work situation of the two speakers.
Between colleagues of similar rank who are
not particularly close, its use may pass unno-
ticed. By addressing a colleague of inferior
rank as colega, one signals a desire to mini-
mize distance, suggesting that the junior
colleague need not ‘stand on ceremony’.
However, estranged colleagues of equal rank,
who formerly used other address forms, may
choose colega to be conventionally polite
while still maintaining distance (see also
Bing’s 1995 discussion of ambiguity in
address). This form can also be used to avoid
acknowledging the superior rank of an adver-
sary. Given colega’s unmarked interpretation
of cooperation, this tactic disguises the under-
lying conflict. Use of ‘my esteemed colleague’
is much less subtle; conventionally politeness
is again signaled, but intonation and gestures
can key an alternative interpretation.
The Zero Form/Avoidance Tactic is con-
sidered a ‘neutral’ option. It gives speakers
more time to consider an appropriate form
and hear how they are addressed. However,
societal expectations are that speakers will,
within a reasonable period, select a form
9781412934633-Chap-28 1/10/09 8:58 AM Page 427
STRATEGIC MODEL OF ADDRESS
providing a sociolinguistic reference point
for the hearer. Informants report mistrusting
long-term use of this tactic, as it is unclear
whether the speaker wishes to maintain dis-
tance or feels offended. Their response may
be to avoid contact with such speakers or, in
extreme cases, call attention to the apparent
slight. On the other hand, exclusive use of the
Zero Form may not always be noticed imme-
diately, as conversationalists commonly
intersperse it with other V-forms to ‘lighten’
the conversation and avoid sounding stilted.
The continual insistence on titles can be
interpreted as either excessive politeness or
conflictive, as the following actual service
encounter demonstrates:
Good morning, senhora
doutora. [response]
How are you, senhora
doutora? [response]
Can I help you, senhora
doutora? [response]
I’ll see what I can do,
senhora doutora. [response], etc.
Thus, even a form seemingly unproblematic
due to its apparent neutrality, can be used to
achieve various conversational goals: to allow
time for relationship assessment, to ‘lighten’
a conversation by not drawing attention to
relative status (a technique which can be
viewed as promoting cooperation), or to avoid
giving respect (a means through which one
can create or promote conflict).
Addressing strategies to avoid conflict are
more difficult to summarize, since they seem
to vary according to the type of relationship the
speakers share. If the relationship is a close
one, the speakers may avoid conflict by choos-
ing reciprocal forms of address to emphasize
the commonality of experience, situation,
mood, or the like. However, if the speakers are
not particularly close, or if there is great status
differential between them, a speaker may
choose forms whose conventionalized meanings
denote greater deference. Alternatively, speakers
may resist perceived attempts to renegotiate
the address form pattern due to increasing
distance in the relationship.
427
These representative conversational strate-
gies are part of a much larger set. Relevant
theoretical advancements in sociolinguistic
inquiry, the underpinnings of these strategies,
will be laid out in the identity management
layer of the model (in preparation). For
instance, Goffman’s (1974) and Tannen’s
(1993) work on framing provides an analytical
tool for understanding the ways address can
both frame a situation (on the negotiated plane)
or be framed by it (on the conventionalized
plane; see Gumperz (1982a) for a discussion
of contextualization cues). Wood and Kroger
(1994) examine discourse perspectives of face-
work. Giles et al. (1991) demonstrate how
speakers subconsciously adjust their linguistic
behavior to be more similar or different to
those of a particular group, while LePage and
Tabouret-Keller (1985) consider this accom-
modation as an identity creation strategy.
Leung (2002: 15) presents an excellent
overview of the various theoretical perspec-
tives that have addressed conflict talk. These
are but a few of the avenues being pursued.
THE APPLICATION OF THE MODEL TO
OTHER LANGUAGES
Researchers of languages with a much simpler
pronoun system than that used in Portuguese
may naturally question the benefits of consid-
ering a model as elaborate as the one pre-
sented here, believing that the degree of
precision is unnecessarily fine for the data
they are analyzing. However, the mere exis-
tence of a precise instrument of analysis might
better serve to encourage researchers to con-
sider whether the communicative complexity
which is expressed in Portuguese through
the pronoun system exists in other languages
but is expressed through other mechanisms.
Anecdotal data suggests that speakers use
vocatives to ‘fine tune’ the interaction along a
particular track. Vocatives which may be
used to promote cooperation include such
forms as ‘colleague’, terms of endearment
(used even with strangers, as in department
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428 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

stores in the southern USA), diminutives
(‘Daddy’ instead of ‘Dad’). On the other
hand, vocatives can also be used to express or
provoke conflict, as in ‘buster’ in the expres-
sion ‘Watch it, buster!’ Other examples
include the use of someone’s full name when
only FN is expected, use of ‘Your Excellency’
to someone for whom that is not their profes-
sional title, adding a derogative adjective to
FN or LN (‘Crazy Sally, come here!’),
although it should be noted that even deroga-
tive forms can be used as terms of endear-
ment if negotiated by the speakers.
In order to emphasize the applicability of
this model to other languages, Table 28.2
reproduces the hierarchical address structure
presented in Table 28.1, substituting sample
vocatives for the address pronouns of
Portuguese. While these vocatives are taken
from English, most or all of these same kinds

Table 28.2 Applicability of hierarchy to other languages

9781412934633-Chap-28 1/10/09 8:58 AM Page 429
STRATEGIC MODEL OF ADDRESS
of distinctions are made in other languages.
Thus, the complex system of address pro-
nouns in Portuguese is paralleled by a wide
array of address vocatives in other languages.
The principal difference seems to be the
degree of discretionary power that speakers
have, or feel they have, to omit the titles
which will shade or categorize the relation-
ship or situation. Here the presumption is
that speakers of a language such as English
would feel more comfortable in omitting
vocative forms (when possible) than
Portuguese speakers would feel in avoiding
the use of a particular pronoun option.
Observational data suggest that Portuguese
speakers are much more aware of the way
they are addressed and discuss infractions
with greater frequency than do speakers of
English. Appropriate address seems to arise
with some frequency on talk shows, both in
conversations to determine the appropriate
form to use with a guest, as well as more gen-
eral exchanges on inappropriate usage that
has been witnessed by the host or guests.
One area of research which merits greater
attention is the co-occurrence of vocatives
and pronouns. In binary pronoun systems,
the pronoun accompanying the second-
person singular form of the verb is consid-
ered the T-pronoun. The V-pronoun may be
the one used with the third-person singular
form of the verb, as in Spanish, or the second
person plural form of the verb, as in German
and the Scandinavian languages. As
described above, the T-pronoun is conven-
tionally associated with informality and inti-
macy, the V-pronoun with formality and
respect. That assumption, if true in all lan-
guages and in all communicative situations,
would imply that the semantic field (interpre-
tation) of the T-pronoun would be the same
from language to language and independent
of the situation of its use. However, obvious
differences exist. Danish du, for instance, is
nearly as widespread as you in English,
whereas use of Italian tu is more restricted
among adult speakers. Within a single lan-
guage, variation also exists in the matching
of a particular vocative to the pronoun.
429
For instance, while some native Spanish
speakers report that they might use the voca-
tive ‘Profesor’ with tú, others state (personal
communication) that if they address their pro-
fessor in that way, they would not use tú. Thus,
the boundaries between T- and V-pronouns are
different in each language.
In addition to the situational variation
within a single language described above,
differences in the usage and semantic inter-
pretation of forms are also found in varieties
of the same language. At a conference on
address forms in the Spanish-speaking world
(Karl-Franzens-Universität, Graz, May 2006),
it became clear that uniformity does not exist
regarding the semantic interpretation of the
pronouns tú, Ud, or vos. As a result, the pairing
of vocatives and pronouns would not be the
same across all varieties of Spanish.
By taking the perspective that the impor-
tance of address (including vocatives) is not
limited to a few communicative strategies or
to all-inclusive definitions of Power and
Solidarity, researchers can more easily
understand the complexities of interpersonal
communication and the role communicative
strategies play in achieving conversational
goals (including conflict and cooperation)
and in constructing one’s identity. To this
end, an additional area to be explored is the
degree to which titles become an integral part
of the legal identity of the individual. For
example, in Germany, the doctoral title
Dr. becomes a part of the family name and
therefore appears both in one’s national iden-
tity card and passport. In Portugal bank and
credit cards include the academic title of the
cardholder, but it is not considered part of the
family name and therefore does not appear
on the national identity card or in the
passport.
FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
This chapter has examined some of the ways
speakers can manipulate the address form
system to encourage cooperation or to
9781412934633-Chap-28 1/10/09 8:58 AM Page 430
430 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
provoke or avoid conflict. The fact that
address is variable at the level of the individ-
ual, rather than determined by one’s demo-
graphic profile, is not recognized in the
Brown and Gilman model, which has shaped
the field of address since its publication.
Moreover, often considered to be but a small
part of the larger field of politeness, address
is often under-analyzed and insufficiently
theorized. The model presented here offers a
framework for understanding how individu-
als create identities for themselves, as indi-
viduals and as co-interlocutors, through
conversational strategies and address form
choices. It further offers a window into
understanding how the choices made mini-
mize or maximize the speakers’ ability to
achieve cooperation or conflict. Space limita-
tions prohibit a more thorough description of
how the ‘accordion effect’ serves to discon-
nect negotiated meaning from the mooring of
the conventionalized interpretation, a more
precise description of the third layer of
analysis (the personal and social identifica-
tion processes, conversational goals, consid-
eration of face needs, etc.), a fuller illustration
of how these social and individual identities
are created and shaped by various address
form strategies, and a more complete expla-
nation of the model’s usefulness in analyzing
address form systems which do not appear to
require this degree of intricacy.
This model may appear unnecessarily
complicated for researchers of languages with
one or two pronouns of address, as is the case
with most European languages. However, it
has been demonstrated that the distinctions
which can be made in Portuguese through
nominal pronouns are made in other lan-
guages through vocatives. Unfortunately,
many studies of address focus on pronouns
while ignoring vocatives. Perhaps researchers
find the number of nominal forms daunting,
or the shades of meaning too subtle for analy-
sis using the analytical models most often
referenced. This model offers greater explica-
tive power, as it allows for the integration of
pronouns of address and nominal forms
within a single interpretative framework.
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9781412934633-Chap-29 1/12/09 4:20 PM Page 433
Conflict and
(Ethno-Linguistic) Diversity:
Canada/Québec
Philippe Couton, Ann Denis, Leslie Laczko, Linda Pietrantonio
and Joseph-Yvon Thériault 1
INTRODUCTION
This chapter presents a case study on
‘Conflict and (Ethno-Linguistic) Diversity:
Canada/Québec’. It consists of five interre-
lated presentations initially prepared for a
roundtable by members of the Department of
Sociology2 at the University of Ottawa,
which hosted the International Sociological
Association Research Council conference in
May 2004. The objective of the roundtable
was to provide a perspective on Canada’s
ethnic and linguistic diversity, and to stimu-
late further thinking about these issues in a
comparative and international context.
Canada’s ethnic structure is complex and
multidimensional, combining as it does vari-
ous axes of differentiation that intersect and
overlap. In rough historical order, these are
the cleavage between Aboriginal peoples and
the dominant society(ies), the historic
French-English dualism which has left two
distinct settler societies, waves of almost
continuous immigration, and claims by
29
Québec for a special status if not full inde-
pendence – hence our references to
‘Canada/Québec’. The intention of this chapter
is to provide a selective overview, not an
exhaustive analysis.3 The emphases reflect
the authors’ respective areas of specialization
within ethnic relations, as well as the fre-
quent separation, in both government institu-
tions and the academy, of studies of First
Nations from those of the two colonizers (the
French and the British) and subsequent
immigrants. This separation is, no doubt,
partly due to the differing legal relations of
these collectivities with the State and to the
tendency for it to be mainly anthropologists
who have studied the First Nations. The
emphases in this chapter are also informed,
we realize, by our location in a bilingual
(French and English) university, in Canada’s
capital, which is located just over the border
from Québec, and whose intellectual points
of reference are in both English and French
speaking universities, in Québec and in the
rest of Canada. Part of the University of
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434 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
Ottawa’s mission is to provide service to the
minority francophone population of
Ontario,4 a mission which our department
embraces and incorporates into its scholarly
agenda in a variety of ways.
Pietrantonio’s opening section examines
official institutional discourses about diver-
sity in the field of cultural policies. How
diversity is conceptualized in a number of
recent policy documents reveals differences
between the federal ways of thinking and
framing issues, and those of Québec. The dif-
ferences are linked to differing national
visions and national projects. The examina-
tion of these differences and tensions is a
recurring theme throughout the chapter. In the
second section, Laczko situates Canada’s
overall level of internal ethno-linguistic
diversity in comparative perspective. He
argues that Canada’s level of diversity is by
many empirical measures higher than that of
most other developed societies, because it
combines different types of diversity. Next,
Couton contrasts federal immigration poli-
cies with those of the Québec government.
The latter have evolved both in tandem with
and in tension with federal ones. He explains
how Québec has been able to successfully
shape its own immigration policy over the
past few decades, placing greater emphasis
on recruiting French-language immigrants.
The fourth contribution, by Denis, focuses on
contradictory features of both Canadian
immigration policies and other policies
which have framed ethnic relations since the
1960s in Canada and Québec. While aspects
of these policies are racist, sexist, and class-
based, certain features are more progressive,
with state policy leading rather than follow-
ing public opinion, and promoting increased
inclusion and rights of social citizenship.
In the final section, Thériault extends the
analysis of state policies on ethno-linguistic
issues by discussing the differing, and to
some extent contradictory, language policies
pursued since the 1960s by the federal and
Québec governments. These reflect differing
visions of language as a cultural tool, bringing
us full circle back to questions of diversity
and cultural policy introduced by Pietrantonio
in the first section, and now examined by
Thériault within the context of the federal
political system. He argues that the formal
equality of French and English, spelled out in
the federal bilingualism policy and the provi-
sions of the federal Charter of Rights and
Freedoms, hamper the Québec government’s
goal – also recognized federally as legiti-
mate – of ensuring the primacy of French
within that jurisdiction. Taken together, the
sections give a sampling of recent and ongo-
ing research on Canada’s complex ethnic
dynamics, without claiming to be exhaustive.
The conclusion draws together the strands of
ethno-linguistic diversity which have been
examined.
DIVERSITY AND CULTURAL POLICIES:
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE
INSTITUTIONAL DISCOURSE ON
CANADA/QUÉBEC CULTURE
(LINDA PIETRANTONIO)
In the study of Canadian society, the ‘man-
agement of diversity’ is an important issue
relative to Canada/Québec relations. This
‘management’ is constructed principally
through social policies, to which we will
refer in this chapter as so many ways of rais-
ing the issue of ethnic relations. It must be
emphasized that the expression ‘management
of diversity’ itself, used by certain key
Québec and Canadian government depart-
ments since the end of the 1980s, was initially
proposed by sociologists of ethnic relations
in their analyses of the institutional
(non)consideration of ethnic diversification
of the population in various sectors such as
education, police services, housing, etc. In
both cases, the expression ‘management of
diversity’ has a strongly Foucauldian mean-
ing, that is to say, managing populations as a
means of social regulation. According to
Foucault, this practice, mediated by public
policies which are endowed with a discourse
introduced and supported by legislation, first
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CONFLICT AND DIVERSITY: CANADA / QUÉBEC
appeared in the eighteenth century in order to
promote the institutionalization of the nation
and the family. For the author, such norma-
tive management will lead, notably, to the
construction of a standardized sexuality,
what we refer to today as the heteronorma-
tive system. The ‘management of diversity’
evoked here is also linked to the normative
aims of a standardized nation.
Since the 1990s, we have observed that
various institutional bodies in Canada and in
Québec choose to use the term diversity
where, previously, they would have spoken
of multiculturalism in Canada and inter-
culturalism in Québec.
The use of the concept of diversity within
these two socio-political entities is worth
noting since, through this notion, the meas-
ures, policies and programs thus put in place
create and project a national identity; that is
to say, they create a social institutional sub-
ject with parameters of identity that are mat-
ters of debate. We know that on this subject
Québec proclaims its distinctiveness from
Canada. To be precise, the debates in Québec
about institutional recognition of the popula-
tion’s ethnic diversity (or normative plural-
ism) essentially began in the 1980s. For
reasons related to the history of ethnic rela-
tions in the country and linked to the Québec
nation’s demands for special status, in
Québec, the term multiculturalism was
rejected first in favour of the idea of ‘cultural
convergence’ – of the migrant population
towards the host society (1978) – and later to
favour interculturalism (1986). Many ‘inter-
cultural policies’ were then introduced,
particularly in the field of education. They
had the same objectives as the Canadian
multiculturalism policy (Juteau et al., 1998)
except in relation to language. (Other sec-
tions of this chapter refer to the same distinc-
tion.) The debate between multiculturalism
and interculturalism culminated in Québec,
in December 1990, with the adoption of a
Québec policy on immigration and integra-
tion. (See the sections by Couton and Denis
in this chapter.) There is an extensive litera-
ture on this debate which bears witness to
435
the effervescence in Québec’s intellectual
and academic milieu on the question of
modalities for the integration of immigrant
populations and their descendants into the
‘nation’.
Ethnic relations – formative of material
and symbolic boundaries between groups – do
shape the manner of thinking about diversity
within the geo-juridical borders of Canada.
Hence, one can also find there explanations
for why the term ‘diversity’ has different
meanings or semantics in Canada and Québec.
The institutional usage of this term in
Québec now dates to the mid-1990s and on a
number of occasions, has presented further
opportunities for affirming the national iden-
tity of French Canadians. We can see this by
analyzing cultural policies in order to exam-
ine normative pluralism. Such an approach
has rarely been used to date to study ethnic
relations (Pietrantonio, 2002). Analysis of
the relationship of cultural policies to norma-
tive pluralism deserves attention since these
policies harbour social, political and cultural
elements considered to be the specificities of
a nation (Handler, 1988). While the typical
analyses of normative pluralism have often
focused on policies and programs related to
official multiculturalism, ethnic boundaries
are discernible within all institutional dis-
courses on culture. Furthermore, we believe
that this is ideal material for a discursive
analysis of ethnic relations, one which also
provides the opportunity for a fruitful associ-
ation between the sociology of ethnic
relations and the sociology of culture.
In the field of cultural policies, since the
end of the 1990s uses of the concept of diver-
sity have been developed that encourage us to
identify various types of normative plural-
ism. There has, in fact, been a long standing
opposition between the Canadian model and
the French republican model, or even the
German one. Indeed, a fresh look at norma-
tive pluralism5 appears even more important
as an international and institutional (thus,
normative) discourse is developing about cul-
ture and diversity, within which both Canada
and Québec are playing a leading role.
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436 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
On the one hand, the federal government
created the International Network on Cultural
Policy (INCP) in 1998 which, by 2003,
brought together 68 ministers from around
the world, each with responsibility for
cultural policies.
On the other hand, Québec was closely
associated with negotiations on the Interna-
tional Instrument on Cultural Diversity
(IICD)6 that resulted in the adoption of the
Convention on the Protection and Promotion
of Diversity of Cultural Expressions on
October 20, 2005, during the 33rd session of
the General Conference of UNESCO.
My reflections are based on a comparative
analysis of three distinct corpuses of institu-
tional discourse about culture: (1) all of the
seven official policies on culture produced in
Québec from 1961 to 2000 (see Pietrantonio,
2002); (2) the weekly press releases of the
Bureau de la diversité culturelle (Office of
Cultural Diversity, BDC), which became, in
mid-May 2004, the Secrétariat gouverne-
mental à la diversité culturelle (Government
Secretariat for Cultural Diversity)7 (for 2000
and the period from 2003 to 2004) – this unit
has, in fact, operated the Internet site for the
Ministère de la culture et de communications
du Québec (Québec Ministry of Culture
and Communications) since January 2000;8
and, finally, (3) the annual reports of the
International Network on Cultural Policy
(INCP),9 a network in which Canada contin-
ues to play an important role, after having
initiated it. It has held an annual conference
since its inception in 1998 and is undergoing
some expansion since only 40 countries were
members in 2001. In each of these three cor-
puses, the discourse on culture is constructed
in relation to an international reference point.
Indeed, we could say that this has also been
the case for cultural policies in Québec since
they were first developed during the 1960s.
Thus, we can argue that since 1998, in
institutional milieus dealing with culture, it
has been the question of regulating global
commerce and trade that has permitted the
international deployment of the discourse
on diversity. (Denis presents a similar
interpretation in her section of this chapter.)
This subject is raised to protect against ‘glob-
alization’ and its anticipated effects of
homogenization. Therefore, discourse on
diversity is constructed on feared power rela-
tionships, whose effects are worrisome, both
in terms of identity and in terms of economics.
Throughout the corpus, the ‘United States’
constitutes the spectre of globalization and is
seen as the home of the feared cultural homog-
enization. Doubtless, the discourse about
the recognition of global cultural diversity
would not be experiencing the same growth
were it not for this dread of a worldwide
American cultural homogenization which is
promoted by commercial hegemony.
The ‘fundamental issue of cultural diver-
sity’ in the field of cultural policies is explic-
itly presented as the protection of the identity
of peoples from ‘commercialization’.10
Throughout this ‘dossier on cultural diver-
sity’, it is a question of promoting nations’
distinctive characters. In the three corpuses
examined the unit of meaning of cultural
diversity is, for the most part, based on the
idea of a cultural homogeneity of nations
which enable nations to differentiate them-
selves from one another. In other words,
diversity is mainly used in the sense of
promoting national cultures, which are, how-
ever, assumed to be ethnically homogeneous.
This entails a new register in the institutional
usage of the concept of diversity. However, in
the case of the INCP, the discourse on the
protection of national culture seems con-
comitant with the need to take account of
intra-national cultural diversity, which
strongly distinguishes this corpus from the
other two. In Québec, such a new usage of
the notion of diversity in the wake of global-
ization takes little account of intra-national
ethnic diversity. Intra-group ethnic diversity,
in terms of categories based on social class,
gender, age, etc., is, in fact, ignored in the
whole corpus, except for what constitutes
Québec’s cultural policy of 1978.11
It is worth mentioning that until very
recently; i.e., less than 10 years ago, in both
Canada and Québec, the concept of diversity
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CONFLICT AND DIVERSITY: CANADA / QUÉBEC
referred basically to immigrant minorities
(Juteau et al., 1998; Li, 2003a). In Québec,
the notion of ‘cultural communities’
appeared at the beginning of the 1980s to
identify this segment of the population, and
then, in the middle of the 1990s, the terms
‘Québecers from cultural communities’ or
‘citizens from cultural communities’ marked
a willingness to expand the national borders,
which were always being debated.12 These
labels are also intended to distinguish
minorities (stemming from immigration)
from ‘Québecers’, who were the former
‘French Canadians’. What is noteworthy in
these new usages of the notion of diversity is
the fact that, through this institutional dis-
course on the need to take cultural diversity
into account, the idea of an ethnically homo-
geneous culture re-emerges. Within the
corpus about Québec, results of the analysis
could not be clearer about this. Diversity has
no relevance in describing Québec’s culture
or that of the francophone majority. It is per-
ceived as external and parallel to the Québec
community of French Canadian origin,
except in the 1978 policy, which we have
already referred to as being exceptional.
This distinguishes the official discourse on
culture in Québec from that of federal bodies
and brings us back to the early history of
this country where immigration played an
important role, including British immigra-
tion. (See the sections by Couton and Denis
on this.)
Such an institutional discourse recalls the
problematic aspects raised by Stuart Hall
(1992) with regard to concepts of homoge-
neous national and cultural identities that,
alone, could guarantee particular identities
and values, to the exclusion of all others.
This discourse also eloquently introduces a
new element in the notion of diversity, that of
protecting national cultures. To take account
of this phenomenon of cultural diversity on a
worldwide scale, we have to think in national
and international terms, which is, strictly-
speaking, accurate, both geographically and
politically. Even if the institutional discourse
on culture, affected by that of globalization,
437
is now perceived through the notion of diver-
sity, this world remains divided into national
territories. Yet to grasp the complexity of the
phenomenon of diversity – even while allow-
ing that we want to confine this diversity to
ethnicity – we cannot think only nationally
and internationally. To take account of this
reality, analyses need to encompass the
national, the intra-national, the international,
and the extra-national dimensions within the
same system (Crane, 2002). The extra-
national dimension also allows us to consider
the impact of Diasporas in each society, and
thus it is associated with the intra-national
dimension (Appadurai, 2001). This phenom-
enon is rarely considered explicitly in analy-
ses. Similarly, the intersections of diversities
based on gender and ethnic identity are too
rarely examined.
Beyond the Canada/Québec comparison of
institutional discourse about culture, we need
to be aware of the tension between protecting
the national culture, on the one hand, and, on
the other, valuing cultural resources on a
global scale, as expressed by the idea of
diversity as a weapon against homogeniza-
tion. It is indeed the concept of diversity that
structures the current discourse on cultural
policies, thus providing these policies with a
new perspective. I see in this an invitation to
turn our attention once again to the aspects of
culture that have been selected for protection
at the national level, and that take account of
our representations of the nation. For the
moment, these representations comprise the
core of concepts relative to human diversity.
They should also be constantly compared to
empirical realities stemming from the
avowed existence of cultural diversity and
ethnic (and sexual) diversification of institu-
tions. In that respect, it is of interest to note
that recently, first, second, and third genera-
tion immigrants, and ‘visible minorities’,
have begun appearing in francophone
Québec media – on television and in print
media. It should be emphasized that this new
representativity of the population in these
media is primarily due to affirmative action,
employment equity measures, and programs
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438 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
designed to fight against discrimination.13
Finally, let us acknowledge the efforts of a
significant portion of the Parti Québécois, a
sovereignist party, to build an inclusive
Québec nationalism.
Conceiving of diversity as the fact of
minorities who exist in parallel with a homo-
geneous national majority constitutes one
form of ‘imagined community’. How are we
to interpret a conception of diversity (here
global) which refers to the sum of national
differences, where nations are themselves
seen as homogeneous culturally? Indeed, of
what diversity are we speaking when it is due
to differences between national groupings,
which are themselves conceived of as being
ethnically and culturally homogeneous?
As Laczko now discusses, such assump-
tions of intra-national homogeneity are mis-
leading in Canada, and of decreasing
pertinence throughout the ‘developed’ world.
CANADIAN DUALISM AND
CANADA’S EVOLVING CLEAVAGES
(LESLIE LACZKO)
Canada’s ethnic structure is complex and
multidimensional, and several dimensions
or axes of ethnic diversity can be distin-
guished. The evolving relationship between
Aboriginal peoples or First Nations and the
larger society, Canada’s historical and over-
arching French-English dualism with a French-
language sub-society centred in Québec, and
its history as an immigrant-receiving society
are often identified as three distinct axes that
each have their own dynamic. This chapter
concentrates on the second and third of these,
and the connection between them. The lan-
guage cleavage is overarching in the sense that
Aboriginal and immigrant ethnic minorities
are to variable degrees part of the larger French
and English language communities, if only for
communication purposes. Looking within
Québec, the three axes are present as well,
except that the size of the French-language
majority within Québec is proportionately
greater than the size of the English-language
majority in Canada as a whole. To round out
the picture we could add the historically sig-
nificant religious cleavage,14 and the increas-
ingly salient distinction between visible
minorities and other immigrant communities.
These various axes of cleavage co-exist and
often intersect in the context of a relatively
decentralized federal political system and on-
going regional rivalries and alliances. This
section locates Canada’s ethnic pluralism in
comparative perspective and illustrates the
connection between the main axes.
In recent decades both the scholarly com-
munity and the general public are becoming
increasingly aware that homogeneous nation-
states are very much the exception on the
world stage, and that most states in the con-
temporary world system are in fact multilin-
gual, multinational, and polyethnic. Indeed,
in a world with thousands of distinct ethnic
groups and languages and fewer than 200
independent states, we should expect most
states to be heterogeneous to some extent.
Over the past few decades several attempts
have been made to quantify the volume of
ethnic and linguistic diversity or pluralism
within states. Quantitative indices of diversity
are of course fraught with many difficulties
and need to be handled and interpreted with
caution. By themselves, they do not tell us
how and whether linguistic and ethnic cleav-
ages are politically significant. Still, it is
interesting to note that Canada’s level of
internal ethno-linguistic diversity or plural-
ism, whether measured in the 1960s or the
1990s, is much higher than that which would
be expected given its high level of develop-
ment. Canada is an exceptional case (an out-
lier, in statistical terms), in this overall inverse
relationship, as are, at least in the earlier data
from the 1960s and 1970s, Switzerland,
Belgium, and the United States (Laczko,
1994, 2000, 2002). These societies all display
pluralism scores15 that are significantly above
the trend line, which shows the overall inverse
relationship predicted between a country’s
level of socio-economic development and
its ethno-linguistic diversity.
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CONFLICT AND DIVERSITY: CANADA / QUÉBEC
Canada shares with Belgium and
Switzerland its pattern of parallel linguistic
institutions and its consociational16 way of
organizing linguistic pluralism and regional
differences. Canada also shares with the
United States (along with Australia and New
Zealand) its history as a new world settler
society, where Aboriginals became a minority
early on and wave after wave of immigrants
followed. In Canada, special legislation,
notably the Indian Act of 1876, defined a
distinct legal status for Aboriginals. I have
argued that it is this combination of types of
pluralism that makes Canada distinctive
(Laczko, 1994). In recent decades, Belgium
and Switzerland have added immigration to
their historical linguistic and regional cleav-
ages, but they have no counterpart to
Canada’s Aboriginals. Similarly, the United
States has no close parallel to the linguistic
dualism that characterizes Canadian history,
despite the growth of its Spanish-speaking
minority.
In my recent and ongoing analysis of the
most recent data sets from the 1990s, based
on the lists compiled by Kurian (1997, 2001),
it seems that, on the whole, Canada’s overall
relative position as a country with an above-
average level of pluralism has been main-
tained from the 1960s to the 1990s. If we list
countries by their level of diversity from high
to low over four time points spanning four
decades, (i) Canada’s level of ethno-linguistic
diversity is among the highest in the world at
each time period, and (ii) Canada’s main
neighbours at the upper end of these lists are
almost all countries with much lower levels
of development. The existence of the cluster
of highly-developed, yet highly-plural coun-
tries reflects the fact that some highly devel-
oped societies such as Canada, Belgium, and
Switzerland have followed a separate histor-
ical path that set them somewhat apart from
the till-recently paramount model of one
dominant language per core state. At the
same time, many developed countries have
become more heterogeneous and accepting
of both territorial linguistic minorities as well
as minority immigrant diversity over the past
439
two decades, and this trend is likely to
continue (cf. Kymlicka, 2003). The historian
William McNeill (1986) has noted that coun-
tries such as Canada have a head start in
facing the challenges of polyethnicity as the
world’s developed states become more
diverse and multicultural. He argues that
polyethnicity is on the rise everywhere and
that from a long-view historical perspective,
this trend signals a slow but steady return to
the ‘normal’ state of human affairs.
Given the complex pattern of Aboriginal
First Nations, linguistic dualism, and immi-
grant multiculturalism in Canada as a whole,
but also within Québec, a useful question that
can be asked is how the three axes interact
and influence each other. It is important to
look at Québec separately, because Québec’s
internal pluralism is the key to Canada’s
exceptional position as a state with a higher-
than-expected level of pluralism given its
high level of development. Although French
speakers are a minority of approximately
25% of the population in Canada, they con-
stitute over 80% of the population of Québec.
Québec is thus a mini-Canada with its
French–English proportions reversed. The
main difference, of course, is that Québec’s
English-speaking minority historically exer-
cised a level of power and influence out of all
proportion to its numbers, while in the other
Canadian provinces the French-language
minorities historically had to fight for their
very survival. As Québec’s Francophone
majority has become a ‘sociological’ major-
ity (and not just a numerical majority) since
the 1960s, its English-speaking minority has
been pressured to adjust to its new role as a
Québec minority rather than as a fraction of
Canada’s English-speaking majority that
happens to live in Québec. This new status is
reflected in French-English bilingualism
rates within Québec. Although the proportion
of the population that is bilingual is increas-
ing in Québec among all categories of the
population, for the past two decades
Anglophones have displayed higher bilin-
gualism rates than Francophones, a reversal of
the century-old traditional pattern whereby
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440 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
bilingualism was disproportionately concen-
trated among the urban and more educated
sectors of the Francophone majority, along-
side widespread unilingualism in the
Anglophone community, even within
Québec. It is also clear that within Québec,
the historical French-English dualism has
affected the other two axes of differentiation:
both Québec’s Aboriginal peoples and its
immigrant ethnic communities display char-
acteristics not shared by their counterparts
elsewhere in Canada. In particular, they dis-
play higher rates of ancestral language reten-
tion than their counterparts in other
provinces. As a consequence, young people
from immigrant families in Québec are often
fluently trilingual, speaking both official lan-
guages as well as their ancestral language.
These patterns can be traced to the presence,
within Québec, of two competing dominant
societies or mainstreams, and the evolving
balance of power between them. We can add
that, since the 1960s, just as Québec’s
Anglophone community has been called
upon to redefine itself, so Québec’s
Aboriginal and immigrant ethnic communi-
ties have been called upon to redefine them-
selves as Québec minorities distinct from
their counterparts in the rest of Canada
(Laczko, 1995).
The interaction between these various
lines of cleavage is often complex, and can
be briefly illustrated with an example from
recent history, dealing with the progress ‘out
of irrelevance’ of Canada’s First Nations. The
politically significant redefinition of their
communities as First Nations in recent
decades is a result of Aboriginal leaders
taking a cue from Québec nationalism. This
process has of course taken place across the
country. Also, in public opinion polls, for
several decades, from the 1960s to the 1980s,
Québecers and Francophones displayed more
sympathetic attitudes towards Aboriginal
grievances than did the population of
English-speaking Canada, perhaps reflecting
some sort of awareness of the shared histori-
cal fact that Francophone Québecers and
Aboriginals were both incorporated into the
Canadian state in less than voluntary fashion.
This pattern changed with the constitutional
debates/crises of the late 1980s and early
1990s. The Meech Lake Accord,17 designed
to recognize in a modest way Québec’s dis-
tinctiveness, failed because it was not ratified
by all provincial legislatures. Specifically,
the Manitoba Legislature’s failure to ratify
the Meech Lake Accord in 1990 occurred
because an Aboriginal member of the
legislature, Elijah Harper, argued he could
not support an agreement designed to satisfy
Québec while First Nations grievances
remained outstanding. This was widely
viewed in Québec as an anti-Québec and
anti-French gesture, of the sort that has long
characterized the history of Western Canada.
In parallel fashion, in the climate of polarized
public opinion, opposition to the Accord
in English-speaking Canada was often
accompanied by statements of support for
Aboriginal rights and grievances. As a result,
in the 1990s, opinion polls showed Québecers
often taking a harder line on Aboriginal
issues than did respondents from the rest of
Canada (Laczko, 1997).
Within this national context of complex
lines of ethno-linguistic cleavage, Couton
now examines Canadian immigration policy,
with a particular emphasis on Québec’s
increasing autonomy and the ways in which
its immigration selection and settlement poli-
cies support its project of an equal French
nation within Canada, if not an autonomous
nation.
CANADA’S IMMIGRATION POLICY
DUALISM (PHILIPPE COUTON)
Under the constitutionally joint provincial
and federal jurisdiction, immigration has
contributed to Canada’s diversity in a unique
manner. While historically provinces have
been at best junior partners in immigration
matters, they, and Québec in particular, have
been playing a greatly expanded role since
the 1960s. The rise of Québec nationalism
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CONFLICT AND DIVERSITY: CANADA / QUÉBEC
during that period was of course the prime
mover, but the emergence of a more consul-
tative approach to federal policymaking also
played a role. The 2002 Immigration and
Refugee Protection Act continues, for instance,
the tradition of provincial consultation first
mandated in its 1976 predecessor. The result
of these forces has been an increasingly
diverse immigration policy, with various
provinces, and even cities, clamouring to
play a role. British Columbia and Manitoba
have obtained some control over parts of
immigration policy, and Ontario has been
negotiating for both more input and funding
for decades (Beach et al., 2003: section III).
But Québec is the sole jurisdiction to have
obtained nearly complete policy control.
Canada is therefore the only major immigra-
tion country to have a ‘bifurcated’ immigra-
tion system, with two distinct administrative
units having different policies, goals, and
institutional structures (Garcea, 1998). Since
immigration has traditionally been one of the
defining prerogatives of national states, this
policy fragmentation (dualism, really) raises
a number of questions, but also hints at larger
trends, which will be briefly explored.
Historically, immigration has affected
Canada’s two settler communities very dif-
ferently. It was a tool in the settlement of the
Canadian West, a way to counter US expan-
sionism, and an instrument of economic
growth for the federation as a whole. After
initial colonization by the French and the
British, largely in separate regions of the
country, the four great phases of immigration
to Canada – the settlement of loyalists (to
Britain) fleeing the American revolution in
the late 1700s, the immigration of workers
and paupers from the British Isles (chiefly
Ireland) during the early to mid-1800s, the
great migratory influx of the early 1900s
from Europe, especially Britain, and most
recently the sustained and increasingly
diverse immigration of the post-WWII
period – have had uneven consequences for
Canada’s English and French ‘founding’
(colonizing) groups.18 Each of those four
phases created a particular challenge to the
441
equilibrium born of various struggles and
compromises that culminated in the 1867
settlement. Bluntly put, immigration was fre-
quently perceived by Canada’s Francophones
as a plot to dissolve their culture into a rap-
idly expanding Anglophone majority
(Grenier, 2003; Kelley and Trebilcock, 1998:
20). This perception was partly based on
facts. The first two great waves of immigra-
tion were almost entirely of British origin,
contributing to the emergence of new
provinces, while the next two massively inte-
grated into Canada’s Anglophone majority,
until very recently (Henripin, 1994). Even
within Québec’s borders, in Montréal in par-
ticular, most immigrants tended to gravitate
towards the vast North American (English-
speaking) cultural hegemon. And during
most of its history, Canada’s immigration
policy was blithely unconcerned with its
effect on Québec or French-Canadians in
general. This was of course just one of many
shortcomings of what was, until the 1960s, not
so much a coherent policy but an essentially
arbitrary series of Cabinet or department-level
regulations, explicitly exclusionary, driven by
an uneasy mix of short-term economic
imperatives (supplementing the labour force)
and larger strategic objectives (populating
the West) (Green, 1976; Green and Green,
2004).
It comes as no surprise then, that the rising
political fortunes of Québec nationalism in
the 1960s and 1970s moved immigration to
the centre of the political stage. A number of
Québec politicians had long felt that federal
immigration policies were not in line with
the province’s needs. Even before the elec-
tion of the first Parti Québécois19 government
in 1976, the province took steps to enhance
its role in this area. Québec created its own
immigration department in 1968, a century
after the first federal law on immigration was
passed in 1869, and began to negotiate a
series of agreements with federal authorities
(Pâquet, 1997). The first of these was signed
in 1971, and led to the permanent 1991 agree-
ment, granting Québec nearly unilateral
responsibility for the selection and integration
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442 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

of its immigrants.20 Québec even obtained origin in particular locations tends to be

a substantially higher share of federal settle-
ment funds, based on the recognition, stated
in the agreement, that it needs additional
resources to help immigrants integrate in a
manner that takes into account its distinct
identity (Li, 2003: 170). The key period in
this process was the second part of the 1970s,
when the Parti Québécois secured important
immigration powers in 1978 (under the
Cullen-Couture agreement),21 and also
attempted to direct immigrants towards the
provincial linguistic majority by making
French education mandatory for school-aged
newcomers.
The bifurcation of Canada’s immigration
policy is therefore largely the product of
Québec’s efforts at greater policy autonomy,
with the objectives of protecting and devel-
oping the use of French, and countering
demographic decline. Contemporary migra-
tion to Canada is, as a result, linguistically
dichotomized. As Table 29.1 shows, French
is spoken in half of the main source countries
of immigrants to Montréal, compared to
none for Canada’s two other immigrant
cities.22 In 2002, nearly half of the immi-
grants to Montréal spoke some French,
against only about 2% of those moving to
Toronto and Vancouver (Citizenship and
Immigration Canada, 2002).23 Since the
concentration of immigrants of similar
self-reinforcing, this is likely to be a long-
term trend (McDonald, 2004).
At the same time, immigration to Québec
has been consistently more modest than to
other large provinces. As Figure 29.1 illus-
trates, Québec has never reached a share of
new immigrants proportional to its demo-
graphic weight in Canada (whereas Ontario
consistently exceeds it). But compared to
other developed countries around the world,
even major immigration destinations like the
United States, France, and Germany, Québec
ranks as a major immigrant-receiving society
(see Figure 29.2).
These figures illustrate both the success
Québec has had at shaping its migratory
influx and the continuing ambivalence with
which it approaches it. This ambivalence
goes beyond numbers, and is further illus-
trated by the fluctuating mission (and name)
of the ministry in charge of immigration
since its creation over 30 years ago (Helly,
1996; Symons, 2002), which Pietrantonio
chronicles earlier in this chapter. Not unlike
other immigrant-receiving societies, Québec’s
official approach to immigration has been
attempting to strike an uneasy balance
between operating within the conceptual
framework of individualistic citizenship
and accepting the reality of communal
diversity. Canada’s immigration policy is

Table 29.1 Top 10 source countries, Montréal, Toronto, Vancouver, 2002

Montréal Toronto Vancouver
+*Morocco India China
China China India
+*France Pakistan Philippines
+*Algeria Philippines Korea, Republic of
+Romania Iran Taiwan
+*Haiti Sri Lanka Iran
Pakistan United Arab Emirates United Kingdom
India Korea, Republic of United States
+*Lebanon Ukraine Pakistan
Sri Lanka Jamaica Hong Kong
Adapted from : Facts and Figures, Ottawa: Citizenship and Immigration, OECD, 2002.
+ Member of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (see http://www.francophonie.org/)
*French is widely spoken and/or an official language.
9781412934633-Chap-29 1/12/09 4:20 PM Page 443

CONFLICT AND DIVERSITY: CANADA / QUÉBEC 443

30

25

20

Quebec Immig %
15
Quebec Pop %

10

0
1970 1980 1990 2000

Figure 29.1 Québec’s proportion of Canada’s immigrants and of Canada’s population,

1970–2000
Adapted from: Duchesne, Louis. 2005. La situation démographique au Québec. Bilan 2005. Québec: Institut
de la statistique du Québec.

also equivocal, but that is due to policy
priorities which oscillate between labour
market, demographic, and humanitarian
goals. ‘Diversity management’ in Québec has
as a result taken a unique turn, with, for
instance, the development of an ‘intercultural’
perspective, different from Canadian multi-
culturalism, and which places a much
stronger emphasis on the importance of a
common language and shared values (Gagnon,
2000; Symons, 2002; see also Pietrantonio’s
contribution to this chapter). Not unlike other
immigration countries, Québec has also been
attempting to ‘regionalize’ its immigration,
i.e., to encourage immigrants to settle outside
of Montréal (Vatz Laaroussi, 2005). Regional
municipalities have played an active role in
this process, often seeking immigration for
demographic, economic and cultural reasons
(Guilbert, 2005). While Montréal has experi-
enced large-scale migration for much of its
history, these other cities have not, prompting
them to organize a range of programs to attract
and retain immigrants (Guilbert, 2005).
This immigration policy dualism raises a
number of analytical questions, but two head

30

25

20

15

10

0
any
ralia

da

den

ec

ium
ce

ria
tes
d
nd

erlan

Queb
Fran
Cana

Aust
Zeala

d Sta

Germ

Belg
Swe
Aust

Switz

Unite
New

Figure 29.2 Proportion of foreign-born, top 10 countries and Québec, 2000

Adapted from: Trends in International Migration, OECD, 2002; Statistics Canada, 2001 Census. (Note: Closest
year when 2000 not available; Luxembourg was omitted).
9781412934633-Chap-29 1/12/09 4:20 PM Page 444
444 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
the list. First, is this simply part of the slow
evolution of Québec towards full statehood?
That may be the case, but Québec is but one
example, albeit the most developed, of the
increasing involvement of sub-national
political units in immigration, in Canada and
elsewhere. Québec is unique in that it seeks
to include immigration in a specific nation-
building project, but many of its objectives
are similar to those of other provinces in
Canada and to those of other political com-
munities in the rest of the world. The emer-
gence of a number of semi-autonomous
sub- and trans-national spaces, including
cities, regions, migrant communities, exiled
polities, etc., is a global phenomenon (Faist,
2000: 281), independent of Québec’s state-
seeking politics. This leads to the second
question: Is this trend towards the displace-
ment of nation-state sovereignty indicative of
the increasing irrelevance of traditional
immigration policies? The emerging ability
of large conurbations and other sub-national
jurisdictions to influence their migratory
inflows may actually signal the development
of more targeted, localized immigration
policies (Nairn, 2003). Instead of the global,
random migration some predict, we may be
witnessing the rise of fine-tuned population
movements, resulting in niched diversity,
with Montréal, for instance, tending to
become a microcosm of the French-speaking
world. The multiple efforts of the provincial
government to integrate newcomers into
Québec’s French-speaking political commu-
nity are reinforcing this trend, sometimes
with mixed results, but with some clear suc-
cesses as well, including the rising use of
French rather than English as the preferred
home language of recent immigrants
(Grenier, 2003; Helly, 1996).
Against this backdrop of national immigra-
tion policies, Denis now considers the contra-
dictory tendencies of these and other state
policies related to ethnic relations – towards
exclusions based on racism, sexism and clas-
sism, on the one hand, and towards the
promotion of ethnic diversity, on the other.
IMMIGRATION AND ETHNIC
DIVERSITY (ANN DENIS)
Throughout its history Canada has been a
settler society, encouraging immigration, as
Couton has mentioned, mainly for the utili-
tarian objectives of increasing the population
and meeting labour market needs. These
reasons have at times been leavened by
humanitarianism, as in the case of admitting
refugees, while family reunion policies
incorporate a combination of utilitarian and
humanitarian considerations. Although the
Canadian immigration policies have been
severely (and legitimately) criticized as
exclusionary,24 at the same time, along with
other national policies related to ethnic
relations, they have often been proactive in
promoting inclusion, leading, rather than
following, public opinion in the promotion of
ethnic diversity. This section will highlight
some of the contradictory tendencies that
result – evidence of racism, sexism and clas-
sism in Canadian immigration policies, and
evidence supporting the interpretation of the
Canadian and Québécois governments as
promoting ethnic diversity.
Permanent, rather than temporary, immi-
gration has been the norm in Canada. Until
1962 this resulted in an explicitly racist
immigration policy: depending on their
national origin, which was considered to be
a predictor of their ability to assimilate to
the dominant Anglo/British culture, potential
immigrants were welcomed (if British,
including those from the (ex-)colonies, or
American, and ‘white’), accepted (if European,
with those from Southern and Eastern Europe
being the least welcome) or excluded, usu-
ally implicitly, if not of European (‘white’)
origin.25
Since 1962, with the introduction of the
‘points system’, Canadian immigration policy
became formally non-discriminatory, with
admission as an ‘independent’ or ‘economic’
immigrant26 based on points assigned for
individual attributes other than national
origin. The preferred attributes are those
9781412934633-Chap-29 1/12/09 4:20 PM Page 445
CONFLICT AND DIVERSITY: CANADA / QUÉBEC
deemed useful for economic integration in
Canadian/Québécois society, such as educa-
tion, training, occupation, a job offer and
knowledge of English or French. In 1978 a
subcategory of ‘investor’ was added to the
independent category: for them money for
investment largely replaces the skills criteria.
The second basis of admission is as a ‘spon-
sored’ immigrant, financially dependent for
10 years on an independent immigrant or a
Canadian citizen. Sponsored immigrants are
not assessed using the points system. In
1978, a third category of immigrant was
added, ‘refugee’. Based on the Geneva
Convention definition, a refugee is a person
who, ‘owing to well-founded fear of being
persecuted for reasons of race, religion,
nationality, membership of a particular social
group or political opinion’ (quoted in
Anderson, 1993: 46), is outside the country
of his/her nationality or habitual residence
and is unable, or, because of such fear,
unwilling to return to it. Refugee claimants
may be selected abroad or assessed when
they arrive in Canada.
That having money to invest allows one to
become an independent immigrant by side-
stepping the ‘universal’ criteria of the point
system suggests class bias in immigration
policies, favouring neo-liberalism.
The criteria for the attribution of temporary
work permits, the exception in a settler
society, also reflect class bias, together with
racism and sexism. These permits have been
largely given to seasonal agricultural work-
ers, who are non-European men (Satzewich,
1991), and to the more numerous live-in
domestic workers or caregivers, on contracts
of one to two years, who are predominantly
non-European women.27 Both accept work-
ing conditions that Canadians refuse. For
example, domestic workers are constrained
to reside with their employer, and changing
one’s employer was initially impossible. While
it is now possible for live-in caregivers to
apply to become independent immigrants at
the end of their contract (as was also true into
the 1960s), in addition to the criteria other
445
applicants had to meet, between 1981 and
1992 they were expected to have taken
courses and/or participated in community
activities during their live-in service, despite
the fact that they are typically living in afflu-
ent neighbourhoods with poor public trans-
port.28 In contrast, professional and technical
workers who obtain temporary work permits
experience no such constraints. In fact, by the
latter part of the twentieth century, this became
a means of fast-tracking their work authoriza-
tion, which has, since 2001, been extended to
their spouses (Abu-Laban and Gabriel,
2002).29 These workers are much more likely
to be of American or European origin.
That normally only one person per family,
typically a man, is assessed as an independ-
ent immigrant, results in women being
disproportionately admitted as legal depend-
ents. As such they are particularly vulnerable
to domestic violence, even though (or per-
haps because) they may make significant
contributions to the family income as
wage-earners from the time they arrive. The
reduction in 2001 of a spouse’s obligatory
dependency from ten to three years provides
a welcome attenuation of the effects of this
sexist practice, without, however, eliminating
it (Côté et al., 2001).
Turning now from immigration law, since
1969 a number of government measures legit-
imizing ethnic diversity have been introduced,
including, for Canada, the Official Languages
Act (1969), which makes both English and
French official languages in Canada; the
Multiculturalism Policy (1971), subsequently
formalized as the Multiculturalism Act
(1988), which declares that Canada is a mul-
ticultural society; the Employment Equity
Act, which defines women, Aboriginals, vis-
ible minorities and people with disabilities as
‘designated groups’ for whom employment
equity is to be promoted (1986); and the
Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982),
together with federal and provincial Human
Rights Codes. Whereas federal multicultural
policies are premised (often implicitly) on the
use of English or French in communication
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446 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
with the ‘host’ society, as Pietrantonio dis-
cusses earlier in this chapter, Québec’s inte-
gration policies for ethnic minorities are
premised on integration into the French-
speaking Québécois community (Juteau et al.,
1998), articulated increasingly as a ‘universal’
national one (Juteau, 2002). While the French
language charter in Québec, which has made
French the official language in that province,
can be considered a measure reducing linguis-
tic diversity and contradicting the spirit of the
Official Languages Act, it must be contextual-
ized as the strategy of an ethno-linguistic
minority to maintain an official national lan-
guage, French. Thériault discusses this more
fully in the next section of this chapter.
Parallel measures are unnecessary for the
maintenance of the other official language,
English, elsewhere in Canada, in view of its
international hegemony. On the other hand,
the legislated obligation to air Canadian con-
tent (of any language) in the media could be
analyzed as an equivalent strategy of resist-
ance to (American) cultural hegemony by
Anglophone Canadians. These Canadian con-
tent regulations are, however, much less con-
tentious for English-speaking Canadians than
either official bilingualism or the legal
predominance of French in Québec is.
Official bilingualism is criticized outside
Québec, especially in Western Canada, for
imposing ‘unnecessary’ obstacles on the
career advancement of federal public ser-
vants, by requiring that they demonstrate the
ability to deal with professional matters in
the ‘other’ official language. Within Québec,
as Thériault discusses in the next section, it is
criticized for diluting the use of French.
Commentaries about multiculturalism have
also been varied (and, to some extent, mutu-
ally contradictory). On the one hand, the
introduction of multiculturalism has been
analyzed both as a response to the vocal oppo-
sition by those of other non-Aboriginal origins
to the emphasis in the Royal Commission on
Bilingualism and Biculturalism on the rights
and contributions of the ‘charter’ British and
French origin groups. On the other, it has been
seen as a means of limiting the importance
of the French origin group, especially outside
Québec. The content itself of the policy has
changed over time, from stressing cultural
(‘folkloric’) maintenance to promoting inter-
cultural understanding. Critiques of multicul-
turalism have a number of bases: that
multiculturalism threatens the legitimation of
an official and distinctive status for the lan-
guages of the two ‘founding’ settler ethnic
groups; that the principle of promoting any
ethnic diversity should be rejected; that the
policy implementation only promotes short
term cultural pluralism and masks assimila-
tion; that emphasis on the cultural obscures
systemic discrimination in the fields of
housing, employment and relations with
civil authorities (e.g., Abu-Laban and Gabriel,
2002; Dua and Robertson, 1999; Li, 2003,
2003a; Porter, 1974 [1972]; Rocher, 1973).
These heated debates about official bilin-
gualism, about multiculturalism and the
Québec interculturalism policy, about levels
(and composition) of immigration, together
with views reported in public opinion polls on
these subjects, combined with experiences of
discrimination by ethnic minorities (e.g., Bobb
Smith, 2003; Dua and Robertson, 1999; Henry,
1994; Henry et al., 2000) lend support to the
analysis of the government as proactive rather
than reactive. Such analysis must, however, be
nuanced: beginning in the 1960s, government
policies were clearly both proactive and more
inclusive, shifting towards liberalism and
humanitarianism. Since the 1980s, however,
there has been a further shift – these tendencies
now vie with strong government propensities,
encouraged by private sector pressures, to
promote a reactive (and exclusionary) vision
of globalization based on neo-liberalism,
economic self-sufficiency and ‘diversity’ con-
ceived of as an economic benefit for trade, not
as a more intrinsic social benefit (Abu-Laban
and Gabriel, 2002; Li, 2003). Some would ask
whether this change also spells the demise of
national settler societies, but continuing claims
of national identity and sovereignty suggest
that such a conclusion would be premature.
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CONFLICT AND DIVERSITY: CANADA / QUÉBEC
In the next section Thériault closes the
analysis of Canada and Québec by examin-
ing how issues of social citizenship are
impacted by language policies, and how poli-
cies legitimizing ethno-linguistic diversity
have paradoxically also weakened one of the
national language communities. His analysis
highlights the complexity of the Canadian
linguistic question, in particular the contra-
dictory logic that determines the paradigm of
linguistic citizenship in Canada.
CITIZENSHIP ISSUES AND OFFICIAL
LANGUAGES IN CANADA
(JOSEPH-YVON THÉRIAULT)
Bilingualism and Binationalism
Canada has not always been a bilingual
country. The project of the majority of its
Founding Fathers in 1867 was to create a great
Anglo-British nation. The ‘Constitution’ of
1867, the British North America Act, is rela-
tively silent on language. It recognizes the
bilingual character of Québec legislation and
of the federal parliament, but does not say
anything about the language of the federal
administration and linguistic rights for
Francophones. It recognizes the rights of
existing separate schools, but above all pro-
tects their confessional character (Catholic or
Protestant) and not their French character
(Landry and Rouselle, 2003: 15).
During the 1960s, language became a true
citizenship issue: it involved a political
discussion about the very nature of what it is
to be a Canadian or a Québecer. The main
impetus of this movement was the neo-
nationalism of Québecers whose aim was to
redefine the pact of Confederation on the
basis of an equality between the two ‘founding
nations’. As a result, the Royal Commission on
Bilingualism and Biculturalism was estab-
lished in 1963, with the mandate of propos-
ing the reforms necessary to respond to the
historical recriminations of French Canadians.
As its name indicates, this Commission was
447
not exclusively linguistic. It was interested
in the bicultural nature of the country and
its recommendations, published between
1965 and 1970 supported a political bilin-
gualization and biculturalisation of Canada.
The Commission especially stressed the
political, economic, cultural and linguistic
inequality in which the French Canadian
community had been maintained. In propos-
ing measures aimed at the equality of the
‘founding’ peoples, the Commission made
the sociological observation that, in fact,
there were in Canada a dominant majority
and a dominated minority. Linguistic policies
were to be written in an effort to overcome
the effect of the majority domination.
The proposal of a re-founding of Canada
on the basis of linguistic duality was
accepted by the federal government, but
without any proposals to transform the ‘de
facto’ French Canadian minority into part of
an egalitarian community. In 1969, the fed-
eral government adopted a law on bilingual-
ism, the Official Languages Act. However, it
refused to associate the recognition of lin-
guistic duality with recognition of a national
duality. Canadian bilingualism would rest
principally on the individual freedom of each
Canadian, all across Canada, to use one or
the other of the official languages when deal-
ing with federal government agencies. As for
the bicultural character of Canada, the fed-
eral government completely reversed the
logic of the Royal Commission and pro-
posed, in 1971, a policy of multiculturalism
that endorsed the idea ‘that cultural pluralism
is the very essence of the Canadian identity’
(Houle, 1999: 110, my translation).
Official language: a societal
language
From this brief historical overview, it is
important to underline that the Canadian lin-
guistic question does not raise, either politi-
cally or sociologically, the question of rights
or the recognition of ethno-linguistic minori-
ties. Politically, in Canada, English and
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448 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
French have equal status: they are both official
languages. The Canadian Charter of Rights
and Freedoms, under article 23, recognizes,
for official language minorities, the right to
instruction in the other official language
(French outside Québec, English in Québec).
However, this right is recognized by virtue of
membership in one of the official language
groups of Canada and not by virtue of minority
rights: this is why other minority language
groups do not have such a right. Furthermore,
in Québec, French is the official language
and Québec’s language policy reflects a
desire to have French as the common public
language.
Official languages policies in Canada and
in Québec therefore do not proceed from a
policy of multiculturalism (or rather multilin-
gualism), which would voluntarily recognize
minority languages in partnership with the
dominant language(s). Language policy in
Canada, as in Québec, is more a classical
policy of national language, sometimes
expressed in terms of a binational state,
sometimes in terms of national minorities.
Moreover, looking back on Canadian politi-
cal history, multiculturalism was developed,
as Denis has noted, if not in opposition to, at
least partly in an effort to limit, nationalistic
demands associated with official languages
(notably demands of Francophones).
Sociologically, the matter is a little more
complex. In the Canadian and North
American contexts (less than 25% of the
Canadian population is French speaking, as
is only about 3% of the population of North
America), the French language in Canada is
in a precarious minority situation every-
where, even in Québec. Francophones are at
great risk of being assimilated outside
Québec, except in the province of New
Brunswick where the erosion of the French
language is slow. Even in Québec, it is only
in a situation of relative stability, in spite of
language laws that have, for some 30 years,
promoted its usage. There, neither French
language activists, nor the courts (which are
regularly called upon by both activists and
governments to rule on linguistic rights),
understand this situation in terms of minority
rights. Instead, they interpret the issues in
terms of equal status (equality rights).
Political systems in opposition
Thus, by declaring two official languages,
the federal language policy since the 1970s
has been intended to dissociate language
from its community or particular cultural
content. In doing so, however, the federal
government created de facto linguistic
minorities in its territory (the Francophones
outside Québec and the Anglophones in
Québec) which, by requiring an actual lin-
guistic equality, reintroduced a link between
language and culture. Thus, article 23 of the
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
(enshrined in the Constitution of 1982)
obliges governments (above all provincial
ones, since education is a provincial respon-
sibility) to provide education and to supply
educational institutions to linguistic minori-
ties, where numbers justify it.
In recent years, the Supreme Court of
Canada has tended to interpret the clause on
language laws generously, which means that
it has forced governments not only to provide
services in two official languages, but also to
promote the development of the official lan-
guage communities when they are minori-
ties. This also means, however, by virtue of
the same principles, that the Supreme Court
has invalidated some Québec language laws,
the aim of which is the promotion of French,
as being contrary to the linguistic equality
promoted by the Charter and to the respect of
linguistic minorities. Notably, the courts
have invalidated restrictions imposed in
Québec on enrolment of Anglophone
Canadians in English schools, and in the
French unilingualism of public signs.30
At the same time as the federal government
established a linguistic regime favouring pan-
Canadian bilingualism and promoting official
language minorities in the provinces where
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CONFLICT AND DIVERSITY: CANADA / QUÉBEC
they are a minority, the policies of successive
governments of Québec have gone in the
opposite direction. On the one hand,
Québec’s nationalist movement, which was
at the root of the politicization of the linguis-
tic issue at the beginning of the 1960s, became
committed to increasing autonomy, which
means that it perceived duality (French and
English Canada) less as a characteristic of
the Canadian nation than as an arrangement
between two nations (Québec and Canada),
each having its own linguistic territory.
Furthermore, the linguistic interventions
of successive governments of Québec have
been supported by the general acknowledge-
ment that the government of Québec is
the only government with a majority of
French-speakers in its territory, which means
that Québec has a particular duty to protect
and to promote both the language and
societal institutions necessary for it to flour-
ish. This acknowledgement is compatible
with the underlying recognition by the
Royal Commission on Bilingualism and
Biculturalism, that language and cultural
community are intimately related and that, in
fact, in Canada, sociologically, one of the
official languages, French, is a minority lan-
guage. Thus, establishing legislation, even in
Québec, that aims to protect French and, con-
sequently, to limit the presence of English is
deemed to be justifiable. It is in this frame-
work that Québec’s principal language laws,
particularly Bill 101, the French Language
Charter, have stipulated the clear predomi-
nance of French in Québec’s territory and
have spelled out the means of implementation.
Even though Québec’s linguistic policy has
been implemented with more flexibility in recent
years, the intention of making French the only
public language in Québec is still active.31
Two linguistic projects, two
citizenship projects
There exist, then, in Canada and in Québec two
linguistic regimes, each proposing a different
449
political definition of the linguistic-national
space. One presents an instrumental concep-
tion of languages, where they should be at
the undifferentiated service of individual cit-
izens. The other one presents a more commu-
nitarian version, where the promotion of the
language contributes to the cultural project
of building a francophone nation within
North America (Taylor, 1992). They are two
regimes which oppose and mutually nullify
each other. By their promotion of bilingual-
ism, the linguistic policies of the federal
government directly contradict the efforts of
the Québec government to make its territory
the only political space in America where
the common public language is not
English. Paradoxically, the efforts of the
Canadian government, begun following the
Royal Commission on Bilingualism and
Biculturalism to promote the French lan-
guage in order to ensure linguistic equality
among Canadians, ends up opposing the most
systematic effort to enhance the political
prestige of this language by the language
policies of Québec.
Conversely, Québec’s language policies,
developed to a large extent on the basis of a
sociological acknowledgement of French as a
minority language in North America, come
into conflict with the rights of official language
minorities.32 There have even been instances of
the Québec government supporting the refusal
of Anglophone provincial governments to
broaden the educational rights of their
Francophone minorities, apparently on the
grounds that it would be dangerous if these
expanded minority rights were extended to
Québec’s Anglophone ‘minorities’. An exam-
ple is Québec’s support for the government of
Alberta refusing to extend French education
(see: Maheu vs. Alberta, [1990] 1 R.C.S. 342).
The conflict between the linguistic regimes
stems from the existence of two national
projects, the Canadian and the Québecois.
Each of these projects has a hegemonic claim
that ends up making it difficult, if not impos-
sible, to recognize the asymmetry of the
linguistic situations. French, while being on
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450 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
an equal political plane with the English
language, is, on a sociological plane, in a
minority situation (even in Québec).
CONCLUDING COMMENTS
This chapter began with an analysis of
Canadian and Québec official discourses
about ethno-linguistic diversity in the field of
cultural policies within an existing nation-state
(Canada) characterized, from an international
perspective, by an unusually high level of
internal ethnic heterogeneity for a developed
society. This is the result of a combination of
different types of ethno-linguistic diversity.
The sometimes contradictory contributions of
Canada’s and Québec’s immigration policies
and other policies which have framed ethnic
relations were then examined, culminating in
an analysis of the tensions related to conflict-
ing citizenship projects for the two official
language groups in Canada and Québec.
While the contemporary official discourses
articulate cooperation, in the form of recogni-
tion of the legitimacy of cultural variation, this
cooperation is expected to occur within the
more (in Québec) or less (Canada) explicit
framework of domination by one ethno-
linguistic collectivity.
We conclude with some analytic com-
ments about the ethno-linguistic complexity
of Canada/Québec and the cross-cutting axes
of diversity this reveals. Canada/Québec can
be considered an interesting case study of
how to understand diversity within a post-
colonial, contemporary society composed of
a wide variety of ethno-cultural groups. As
we have seen, diversity is a key feature of
Canadian society. It is at the very heart of
Canada’s political system and forms the nar-
rative basis for the recognition of its varied
social groups. Competition and sometimes
conflict among its constituent parts – ethnic,
linguistic, religious (and regional) – is a
common thread running through the history
of Canada and has also been central to
Canadian sociology, notably within the
political economy tradition which has
informed much of the sociological analysis,
including in ethnic relations (see Clement
and Vosko, 2003, as a recent example of this
tradition). The current quest for greater recog-
nition of diversity now reaches beyond the
institutional policy of multiculturalism of
1971 although the latter remains an important
source of legitimation of this recognition.
Varied and sometimes conflicting percep-
tions of diversity persist, rather than a unified
Canadian representation of it – although
perhaps we are in the process of achieving
a consensus in the middle of the first decade
of the second millennium. The Canadian-
Québecois leadership role in the develop-
ment of the international Convention on the
Protection and Promotion of Cultural
Contents and Artistic Expressions, adopted
in 2005 under the auspices of UNESCO, sug-
gests this might be the case, although
Thériault’s analysis of Canadian and Québec
language policies suggests the contrary.
Whereas subsequent sections of this chapter
concentrated on the diversity in population
composition and the diversity of policy
responses intended to manage the popula-
tion, the first one centred its analysis on the
meanings and usages of the term ‘diversity’
within the field of the politics of culture,
identified differences in the semantics of the
term, and outlined possible new forms of
normative pluralism. The material analyzed
supports the conclusion that the power rela-
tions and social differentiation issues, them-
selves examined later in the chapter, do shape
the meanings of the concept of ‘diversity’,
always in relation to a form of idealized
nation. Out of this initial analysis, two major
explicit usages appear: openness to cultural
diversity within nations and international
recognition of cultural diversity to portray
the sum of homogeneous nations throughout
the world. In both, diversity is reduced to eth-
nicity: every other aspect of cultural diversity
of the collectivities is concealed. The various
usages reveal the normative aspect of the
term, and the concentration on a limited
portion of its possible meaning.
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CONFLICT AND DIVERSITY: CANADA / QUÉBEC
Many strands of diversity might be the
best way to portray Canada/Québec, charac-
terized, depending on the players being
examined, by often simultaneous conflict
and competition, as well as relations of coop-
eration. That various processes of social
differentiation are involved is attested by the
many issues addressed through Canadian
(and Québec) policies and laws which regu-
late power relations between majority and
minority groups (e.g., multicultural policy, lin-
guistic policies, Aboriginal policies, immigra-
tion policies, cultural policies, etc.). When
made explicit, the various bases of diversity
can tell a great deal about histories of both
individuals and collectivities, which are
marked not only by ethnicity, language and
immigration status, but also by such other
social locations as gender. Clearly, the impact
of the paradigm of diversity on the imagined
nation or national boundaries remains to be
analyzed. It would, perhaps, be more realistic
to speak of the diversity of diversity than of
a stabilized meaning of the term.
We can identify at least five axes cross-
cutting the social and sociological usages of
the term: diversity as social discourse; diver-
sity as a narrative of institutional policies;
diversity as a social fact; diversity as a political
rhetoric; and diversity as a concept, a tool to
study and understand social realities. The
sometimes blurred boundaries between those
axes call out for an epistemology of diversity.
More modestly we will suggest the following
as points to consider in tackling diversity in
sociological research: (1) the complexities it
challenges us to incorporate into our analysis,
(2) its heuristic value, (3) the impact on our
analysis of what is perceived as diversity by
institutions, and finally (4) the limits to our
sociological application of ‘diversity’.
First let us consider the complexities we are
challenged to incorporate. Since the 1970s
conceptualizations of ethnicity have become
less essentialized and less static (see, e.g., in
quite different ways, Appadurai, 1996, 2001;
Guillaumin, 1995; Hall, 1992; Schermerhorn,
1970). These conceptualizations allow us to
consider a wider range of social statuses
451
which may be the empirical referents of
ethnicity, along with the dynamic (and even
fluid) nature of these referents. Theoretical
approaches which focus on majority/minor-
ity or dominant/subordinate social relations
are especially useful. Moreover, by the early
1980s, a number of feminist sociologists,
working independently, started to develop
what has now become intersectional analy-
sis, incorporating concurrent consideration
of ethnicity/race, gender and class (and
sometimes other social locations as well).
These pioneers included Danielle Juteau
(Juteau and Roberts, 1981) in Canada, Bell
hooks (1981) in the United States, and Floya
Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis (1983) in
Great Britain. Analyses which emphasize
fluidity and multiple identities related to
ethnicity have, to date, been more widely
adopted than those focussing on intersec-
tionality (of sex, race, ethnicity), but both
challenge us to incorporate the complexi-
ties of concurrently occupying the multiple
social locations, while recognizing that their
meanings are not necessarily remaining
static.
At the same time, to take up our second
point, about the heuristic value of diversity,
there has been a tendency, since the end of
the 1980s, to homogenize all migrants of
European descent when studying their migra-
tion and integration in Canada/ Québec. This
is no doubt a result of a substantial increase
in the source countries of migration,
reflected in the much greater immigration
from non-European regions, notably Asia,
Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.
As noted in this chapter, immigrants from
these regions and their descendants are often
referred to collectively in Canada as ‘visible
minorities’, although the acceptability of this
concept is contested as ethnocentric by some
of those to whom it is applied. Like the
‘non-visible minorities’, they, too, have often
been homogenized in recent analyses (e.g.,
Li, 2000). This is a tendency which we con-
sider just as problematic as the homogeniz-
ing of those of European origin, given the
differences among their respective social
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452 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
realities: ‘diversity’ reminds us to challenge
analyses which homogenize. At the same
time, we do acknowledge that the dichotomy
on the basis of being a member of a ‘visible
minority’ or not can facilitate an overview of
over-arching practices of social discrimina-
tion which are based on physical features
or appearance.
Our third point raises the impact of social
institutions and policies on scholars and
illustrates it in the Canadian/Quebecois
context. In effect, sociologists often find
themselves working within, or doing contract
research for, government ministries which
address issues of ethnicity, language and immi-
gration, such as the Department of Canadian
Heritage or Citizenship and Immigration
Canada. At the same time as they help shape
the discourse on these topics, their analytic
vision may be constrained by institutionally
defined boundaries. The three solitudes sepa-
rating the study of First Nations peoples,
official language groups and one or more of
the ‘other’ ethnic groups is a case in point.
Separate government departments or sections
have responsibility for each, resulting not
just in varied policies but also varied (and
separate) funding opportunities for research
about these groups.
There are also considerations of diversity
in the policy and institutional pluralism that
result from migratory flows. Whereas diver-
sity is most commonly understood as the
rising social and cultural pluralism that
marks a number of urban areas throughout
the world, the fact that migration also gener-
ates a wide array of policy responses to the
movement of people is often overlooked.
Nation-states have, of course, developed
their own ‘immigration models’ over the past
two centuries, but increasingly regions, sub-
national units in federations, and more
recently cities are developing their own insti-
tutions and programs. The case of Québec
discussed in this chapter is a very clear
example of this, although Québec is in many
ways a quasi nation-state. Its gaining control
over immigrant selection and integration
could be simply understood as part of a
larger process of nation-building, but to do so
would involve overlooking the fact that
other Canadian provinces and municipalities
are also asking for some control over
immigration.
Institutional diversity, however, goes
beyond simply increasing the role of sub-
national actors in regulating migration.
Cities, in particular, are being shaped by
migration flows, which are often very specific.
Migration has always been sharply patterned:
flows become established and tend to main-
tain themselves in specific directions. In
other words, migrants are not randomly dis-
tributed across the world. This is obvious in
the case of post-colonial migration or tempo-
rary migrant worker programs. But there
are also regional specificities that emerge
because of geographical proximity (Cubans in
Miami), cultural and linguistic resemblance
(Francophones in Montréal), network effects
(residential concentration within cities).
These tend to generate different responses
that greatly diversify the policy and institu-
tional responses to migration. In that sense
then, diversity also means the rise of different
polities endowed with their own approaches
and structures designed to handle diversity
(Nairn, 2003). The great, and partly fictitious
national models of managing migration and
cultural pluralism are in part giving way to
more localized, frequently urban and
regional models of understanding, building,
and experiencing diversity.
Finally, we will consider limits in our appli-
cations of diversity. Empirically, in our analy-
ses sociologists of ethnic relations generally
work with no more than three or four aspects
of the social differentiation that constitutes
human diversity: for instance, migration or
citizenship status, together with race, lan-
guage and/or religion. Rarely can we consider
all aspects of an individual’s social identity
within groups, such as those based on sex,
age, ethnicity, language spoken, disability,
being part of a Diaspora, or the dynamic char-
acter of any (or all) of such social locations.
From this observation we might consider that
our own analyses contribute to making
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CONFLICT AND DIVERSITY: CANADA / QUÉBEC
human diversity – including its constitution
and transformations – invisible, perhaps
because such complexity is so difficult to
consider. Before giving up in the face of
seemingly impossible challenges that this
approach presents, however, we should
remember that it is only relatively recently
that sociologists have begun tackling them.
The foregoing analyses have situated the
ethno-linguistic diversity and tensions of
Canada/Québec within an international con-
text, highlighting both their distinctive features
and the fact that our experiences may offer
insights about potentials and pitfalls in the
management of ethno-linguistic diversity
within a framework which, formally, is com-
mitted to equality. That equality can be both
an individual and a collective right, results in
tensions and in contradictions. Furthermore,
national cultural policy may be premised on
intra-national homogeneity, combined with
international diversity, or on a recognition of
intra-national diversity. In fact, the political
boundaries of national jurisdictions as well as
the realities of transnational border crossings
need to be factored into both our analytical
and policy frameworks as we address issues of
ethno-cultural and linguistic diversity in the
twenty-first century. This chapter’s overview
of Canada and Québec’s ethno-linguistic
dynamics has been necessarily selective, as
we have already noted. Canada’s scores on
the quantitative indices of diversity alert us to
some of the particularities of the Canadian
case, but in themselves they do not tell us
much about how ethnic and linguistic cleav-
ages are structured, how they change over
time, and how the whole picture is framed.
We have tried, in this concluding section,
to tease out what it means, in terms of
research practices, to take into account the
diversity of diversity, and the many chal-
lenges of attempting to do so. We conclude
that the heuristic value of the concept of
diversity remains an open question, particu-
larly if we consider conflict, competition and
cooperation as they impact on any concept of
diversity. It is a question which, we feel,
merits further exploration.
453
NOTES
1 Authors’ names are listed alphabetically. All
contributed equally to the joint segments of this
chapter, in addition to writing their respective
sections, and all participated in the overall revision of
the chapter.
2 Until May 2006 it was a Department of
Sociology, rather than the joint Department of
Sociology and Anthropology it now is.
3 Notably absent from this collective effort is any
substantial discussion of Canada’s First Nations.
4 In fact, in the spirit of communicating the
bilingualism, at the conference two of the papers
were presented mainly in French, two mainly in
English, and one equally in the two languages. Visual
aids assisted the understanding of the French papers,
since all in the audience understood English.
5 In 1970, in Comparative Ethnic Relations: A
Framework for Theory and Research, Schermerhorn
contrasted normative pluralism with political, cul-
tural, and structural pluralism. He encouraged us to
conceive of a single form of normative pluralism:
either it is or it isn’t. The new discourse on the diver-
sity of cultural policies allows us to see that we
should be attentive to different configurations of
those policies, and certainly to the uses that develop
from the notion of diversity.
6 On this subject, see the document prepared by
the jurists Ivan Bernier and Hélène Ruiz-Fabri (2002).
7 Published on the Internet at http://www.
mcccf.gouv.qc.ca/diversite-culturelle/eng/index.html.
This url includes the Newsletter on the Diversity of
Cultural Expressions.
8 The objective of the ‘Secrétariat gouverne-
mental à la diversité culturelle’ is to ‘inform and sen-
sitize people from all backgrounds to issues of
cultural diversity’; ‘provide expertise on the links
between trade and culture’; ‘guide relevant works
and studies’; ‘participate in interdepartmental coordi-
nation’, and ‘advise departmental and governmental
authorities’. See also the Internet site of the
Secretariat, whose url is given in Note 7.
9 Reports also published on the Internet site of
the network at http:www.incp-ripc.org/index_e.shtml
10 A remark found particularly in the study ‘Sur la
faisabilité juridique d’un instrument international sur
la diversité culturelle’ (On the Legal Feasibility of an
International Instrument on Cultural Diversity) by the
jurists Bernier and Ruiz-Fabri (2002).
11 La politique québécoise du développement cul-
turel Vol I – De quelle culture s’agit-il? This is an excep-
tional policy in many respects that raised the question
of the institutional presence of diversity and its
political recognition. In this official text, culture is not
merely the fact of ethnicity; it is also seen as including
gender and other forms of social differentiation,
including language.
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454 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
12 These labels also correspond to the depart-
ments responsible for immigration and integration,
whose successive changes in designation correspond
to the same phenomenon: the Ministère des
Communautés culturelles et de l’Immigration
(MCCI, Ministry of Cultural Communities and of
Immigration, 1981–1993); the Ministère des Affaires
internationales, de l’Immigration et des Communautés
culturelles (MAIICC, the Ministry of International
Affairs, Immigration and Cultural Communities,
1993–1996); and then the Ministère des Relations
avec les citoyens et de l’Immigration (MRCI, Ministry
of Relations with Citizens and of Immigration [trans-
lation, A.D.], 1996–2005). In 2005, this department
was renamed once again, with a variant, the
Ministère de l’Immigration et des Communautés
culturelles (MICC, Ministry of Immigration and
Cultural Communities). It is interesting to note that
before the establishment in 1968 of the first depart-
ment in Québec responsible for immigration, the
Ministère de l’Immigration du Québec (MIQ, The
Ministry of Immigration of Québec, 1966–1981),
matters related to immigration were handled by the
Ministère des Affaires culturelles (Ministry of Cultural
Affairs, 1966). For a summary portrait of these differ-
ent departments, please see the interesting article by
Gladys Symons (2002).
13 Moreover, the term ‘visible minority’ refers to
these measures. It appeared in 1984 in the document
Equality Now and on the heels of the work of the
federal Royal Commission on Equality in
Employment, where Judge Rosalie Abella, today a
Supreme Court judge, was the sole commissioner.
See also the section by Denis in this chapter which
provides other details related to this concept.
14 Aboriginal religious traditions were marginal-
ized by Christian proselytizing under both the French
and British colonial régimes. For many decades after
the British Conquest the most salient cleavage was
between the Protestant majority and the Catholic
minority, with the latter category being the majority
religion in Québec. Most English speakers were
Protestant and just about all French Canadians were
Catholic. Starting in the 1800s the English-speaking
population became more diverse in its religious com-
position, with the arrival of waves of Irish and Jewish
immigrants. In recent decades, Canada has experi-
enced extensive secularization, as reflected in declin-
ing religious attendance rates and a growing
proportion of the population reporting no religious
affiliation. At the same time, new waves of immigra-
tion have increased the numbers of Muslims,
Buddhists and members of other religions.
15 For the earlier periods, the index of pluralism is
measured by the ethno-linguistic fractionalization
(ELF) scores assigned by Soviet ethnographers as
reported in Atlas Narodov Mira (Taylor and Hudson,
1972). For each country, the index of ethno-linguistic
fractionalization is defined as the probability that two
individuals selected at random within the country will
be from different ethnic groups. For the later period,
the index is a simple measure of the proportion of the
population that is not a member of the dominant
ethno-linguistic category as reported in Kurian’s hand-
books (1997, 2001). In addition, a refined and updated
successor to the original ELF (cf. Okediji, 2005) also
places Canada’s overall level of diversity as the
highest in the developed world.
16 The term consociational democracy refers to
the way societies that are divided into ethnic, linguis-
tic, or religious segments or regions often rely on a
pattern of elite consultation and accommodation
between representatives of each segment. See for
example Lijphart (1977).
17 This set of failed constitutional amendments,
negotiated by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and his
provincial counterparts, is named after the govern-
ment meeting house in the Gatineau Hills north of
Ottawa where negotiations were held in 1987. The
Accord specified that each provincial legislature was
to confirm its agreement within three years.
18 The disastrous impact of immigration on
Canada’s First Nations will not be discussed here, due
to space restrictions, but would deserve a separate
discussion.
19 From its inception, a major point in the platform
of this party has been Québec political autonomy.
20 See a brief discussion of the agreement by
Margaret Young at: http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/
library/PRBpubs/bp252-f.htm
21 From the names of the respective ministers who
signed the accord, which granted immigrant selection
and integration powers to Québec (Grenier, 2003).
22 The vast majority of immigrants to Canada
settle in those three urban centres.
23 Canada received about 230,000 immigrants in
2002, the majority from Asia. See Citizenship and
Immigration Canada (2002) for details.
24 Much of the criticism has related to the period,
until 1962, when national origin was a major factor
in the determination of admissibility. As Couton has
explained, there was no separate Québec policy at
that time. On the other hand, criticisms about exclu-
sion on the basis of criteria under the ‘point system’
and de facto exclusion due to the locations of immi-
gration offices overseas could also apply to Québec.
25 For example, by requiring uninterrupted pas-
sage from point of origin to Canada, by the imposi-
tion of a ‘head tax’, or by a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’
with the country of origin, whereby the person could
not leave that country to come to Canada
(Abu-Laban and Gabriel, 2002; Hawkins, 1988).
26 The terminology has varied over time, as have
the precise criteria and the weight given to each.
27 During the periods when designated occupations
were accorded points – the system now emphasizes
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CONFLICT AND DIVERSITY: CANADA / QUÉBEC
training and job experience instead – the points
accorded for these occupations decreased, even
though there was clearly a continuing demand for
such workers (see, e.g., Arat-Koc, 1999; Bakan and
Stasiulis, 1997; Calliste, 1989; Daenzer, 1993, espe-
cially Chapter 5, for details).
28 There have been numerous changes over
the years, some more, some less restrictive, in the
regulations for live-in domestic workers. After a
period of relative openness through the 1950s (when
many candidates were European), the tendency has
been towards increased restriction, which Daenzer
(1993) and Arat-Koc (1999) have qualified as inden-
ture. Incremental improvements have typically
required intensive lobbying by the domestic workers’
association, INTERCEDE, with some support from
Canadian liberals and feminists.
29 The introduction of spousal authorizations
invites analysis: does it reflect increasing numbers of
women among the professionals and technical work-
ers on temporary permits and the ‘need’ to make pro-
vision for their husbands? the ‘need’ to facilitate two
income households in the upper middle class? or ...?
30 See Plourde (2000) for a study of the evolution
of linguistic policies in Québec.
31 On the recent evolution of Québec’s linguistic
policy, see Stefanescu and Georgeault (2005).
32 This conclusion is also expressed by Léon Dion
(1980).
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ranslat Vatz Laaroussi, Michèle (2005)
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PART FIVE

Conclusion
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9781412934633-Chap-30.qxp 1/10/09 8:59 AM Page 461
Conflict, Competition
and Cooperation: Means
and Stratagems for Shaping
Social Reality in the Twenty-
First Century
Ann Denis and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman 1
The three terms which are part of the title of
the Handbook and appear at the head of this
chapter represent a classical view of how to
categorize different kinds of social relations.
In compiling the articles in this collection,
we have discovered that they are not only
conceptual instruments with the aid of which
sociologists practice their discipline. They
also have a wider usage as faithful reflections
of what goes on in sociology and as bases for
coping with the mounting number of ques-
tions that arise in the social world.
Furthermore, conceptualizations of conflict,
competition and cooperation are indications
of how to find solutions to social problems.
As noted in the ‘Introduction’, this volume
is based on discussions that took place at a
Research Council conference at which repre-
sentatives from the Research Committees of
the International Sociological Association
30
were asked to reflect on cooperation, compe-
tition and conflict in sociology. The collec-
tion of papers that was chosen for this
Handbook provides evidence of how ubiqui-
tous the three focal processes are, how diverse
the modes of entry into the study of society
and how closely linked sociology as a disci-
pline is to the political and economic features
of its subject matter. Thus, conflict, competi-
tion and cooperation are indeed the basic
means and stratagems that underlie the mis-
sion of sociology in the twenty-first century.
CONFLICT, COMPETITION AND
COOPERATION EVERYWHERE
Beyond the request to include some reference
to the processes of cooperation, competition,
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462 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
and conflict, those submitting papers were
free to choose their approaches to theory and
research in the discipline of sociology. The
result, as the organization of the Handbook
shows, was a highly diverse collection in
which we can see that the focal processes are
valid for topics that can be aligned on a kind
of continuum of substantive issues, from the
general grasp of sociology as a science to
evidence of how sociology can be used to
describe and explain particular cases. A short
review of the materials in the successive parts
of the Handbook will underline the ubiquity
of conflict, competition and cooperation
from every current vantage point for examin-
ing society, as well as disclosing how diverse
the approaches can be.
Some contributors chose to present a
general overview of the subfield of sociology
which is at the core of interest to the people
organized in a particular research committee.
From the overview, readers are able to derive
an understanding of how cooperation, com-
petition and conflict have been absorbed into
sociology as a discipline. Others, as we see in
Part 2, chose to focus on the three ‘required’
processes in order to examine where and how
they figure in the various working concepts
and theories that concern their research
group. Those whose articles appear in Part 3
present investigations of how, from their
particular mode of conceptualization, con-
flict, competition and cooperation shed light
on pressing social issues. In Part 4 the
researches presented zoom in on specific
cases where one or the other of the processes
is a distinctive characteristic of the events
portrayed.
Within each part, however, there are
important differences among the articles as
researchers offer what they perceive to be the
point of view of the research committee
they represent, or, in the case of those not
representing research committees, an impor-
tant perspective in the area within which
they work. Thus every chapter relies on a the-
oretical and a methodological apparatus
which has been developed in a recognized
sociological subfield. Among the articles in
Part 1, which presents general approaches to
research, for example, there is a clear division
between those that emphasize the concern
with the theoretical framework of research
and those that emphasize the concern with
methods and practices. The chapters on
alienation (Langman and Kalekin-Fishman)
and belonging (Yuval-Davis) emphasize pos-
itive and negative outcomes of structurally
embedded processes of conflict, competition
and cooperation in their on-going dynamics.
The chapter on socio-technics (Hogsbro,
Pruijt, Pokrovsky and Tsobanoglou) intro-
duces the notion of the uses of sociology in
social intervention, as a tool which is both
practical and critically analytic. Banakar’s
chapter on socio-legal research, Reis’ chap-
ter, with its focus on the links between social
transformations and changes in conceptual-
ization, and Jimenez’s chapter on the need to
involve concerned lay persons in research all
blueprint designs for work that sociologists
should be doing in light of how they view the
nature of society.
Part 2, in which there are specifications of
how conflict, competition and cooperation
are treated in a selection of subfields, is also
characterized by several different percep-
tions. Chapters on the sociology of develop-
ment (Schuerkens), on sociological theories
of professions (Evetts, Gadea, Sánchez and
Sáez), on the sociology of childhood (Van
Krieken and Bühler-Niederberger), and on
social mobility (Moulin and Bernard) focus
for the most part on how re-conceptualizations
of conflict and cooperation in their subfields
are likely to improve the match of research
and research findings to the realities of living
in each domain. Those on the sociology of
the arts, the sociology of sport, and health
sociology, on the other hand, view the devel-
opments in their fields as expressions of
broader social trends. From evidence of the
impact of economic forces on what happens
in art, Marontate concludes that the art
world is governed by the same neo-capitalist
logic that characterizes a globalizing world.
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CONFLICT, COMPETITION AND COOPERATION
Viewing the direction of influence as being
that from the domain of sport to universal
social phenomena, Ohl expresses a fear that
the escalating obsession with competitive
sport throughout the world may be leading to
a general societal perception of competition
as ‘the sole legitimate ideology by which
human behaviour may be understood’. A sur-
prising contribution is the finding high-
lighted in the chapter on the sociology of
health (Riska, Annandale and Dingwall),
namely that the concepts with their classical
theoretical import are less and less important
in the field. Here, the privatization of health
care and the widespread practical concern of
researchers with intervention are detailed as
factors undermining what we may call the
‘pure’ disciplinary approach to the domain.
A major part of sociological research is
dedicated to applying sociological tools to
describe and analyze social problems that
arise. From this vantage point, the variety of
topics dealt with in Part 3 is a measure of how
widely applicable conceptualizations of con-
flict, competition and cooperation are. The
broad range of problems to which they can be
applied include the ambiguities of conflict
and cooperation in peacekeeping operations
(Segal, Dandeker and Whitestone), the per-
sistence of inequalities in determining demo-
graphic trends (Ram and Ram), the influence
of capital accumulation on competition and
conflict in the governance of health care
(Browne), the dilemmas confronting labour
unions in neo-liberal societies (Webster and
Lambert), the diverse political meanings of
consumerism (Silvestro), the precariousness
of digital futures (Schulz), and the persist-
ence of rural crime (Donnermeyer, Jobes and
Barclay).
Finally, from Part 4 it is clear that the
implementation of instruments derived from
the conceptualization of conflict, competi-
tion and cooperation is useful for uncovering
the workings of specific cases. Among them
are the cases of the globalized food system
(Koc), social movements in Brazil (Gohn),
industrial relations in South Africa (Sitas),
463
policies for furthering development in
Singapore (Pereira), municipal democracy in
different countries in Eastern and Northern
Europe (Teune), as well as in analyzing the
discourse of social justice in Latin America
(Armony), and negotiations about the use of
forms of interpersonal discourse in Portuguese
(de Oliveira). The final substantive case study
presents the work of a group of Canadian
researchers (Couton, Denis, Laczko, Pietran-
tonio and Thériault) who use the angles of
vision of the key concepts to analyze ethno-
linguistic diversity in Canada/Québec. They
examine the complex ways in which the
interplay of conflict, competition and cooper-
ation emerge from an examination of govern-
ment policies, migratory flows, gender and
language communities. The researchers also
show how the processes affect research agendas.
EMERGING THEMES
While interpretation of the processes may
vary from subfield to subfield, basically the
classical investigations of conflict, competi-
tion and cooperation have turned out to be
adaptable to the examination of events and
issues in both the twentieth and the twenty-
first centuries. Each chapter deals with how
a particular research focus frames an episte-
mology, a vision of what it means to think in
terms of relationships that lead to conflict,
competition and/or cooperation. Several
chapters deal with the processes from the
point of view of a sociological analysis of the
organization of the discipline or of a particu-
lar subfield in sociology (see, for example,
chapters by Banakar, Schuerkens, and Evetts,
Gadea, Sánchez and Sáez). Interestingly
enough, from these analyses there is convinc-
ing evidence that conflict, competition and
cooperation are not necessarily discrete
processes in unfolding social events. Conflict
and competition may give rise to cooperation
(arts); conflict may lead to competition and
even cooperation (alienation); or efforts to
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464 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY
ensure cooperation may lead to situations of
structured conflict (ethno-linguistic diversity
in Canada/Québec).
Shared themes emerge in a different way
among several groups of chapters. In sketch-
ing the topics of the various chapters, we
have seen that conflict, competition and
cooperation are processes that can be dis-
cerned at every level of social contact. With
regard to macro-phenomena depicted in
the collection, conflict, competition and
cooperation are shown to govern events
related to globalization and international
peace-keeping arrangements, to food sys-
tems, to demographic trends, to the model-
ling of digital futures, as well as to the
management of economic affairs (including
labour relations) and governance on a global
or a national level. They are palpable on the
meso or intermediate level as shown in the
work on crime in rural communities, on
sport, on the arts, and in the analyses of
social movements and of NGOs in Brazil.
But they also come to the fore in the exami-
nation at the micro-level of how individual
consumer behaviour is to be understood, how
adults and children meet and influence one
another, even how people think about their
own actions, how they address one another,
how they feel socially connected – or alien-
ated, and how research is done and how it can
be done in small groups.
Among the materials of the collection,
where researchers from different continents
have related to the issues that are of the high-
est importance for them in their work as soci-
ologists, it has also been possible to bring to
light issues which are central to the sociolog-
ical enterprise across the globe. The issue of
dialectical processes is central, as the chapter
on alienation underlines. The sweep of glob-
alization is inevitably encountering the seeds
of resistance and their success can be fol-
lowed in the evolution of social movements
which present a new form of political
activism. In this Handbook, researchers who
have investigated grass roots organizations
that express discontent in Latin America,
base their work on descriptions of social
movements from different points of view.
The rise of grass roots movements of differ-
ent kinds in Brazil is described in some detail
by Gohn, while it is seen by Reis as a process
of solidarity that marks far-reaching changes
in the warp and weave of society as well as in
the evolution of how people think, with the
latter being a dimension which Armony ana-
lyzes from a different point of view. But
social movements are not restricted to Latin
America and there is also the issue of the
boundary between individual acts of resist-
ance and collective action, which Silvestro
addresses. The kinds of dynamics that the
contributors to this volume have examined
are of interest to many researchers who are
looking into how the pressures of globaliza-
tion are being countered (McFarland, 2007;
Polletta and Jasper, 2001). Yet, despite the
enthusiasm with which the spread of grass
roots movements for political ends is met, a
sober theoretical view also inspires new
sociological questions. Could it be that with
this activism the seeds of renewed, perhaps
more effective, repression are being sown –
Webster and Lambert suggest as much, and,
in a different way, so does Schulz. And if so,
how can such consequences be prevented?
A second commanding theme is that of
stratification. Although only one chapter in
the Handbook (by Moulin and Bernard) has a
term – ‘social mobility’ – explicitly related to
‘stratification’ in its title, the chapters that
deal with health, health care, demography,
digital futures, hunger and plenty, labour stud-
ies, and the market, not to mention the prob-
lems of language and ethnicity in Canada/
Québec, and the politics of belonging, all
cogently address issues of how populations
are divided into strata by different principles
of distribution. While specific outcomes can
be traced in each domain, they combine to
indicate the dimensions of stratification and
the varied hierarchical arrangements that
enforce the divisions and shape identities for
the identification of strata. Concretely, they
point to how the demands made on and by diff-
erent groups are multi-dimensional and liable
to create clashes of interest. From the point
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CONFLICT, COMPETITION AND COOPERATION
of view of the people involved, handling allo-
cation to one or another stratum of society
requires the ability to discern complexities of
life in the twenty-first century and what can
only be called the agility to adjust to the kalei-
doscopic problems one is called upon to face.
Another side of the coin is the fact that
these very concerns can be defined as having
to do with diversity. All the researchers rep-
resented in the collection, and perforce their
Research Committees, provide evidence that
diversity permeates all aspects of social
living. But this perception goes far beyond a
mere citation of the fact of diversity. On read-
ing the chapters, one cannot escape the con-
clusion that among sociologists, there is an
explicit desire to promote the recognition of
diversity as legitimate and even desirable.
Support for diversity whether in terms of reli-
gion, gender, race, ethnicity or language
basically reflects a recognition of trends in
the structuring of societies throughout the
world. By contrast with the advancement of
nominally homogeneous nation-states that
characterized the nineteenth century and
much of the twentieth, the twenty-first seems
to be characterized by social entities that are
diverse – and becoming more so. Many of the
chapters note that states and regions are
undergoing wide-ranging changes toward
increasing diversity. Even when territorial
units define themselves as exclusive in terms
of nationality, the population count turns out
to include significent groups of ‘others’ who
are necessarily part of the demographic land-
scape. This perception has implications for
the type of theorizing and the directions in
research that sociology will be taking in the
twenty-first century.
As Couton, Denis, Laczko, Pietrantonio
and Thériault sum up their findings, the case
study of Canada/Québec alerts sociologists to
the ‘diversity of diversity’ which, as the Canadian
researchers note, requires further investiga-
tion. By problematizing diversity, the con-
tributors to the round table have defined a
task that awaits the engagement of teams of
sociologists within the next decade. Going
beyond intersectionality, the challenge is to
465
explore the inter-relations among the groups
formed by all the statuses that are available to
human beings in different social milieus.
Rather than limit their work to dealing with
the ‘big’ categories of ethnicity, gender, race
and class, researchers will have to define how
status sets combine in parts or wholes. They
will have to elaborate new methodologies in
order to discover the interrelationships of the
various factors.
While diversity in one form or another
permeates the chapters of the Handbook, the
salience of gender does not. That it is an inte-
gral part of at least a quarter of the analyses,
and incorporated into illustrations in at least a
third of the other chapters indicates, however,
how far sociology has evolved from the
gender blindness that characterized much of
its work as recently as a quarter century ago.
Both the empirical specifics of women’s
experiences and new approaches to theorizing
that have resulted (see chapters by Yuval-
Davis and Browne, for instance) provide
wide-ranging illustrations of the ‘interna-
tional feminist challenge to theory’, which
was the subject of a pre-Congress conference
of Research Committee 32 (Women in
Society) in 1998 and a subsequent publication
(Segal and Demos, 2001). Perhaps feminism,
as a current within sociology which has been
instrumental in introducing intersectionality
as an analytic concept within our discipline,
will again offer leadership as we struggle with
the theoretical and methodological challenges
of incorporating the interrelationships of
various factors into our analyses.
Another dimension of diversity is geo-
graphical – this Handbook is, after all, a pub-
lication of the International Sociological
Association. Despite being officially trilin-
gual, the main language of communication
in the association is English, and that is also
the language of this Handbook (although it
does include chapters that were translated
from French, the second language of the
conference which gave rise to it). Equally
important has been what one could call the
Anglo-European hegemony within sociology –
in terms of the ‘founding fathers’ and
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466 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

continuing referential literature. We encour- contributors to the Handbook. Hogsbro, Pruijt,

aged our authors to contextualize their analy- Pokrovsky, and Tsobanoglou say:
ses and, if possible, to incorporate material We need to address issues of innovation, social
from and about more than one society. Thus, security and social integrity. Sociology must com-
where the literature examined is primarily bine the empirical study of social phenomena, and
Anglo-European, this is acknowledged (rather the critical analysis of social forms and processes
with the production of policy guidelines directed
than silenced, with the implication of univer- to both governments and social movements. These
sal coverage). Moreover most chapters are guidelines should aim at guarding fundamental
characterized by references to more than civil rights, while facilitating negotiated change
one society or sociological literature. Of par- and the accommodation of aspirations of diverse
ticular interest however, in view of the exis- communities .... The practical sociologist must
master a multiplicity of sociological approaches to
tence of the Anglo-European intellectual gain a more realistic understanding of the com-
hegemony, are chapters which draw on litera- plexity of the changing social world, and must do
ture from both the economic (and political) something about it.
North and South, or are firmly anchored in
Still, this does not mean that sociological
their theorizing, methodology, or analysis in
theorizing is done. With respect to the disci-
the South. The conclusion by Webster and
pline as we still know it, there are challenges
Lambert of the inadequacy of Northern theo-
that have not been adequately met and
rizing about the labour movement of the South
aspects of theory that remain to be clarified.
(and perhaps of the North as well), the Latin
Although the processes that were set as the
American research initiatives described by
challenge to the contributors have been
Jimenez, and the recognition by Donnermeyer,
approached from a variety of angles, the actual
Jobes and Barclay of the challenge of develop-
work of building a social milieu, the principles
ing analyses of rural crime which are pertinent
that stem from the work of ethnographers, the
in the South as well as the North are just three
nuts and bolts of encounters that are suffused
examples from the Handbook of challenges
with conflict, competition and cooperation
to the Northern hegemony.
still remain to be described and analyzed
There is another theme that emerges from
in full.
even a summary leafing through the collection.
And finally, there remains the constant
We see that research in depth of the kind noted,
challenge of locating conflict, competition
if only because of the topics tackled, the
and cooperation within the discipline of soci-
methodologies supported and the tenor of the
ology. Struggling to cope with the relentless
explanation, seems to show that sociologists
developments that surround our lives, sociol-
as a community are intensely interested in
ogists have not yet found exhaustive ways of
making the world a better place. The platform
describing and analyzing the connections
for public sociology (Burawoy, 2005;
between how the focal processes operate in
Calhoun, 2005) turns out to be the specifica-
the running of the world with what goes on
tion of an agenda which, although apparently
within the disciplinary community or com-
widely supported, is held in privileged con-
munities (relationships) and, more tantaliz-
cealment – betimes even from ourselves.
ingly, what goes on within the discipline
Under the different chapter titles, sociologists
(epistemology). Finding how these connec-
from all the continents unabashedly press for
tions emerge and interweave would be a leap
the acceptance of difference, for extending and
forward in sociology.
securing human rights, for expanding the
scope of society beyond the boundaries of the
nation-state and even well beyond the exclu-
sivities of scientific communities. The plat- NOTE
form enunciated in the concluding remarks of
the chapter on socio-technics can easily be seen 1 Authors’ names are listed alphabetically, since
to be suitable to the points of view of other both contributed equally.
9781412934633-Chap-30.qxp 1/10/09 8:59 AM Page 467

CONFLICT, COMPETITION AND COOPERATION 467

REFERENCES McFarland, Andrew (2007) ‘Neo-Pluralism’,

Burawoy, Michael (2005) ‘2004 American
Sociological Association Presidential Address:
For Public Sociology’, British Journal of
Sociology, 56(2): 259–94.
Calhoun, Craig (2005) ‘The Promise of Public
Sociology’, British Journal of Sociology,
56(3): 355–63.
Annual Review of Political Science, 10: 45–66.
Polletta, Francesca and Jasper, James M. (2001)
‘Collective Identity and Social Movements’,
Annual Review of Sociology, 27: 283–305.
Segal, Marcia Texler and Demos, Vasilikie (eds.)
(2001) Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 5:
‘The International Feminist Challenge to
Theory’.
9781412934633-Index 1/12/09 1:11 PM Page 468

Index

aborigines 32–3 schools 21–2

accommodation 186 by scientific projects 16
activism 285–6, 351–2, 464 in sociological research 12–14
cyberactivism 295–6, 301 spiritual 23–4
in El Salvadore and Honduras 354–66 through sport 159
KwaZulu-Natal 368–9, 376 of television 17–18
language 448 through technological changes 13
Latin American movements 352–4 of wage labour 10–12, 13, 15, 16
in USA 353 alterity 375-80
Second Great Transformation 265–74 Ambert, Ann-Marie 189
ACTU (Australian Council of Trade Unions) 267 Annandale, Ellen 124–35
Adorno, Theodor 11, 16, 172 Áralos, I. 96
address forms (Portuguese) 416–30 Ariés, Philippe 187
address form relationships, stages of Armony, Victor 351–66
422–3, 424, 426–7 Aron, Raymond 115
address form system, schema of 420 art 11
address model 418–24 arts, sociology of the art controversies 175–82
applying Portuguese model to other art worlds as sites of collaboration 173
languages 427–9 art as a career 174–5
conflict and co-operation in address 424–7 class and 172
hierarchical address structure 428–9 high culture model and power 173–4
introduction to 416–18 production of culture perspective 174–5
strategic cognitive model 419–24 Sensation Show, Brooklyn Museum 180
strategic level of conventionalised plane 423, 425 study of 170–2
strategic level of interaction 422–4 Turner Prize and K Foundation 177–9
Zero Form/Avoidance Tactic 426–7 Asia 119
Africa mortality rates 226
globalization issues 119 assimilation 186
mortality rates and AIDS 227–8 Australia 294
Ahponen, Pirkkoliisa 23 rural crime 308, 312–13, 314
AIDS/HIV 227, 228 Trade Unionism 267
Alanen, Leena 187, 188 authority 76–8
Alexander, Jon 43 Brazil, NGOs 79–88
alienation 9–25, 376, 462 fetishism 16–17
in the arts 11
capitalism as alienating 10 Banakar, Resa 58–72
communication and 19–20 Barclay, Elaine 305–16
of communities 18–20 Baumgartner, M. P. 65
and consciousness 16 Beck, Ulrich 194, 195
conspiracies of elites 17 Becker, Howard 173
de-alienation 20–4 Bell, Vikki 31
domestic work 21 belonging 29–38, 285, 462
Hegel, views on 14–15 boundaries 30–1
identities 22–4 citizenship 31, 76–7
Marx, views on 10, 14 diasporic communities 33–5
meanings of 9–12 identities 30, 31–2
of modern social life 13–14, 16 indigenousness 32–3
overcoming 20–4 land rights movements 32–3, 337, 338, 342, 346-7
and popular culture 17–18 nationalism 29, 36
proletariat 10–11 security, women 35–6, 37–8
of right-wing movements 17 Bendix, R. 206
9781412934633-Index 1/12/09 1:11 PM Page 469

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Berghe, Pierre van den 373–4 and rationalization 10

Berlet, Chip 17 and responsible consumerism 282–3
Bernard, Paul 201–15 and sport 158–9
Best, Stephen 20 wage labour 10–12, 13, 15
Biomedical Sciences Institute (Singapore) 393–6 Weber, views on 10
Blau, P. 206 CASMIN project 205, 210
Bourdieu, Pierre 162, 172, 174, 205, 341, 352 Castells, Manuel 22, 267, 370-1
bourgeoisie 10, 187 CEJUS (Justo Sierra Study Center) (Mexico) 102
thought 15, 16 Chicago School of sociology 126, 306, 310
Brah, Avtar 33 China 230
Brazil, NGOs 79–88, 102, 347–8, 348n2, 464 globalization issues 119
adaptation to society trends 83 mortality rates 226, 227
computerization of 85–6 sociology in 49
definitions of 81 childhood sociology 185–96
funding of 83–4 children as social actors 195
government partnerships with 80 children at work 190–1
Internet usage 86 children’s experiences 189–90
objectives of 82 children’s rights/responsibilities 192–3
and the state 86–8 education, welfare, health 194
workers in 84–5 future directions of 195–6
Brazil, social movements in 336–48 globalization, effects of 192
Afro-Brazilian movement 341, 343 history of 186–8
categories for analysis of 339–41 research in 188–94
civil society, notion of 337–8 children
early movements 337–8 economic activity of 191
gender movements 343 experiences of 189–90
movement of landless workers (MST) 338, 345, 346–7 Internet, use of 192
NGOs 347–8 in politics 185–6
overview of 341–3 rights of 192–3
pluralistic 343–4 as social actors 195
Quilombola 343, 347 vaccinations 230
research into 341–3 Church, the 11
rural 346–7 in El Salvador and Honduras 361–2
social movement unionism (SMU) 270–4 CIDE (Center for Innovation and Educational Development)
studies of 338–41, 347 (Mexico) 98–102
trade unionism 340, 342 ‘Citizens’ Juries’ 52–3
urban population movements 344–6 citizenship 31
Breen, Richard 215 and children 192–3
Brown, Roger 417–18, 430 civil society 77
Browne, Paul Leduc 250–61 in Brazil 337–8, 340, 341
Bruntland Report 111 NGOs 78–88
Bühler-Niederberger, Doris 11 class systems
Burgess, Ernest W. 185–6, 387–8 alienated 16
and arts 172
Canada 294 bourgeoisie 10
corporate control of agriculture 327 childhood 187
ethnic structure 433 conflict 113–14, 156, 161–2
farming crisis 328–9 health, effect on 125, 129–31, 225–6, 230
food supply 330 proletariat 10, 113, 216n4
health care in 256–61 and quality turn, food consumerism 283
hunger in 330 social stratification 202–3, 210
obesity in 329 sport 156, 159, 161–2
peacekeeping role 243 Clawson, Dan 272–4
rural crime 308 clinical sociology 46
Canada/Québec, ethno-linguistic diversity 433–55 Coburn, David 130
bilingualism, Québec 439–40 452, 446, 447 Cohen, Robert 33
cultural communities 437 colonial managerialism 374–5
diversity, general analysis of 450–3 commodity fetishism 15, 24
diversity management 434–8, 443 communication
ethnic diversity, legitimising 445–7, 465–6 face-to-face 19–20, 416–30
immigration 434, 435, 440–5, 451–2 technological advances in 92, 291–302
language policies 448–50 community living 18–20
multiculturalism 435, 445, 446 see also belonging
pluralism, level of 435, 438–40, 445–6, 452 communities
capabilities 36, 112 diasporic 33–5
capitalism and rural crime 309–10
alienation 10 competition 109, 119, 185–6
and art controversies 181 in childhood 196
consumerism 11, 23 in conversation 416, 424–7
Durkheim, views on 10 competitive advantage 387
Gramsci, Antonio 11 and futures research 292–3, 300
Marx, Karl see main entry Marx, Karl in health sociology 128–9, 134
and pop culture 17–18 intergovernmental FDI 386–7
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competition (Continued) Costa Rica, collaboration of science and sociology 102

and Internet development 298–9 Cotterell, Roger 66
nations, between 119, 121 Couton, Philippe 434, 440–4
amongst peacekeepers 236 crime, childhood 193
in professions 141–4 crime, rural 305–16
Singapore (case study) 388–96 agriculture-related 307, 308
South America, lack of, 120 in Australia 308, 312–13
in Southern countries 119–20 community and 309–16
in sport, 155–66 crime and social structure 307
summary 461–6 criminal justice issues 307
for world markets 91–2 domestic violence 307–8
competitions 162–3 police and courts 307, 308
conflict 109, 121, 186 social disorganization theory 310–12
in address forms 424–7, 430 studies of 305–9, 315–16
in Anglo-American sociology of substance abuse 308
professions 144 urbanism 306
in childhood sociology 196 in USA 306–8, 313
among competitors 387 victimization 307
in conversation 416 CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) 283, 287
and ecological competition 387–8 culture and identity alternative 13, 14
empirical evidence of, after 1945 117–18 cultural formation pressures 376
in European sociology 151 culture, definition of 118
in French sociology of professions 145, 147 music 13, 17
and futures research 292–3, 300 popular, alienation of 13, 17
and increase in globalization 405, 408, 412–13 television 17–18
and intergovernmental FDI competition 387–8 cyberactivism 295–6, 301
linguistic (Canada/Québec) 449
local-global interpretation of 402–4 Dahms, Harry 16
in medical sociology 132–4 Dahrendorf,, Ralf 109, 114
and peacekeeping 236–47 Dandeker, Christopher 236–47
and professions 141–4 David, Matthew 16
science, technology and society 91–6 de–alienation 20–1
in Spanish sociology of professions 147–150 Dean, Michael 47
in sport 155–66 defensive combinations 375
summary 461–6 democracy
theories of, 1960’s 113–16 effect of globalization on 406–9
theories of, non-Marxist 114–16 Local Governance Research Program 408–13
war 115–17, 237–8, 245 Poland, Russia and Sweden
see also peacekeeping comparisons 410–11
CONICIT (National Council for Scientific and demographic transition theory 224–6
Technological research – Venezuela) 96 Denis, Ann 3–6, 434, 444–7, 461–6
consciousness 14–15, 16 Denmark, welfare policy 47
consumer society 279–81 DeNora, Tia 171, 172–3
consumerism, food 280–4 development theory and cooperation 110– 13
consumerism, responsible/political 278–88 feminist approach to 111–12
certification of products 283 deviance, sociology of 126, 127
consumer society 279–8 dialectical approach 14–15
CSA 283, 287 diasporism 33–5
fair trade/ethical, popularity of 282 digital futures 291–302
food consumption habits 280, 281–4 conclusion 300–2
as a political act 286–7 digital inequalities 295–6, 300
as political participation 284–6 futures research 291–3, 300
convergence, concept of 225 Internet 293–300
conversation and conflict/cooperation 416–7 NICT, global diffusion of 293–5, 300–2
strategic model of address 419–24 DiMaggio, Paul 174
cooperation 109, 186 Dingwall, Robert 124–35
in address forms 424–7, 430 DiPrete, Thomas A. 211–12, 213–14, 215
in childhood sociology 196 disease patterns 224–5
and competition (sport) 163–7 dissonance 375
in conversation 416 diversity, summary 465–6
among food producers 324 division of labour 113
and futures research 292–3, 300 Dobbie, Charles 239, 240
in health sociology 129–31, 134 Dobré, Michelle 285–6
intergovernmental for FDI (Singapore) 391 doctrinal studies, legal 61–2
and Internet development 297–300 domestic labour 21
in Kwazulu Natal 368–81 domination 375
among peacekeeping nations 236, 241 Donnermeyer, Joseph F. 305–16
in sport 164–6 Dunayevskaya, Raya 15
summary 461–6 Dunbar, Claude 146
theory development and practice 110–13 Duncan, O. D. 206
see also UN Dunning, E. 164
corporate social responsibility 78 Duret, P. 163–4
Coser, Lewis A. 114–15 Durkheim, Emile 10, 291
9781412934633-Index 1/12/09 1:11 PM Page 471

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health sociology 125 poverty and plenty 328–31

law, analysis of 66 World Food Summit (WFS) 330
professions 144–5 Fordism 325–7
Foucault, Michel 128–9, 341, 370, 371–2, 434–5
ecological paradigm 400–13 Fournier, Valerie 143–4
definition of 400–2 France 112
dialectics of development 408 collaboration between science and
and globalization 403–7 sociology 102–3
learning and adaptation 407–8 professions, sociology of 144–7
local-global conflict 402–4 Freidson,Eliot, 126, 127, 142, 143, 145
local-global relations and impact on Frankfurt School 18, 159
local development 408–13 and alienation 10–11
economic development bourgeois thought 15
and intelligence, role of 120–1 consumer society 279–80
mortality patterns 229 futures research 291–3, 300
economic
activity of children 191 Gadea, Charles 140–51
growth restraint, South America 120 Gamboni, Dario 175–6
inequality and mortality patterns 229–31 Ganzeboom, Harry B. G. 207, 210–11
education, 194 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) 91, 327
and social mobility 207 Geertz, Clifford 53
social movement for (Brazil) 345–6 gender
Ehrlich, Eugene 68 and health 132–4
El Salvador and Honduras, social justice and health care 258
discourse analysis 355–66 notions of ideal via popular culture 13
Church, the 362 and occupational closure 143
injustices 356–7 and social movements (Brazil) 343
injustices, remedies 359–60 sport, inequality in 159–60
injustices, those who benefit from 358 temporary work permits, Canada 445
maquilas 358–9, 364 Germany 243, 293, 300
people, speaking on behalf of the 361–2 Gibbons, M. 92–4
social mobility in 352–5 Gibson, Rick 21–2
social movements 362–3, 365 Gilman, Albert 417–18, 430
vocabulary by gender 363–4 Gilroy, Paul 33, 34
Elias, N. 164 Giminez, Martha 21
Engels, F. 113, 125, 324 globalization 75, 112, 192, 226, 233, 403–7, 464
epidemiologic transition theory 224–5 alienation, as creating 17
Erikson, Robert 205 anti-globalization movement (Brazil) 344
ethical issues see consumerism, cellular 51–2
responsible/polictical children, effect on 191–2
ethnic diversity (Canada) 445–7, 465–6 and cultural diversity 436
ethnic groups economic 384–7
Canada 433–52 of the economy 91
rural crime and 314 of food system 323–32
Europe, mortality rates 226, 227 glocalization 52, 54
Evetts, Julia 140–51 ideological processes in 406–13
impact on local democracy 409–13
Favel, Adrian 30 ‘Planning Cells’ 52–3
FDI (foreign direct investment) rural communities, impact on 310
and economic globalization 384–7 sociology, effect on globalization 53–4
and Singapore (case study) 388–96 and sociotechnics 50–3
feminism 21 Glucksmann, Miriam 254
belonging and security 37–8 Goffman, Erving 126, 127, 375, 427
domestic work, as alienating 21 Gohn, Maria da Glória 336-50
economic development, effect on Goldthorpe, John H. 205
women and health care 128, 132, 251, 256, 258, 260 Goodman, David 281, 282, 287
women in development (WID) 111–12 governance 48–9
medical sociology 128, 132–4 in Brazil 79–80
in sport sociology 159–60 and globalization 52–3
First Great Transformation 266, 267, 268, 274 repressive 17, 117
FONACIT (National Fund for Science, Technology and in work organization 50
Innovation – Venezuela) 96 governmentality, sociotechnics 46–50
food Gow, James 239, 240
community supported agriculture (CSA) 283–4, 287 gradation and social mobility 202–6
ethical and fair trade 280, 282–3 Graeber, David 257
food system, global 323–32 Gramsci, Antonio 11, 161, 340
Canada 330 Greenwood, E. 142
corporate control of 327–8 Gruneau, Richard 161
food regimes 324–7 guru industry 49–50
global food regime 325–7
GM crops 327 Hart, H. L. A. 60, 71
meat packing industry 327 health
modern day 324 changes in health patterns, determinants of 228–31
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health (Continued) Internet 291, 293–300

epidemiologic transition theory 224–6 alienating 13, 18
maternal education 231 children, use by 192
public spending on n231 cyberactivism 301
trends 226–8 de-alienation 20
health care 250–61 distribution of access to 294–5
Canadian 256–61 Internet2 299–300
care and labour 252–3 Linux 300
children 194 Phase I 297
and government 134–5 Phase II 297–8
labour process of care 253–5 Phase III 298–9
maternal education 231, 232 recycling of technology 299
‘necessary’ and ‘surplus’ labour 259–60 Ion, Jacques 285
public spending on 231, 232 Iraq 246–7
women and 251 ISA Research Committee 26 (RC26) 43, 45, 46
health sociology 124–35 Islam 17
development of 124–5 Italy, peacekeeping 244
deviance, sociology of 126, 127
in Europe 124 Janowitz, Morris 238, 239
feminist health movement 128, 132 Japan, peacekeeping 243–4
gender studies 132–4 Jímenez, Jaime 91–103
health risks 131–2 Jobes, Pat 305–16
health care and government 134–5 Jordan, Tim 285
inequalities 130–1 jurisprudence 59–61, 62
interactionist/social constructivist perspective 126–9 sociological 67–8
medical sociology, development of 126, 132–4 sociology, how it can learn from
medicalization thesis 128, 133 jurisprudence 70–1
sick role, analysis of 126, 127–8, 132
social-causation perspective 126, 131 K Foundatiuon 177–9
social-capital theory of health 129–31, 134 Kalekin-Fishman, Devorah 3–6, 9–25, 461–6
social network thesis 129 Kellner, Douglas 20
status syndrome 130 Khumalo, Baba 377–8
in USA 124 Koc, Mustafa 323–32
knowledge 92
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 14–15 in France 102–3
hegemony 11 Mode 1 93, 103
Heidegger, Martin 22 Mode 2 92, 93–4, 102, 103
Heinich, Natalie 171, 176 Mode 3 96, 98, 102-3
Hennion, Antoine 174 new social contract with science 95
Hogsbro, Kjeld 42–54 scientific communities, Mexico 98–102
homophobia, in sport 160–1 Venezuela’s Research Agendas 96–8, 102
Honduras see El Salvador and Honduras World Conference on Science 1999 95
hospitals 256, 273 Krieken, Robert van 185–96
households 21 Kuper, Leo 373
Hout, Michael 211–12, 213–14, 215 KwaZulu Natal (KZN), cooperation in Baba
human rights 31, 35–6, 342, 365 Khumalo 377–8
children’s 185, 186, 189, 192–3 black workforce, motivation of 369–72
KwaZulu Natal 373–4 colonial managerialism 373–8
indigenousness 32–3 concepts defining cultural formations, 375–80
see also activism; social movements; New Labour Studies 374
women new managerialism 381
Hyman, Richard 265, 266 sociology in South Africa 372–5
trade unionism 368–9, 375–80
identity 30-2, 166, 340
and alienation 22–4 labor
and Brazil social movements 340 care as 252–60
and cultural diversity 436 child 190–1
through models of address 418–19 food production 324
and social movements 340 KwaZulu Natal 368–81
symbolic 34 Marx, according to 10, 15
immigration policies (Canada/Québec) 440–5 Second Great Transformation 265–74
INCP (International Network on Cultural Policy) 436 Singapore 388, 390
India women’s 112
AIDS 228 see also social movements; trade unions
hunger 329 labor movements see Trade Unions
indigenousness 29, 32–3 Laczko, Leslie 434, 438–40
individualism, glorification of 18–19 Lambert, Robert 265–76
inequalities between nations 120–1 land rights movements 32–3
health 225, 130–1 Langman, Lauren 9–25
Inglehart, Ronald 282 language
intelligence and economic development 120–1 address forms, other languages 416, 427–9
interactionist approaches, French professions 146–7 bilingualism (Québec) 439–40, 446, 447, 452
9781412934633-Index 1/12/09 1:11 PM Page 473

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ethno-linguistic diversity (Canada) 438–9 nation states 76–7

Portuguese address forms 416, 417–27 National Fund for Technology and Innovation 96
social activism study, El Salvadore and nationalism 29, 36, 364, 441
Honduras 356, 362, 363–4, 365 New Labour Studies (in KZN) 374
socio-linguistics 416–17 NGOs (non-governmental organisations) 75
Latin America, social justice and mobilization civil society 78–88
interviews 351–66 and the Internet 86, 298, 299, 300, 301–2
discourse analysis 355–66 as peacekeepers 242
El Salvador and Honduras 352–5 NGOs in Brazil 79–88, 102, 347–8, 348n2, 464
law 58–72 adaptation to society trends 83
and children 193 computerization of 85–6
criminal justice, rural crime 307 definitions of 81
doctrinal studies of 61–2 funding of 83–4
jurisprudence 59–61, 62, 67–8, 70–1 government partnerships with 80, 338
Law in Context 69 Internet usage 86
Law and Society 67, 69 objectives of 82
Policy Research 69–70 and the state 86–8
role of 58–62 workers in 84–5
Socio-Legal Studies 64, 68–70, 71–2 NICT (New Information and Communication
sociological jurisprudence 67–8 Technologies) 293–5
sociology and 62–4 digital inequalities 295–6, 300–1
sociology of 64–7 Internet 13, 18, 192, 291, 292–300
see also crime, rural North America 110–13, 327–8
Law and Society 67
legal positivism 60 occupations, knowledge-based 141
lifecourse, notion of 212–4 Ohl, Fabien 155-66
life expectancy 226–7 Olivera, Sandi Michele de research on Portuguese
Lipset, S. M. 206 address forms 417, 418–27, 416–30
local-global relations and conflict 402–4, 408 Omran, Abdel R. 224–5
and globalization 404–6 organization, issues of 49–50
impact on local democracy 408–13
Los, Maria 43, 44 Park, Robert E. 185–6, 387–8
Lukacs, Georg 15, 16, 24 Parsons, Talcott 126, 127, 142
Lüschen G. 157, 158 peacekeeping 236–47
Lynn, Richard 120–1 Canada 243
changes in participation in 240–1
maquilas 358–9, 364 changing norms of 239–40
market mechanisms 76, 78 changing roles in 241–5
Marmot, Michael 129–30 Dutch 243
Marontate, Jan 170–81 France 242
Martín-Moreno, J. 147, 148, 149 Germany 243
Martineau, Harriet 126 Iraq 246–7
Marx, Karl 20 Italy 244
alienation 10,11, 24, 376 Japan 243–4
conflict theory 113–14, 116, 291 peacekeeping 242
dialectical analysis 14–15 UN 237, 239, 240–3
on technology 20 US 237, 239, 240, 242–3, 246–7
medical sociology see health sociology Pereira, Alexius A. 384–96
medicalization thesis 128, 133 Perroux, F. 110
Melucci, Alberto 339, 340, 351 Peterson, Richard 174
Menger, Piérre-Michel 174–5 Petrzycki, Leon 67–8
Mexico, scientific studies in 98–102 pharmaceutical corporations (Singapore) 393–6
CEJUS 102 Phillipps, Howard G. 306–7
CIDE 98–102 Phoenix Factor 116
Internet access 296 physicians 127–8
Zapatista rebels 295–6, 301 Pietrantonio, Linda 434–8
Micheletti, Michele 284, 287 Pokrovsky, Nikita 42–54
migrants 34–5, 120 Podgorecki, Adam 43–4, 45
Miguel, A. de 147, 148, 149 Poland
military, the see peacekeeping communism, breakdown of 44
modernization 110, 224 impact of globalization on local
mortality rates 224–7 democracy 409–13
conflict and competition for resources 232 Polanyi, Karl 265, 266
economic development and 229, 232–3 politics 17
economic inequality and 229–31 Africa 119
maternal education and 231, 232 Asia 119
public spending on health 231, 232 and children 185–6
Moulin, Stéphane 201–15 and citizenship 31
MST (movement of landless workers) 338, 342, civil society, Brazil 338, 339
345, 346–7 consumer 278–88
MTV 13 democracy, Russia/Poland 409–13
multiculturalism (Canada/Québec) 435, 445, 446 diasporic 33–5
music, alternative culture 13 El Salvadore/Honduras 360–2
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474 INDEX

politics (Continued) RSSM (Research in Social Stratification and

feminist 37–8 Mobility) 202, 207–9, 214
and globalization 406, 407, 408–10 rule-based thinking 60
and indigenousness 32–3 Russia
and power 116, 117 impact of globalization on local
Québec/Canada 441, 449–50 democracy 409–13
South America 120 mortality rates 227
population
convergence, concept of 225 Salerno, Roger 19
demographic transition theory 224, 225 Sánchez, Mariano 140–51
disease patterns 224–5, 228 Sandler, Todd 241
epidemiologic transition theory 224–5 Schmidt, Vivian 48
mortality and fertility rates 224–8 Scheff, Thomas 19
Porpora, Douglas 23–4 Schmidt, Joachim M. K. H. W. 43
Porter, M. 369 Schuerkens, Ulrike 109–21
Pound, R. 67–8 Schulz, Markus S. 291–302
power 122n3 science
address forms, reflected in 417–18, 419 and sociology 92–3, 95
between adults and children 187–8 Mexican studies in 98–102
in the arts 173–4 World Conference on Science (Budapest 1999) 95
and conflict theory 114–15, 116 Second Great Transformation 265–76
Foucault’s approach to 129 in Australia 267
knowledge as 92 in South Africa 268–9
and medicalization 128–9 Segal, David R. 236–47
Québec language 439–40, 447–50 Seidman, Gay W. 271–2
in sport 159–9 selfhood see identity
of Trade Unions 267 Sen, Amartya 36, 112
production, factors of 385 Sensation Show, Brooklyn Museum 180
professionalism 143 Serrano, Martin 148
new analyses of 143–4 Shimizu, H. 241
as occupational value 141–2, 151 sick role 126, 127–8, 132
professions, sociology of 140–51 Silvestro, Marco 278–88
Anglo-American sociological Singapore and FDI 388–96
interpretations of 141–3 Biomedical Sciences Initiative 393–6
comparison, Anglo-American and competition for FDI 389–90
European 140–1 inter-governmental competition to attract FDI 391
French interpretations of 144–7 regional industrial parks, setting up of 391–2
in Spain 147–50 Suzhou Industrial Park and government
‘trait’ approach to 142 conflict 392–3
professionalization Sitas, Ari 368–81
and market closure and monopoly 143, 151 Smith, Adam 120
and Spanish sociology 147–50 Smith, David N. 16
professions, traits 142 Smith-Lovin, Lynn 18
profit-making 181 social capital theory of health 129–31, 134
proletariat 10, 16, 113, 203, 216n4 social causation perspective 126, 131
Prosono, Martin 18 social cohesion 29, 94, 129–31, 134
Prujit, Hans 42–5 social constructionist perspective 126
social disorganization theory 310–12
Québec see Canada/Québec social justice interviews, Latin America 351–66
social mobility, paradigm of 201–15
racial discrimination gradation and class 204–6
Afro-Brazilian movement 341, 343 individualist/structuralist views 206–7
in sport 161 lifecourse approach 212–14
Radin, Margaret J. 255 meritocratic considerations 207–8
Ram, Bali, 223-33 new approaches to study of 210–12
Ram, Shefali S., 223-33 RSSM studies of 202, 207–9, 214
rationality 10, 20, 23 social stratification 202–3, 210, 464–5
Reis, Elisa P. 74–88 Sorokin’s creation of 202–4, 206
religion 24 vertical 203
Rengifo R. 96, 97 social mobilization see social movements
research, collaboration with science social movement unionism (SMU) 269–74
and technology 92–6 social movements 351–2, 376, 464
CEJUS 102 Brazil 336–48
CIDE 98–102 Latin America 352–4
CONICIT 96 USA 353
in Costa Rica 102 social stratification 202–3, 210, 464–5
in France 102 socio-linguistics 417–8
in Mexico 98–102 sociological jurisprudence 67–8
Modes of 92–4, 96, 102–3 sociological knowledge, application of 49–50
Research Agendas, Venezuela 96–8, 102 sociological practice 45–6, 53–4
Riska, Elianne 124–35 globalization 50–3
Rostow, Walt W. 110 meso level, intervention at 49–50
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INDEX 475

sociology 62–3 social movement unionism 269–76

contemporary changes in 74–8, 88 in South Africa 267–9, 270
sociology and the arts 170–81, 462 ‘trait’ approach (professions) 142
sociology, childhood 185–96 Travers, Max 69
sociology in China 49 Treiman, Donald J. 208, 210–11
sociology, clinical 46 Tsobanoglou, George 42–54
sociology, health 124–35, 462 Turner Prize 177–9
sociology and law 61–4, 64–7, 70–2
sociology of professions 140–51 UN (United Nations) 117, 237, 239, 240–3, 407
sociology in South Africa 372–5 UN Convention on the Rights of the
sociology and universities 94 Child (1989) 192–3
sociotechnics 42, 43–5, 54 poverty 330, 331
‘Citizens’ Juries’ 53 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 35
and globalization 50–3 UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) 111
governmentality of 46–9 universities and sociology 94
guru industry 49–50 urbanism 306
‘Planning Cells’ 52 USA
and sociological theory 48–9 beef-packing/agriculture 327–8
solidarity and authority studies 74–8 Chicago School of sociology 126, 306, 310
in address forms 417–18, 419 communities, alienation of 18–19
alienation 19 co-operation, notion of 110
NGOs and Brazil 78–88 food consumption habits, research, 281
Sorokin, P. A. 201, 202–4, 206, 215, 306 health sociology 124–35
South Africa individualism vs structuralism 206
social movement unionism 270–6 Internet development 295, 297–99, 300
sociology in 372–5 Internet usage 294, 295
Trade Unions 268–9 Law and Society 67, 69
Kwazulu Natal 369–81 obesity 329
South America 110–13, 120 peacekeeping operations 237, 239, 240, 242–3
Spain, sociology of professions 147–50 rural crime research 306–8, 313
pre-1982 148–9 shootings, high school 21–2
since 1982 149–50 social movements 353
spirituality 23–4 social stratification studies 205, 206–7
sport welfare policy 47–8
competition as ideology/obstacle 159–61 women’s health movement 128, 132
competition and conflict in sociology of sport 158–9
competition/cooperation together in 163–6 Vanhanen, Tatu 120-1
competition, diversity of 161–3 Venezuela
gender inequality in 159–60 CONICIT 96
homophobia in 160–1 FONACIT, 96
isolation of athletes 161 Research Agendas 96–8, 102
meaning within sociology of sport 155–8 vertical mobility 203–4
racial inequality in 161 video games, as an alienating force 21
sociology of, early analyses 158–9
status syndrome 130 wage labour 10–12, 13, 15, 16
stratification RSSM 202 in NGOs 84–5
Strong, P. M. 128 see also Trade Unions
Súez, Juan 140–51 war 237–8, 245–6
Sutton, J. 65 and development, theories on 116–17
Sweden see also peacekeeping
impact of globalization on local Weber, Max 10, 122n3, 204, 372
democracy 409–13 Webster, Edward 265–76
Weisheit, Ralph A. 307, 313
technology welfare policy 209
as an alienating force 13, 20–1 Denmark 47
development of 91–2 Third World 79, 267–8
digital inequalities 295–6, 300–1 USA 47–8
futures research 291–3 Wells, Edward L. 313
Internet 13, 18, 20, 192, 229–31, 291, Whiteread, Rachel 177–9
293–300, 301 Whitestone, Yuko K. 236–47
NICT 293–5 Wilensky, Harold 142
television, as a device for alienation 17–18 Wilkinson, Kenneth P. 306, 313
terrorism 34, 35, 36, 293 women
Teune, Henry 400–13 belonging and security 37–8
Thériault, Joseph-Yvon 434, 447–50 in El Salvador 362, 365
Tónnies, Ferdinand 30, 305–6, 314 and health care 128, 132, 251–2, 258, 260
Touraine, Alain 336, 340 as immigrants in Canada 445, 455n29
Trade Unions 265–6 inequality in sport 159–61
and Baba Khumalo 377–8 maquilas 358–9
in Australia 267 maternal health education 231, 232
in Brazil 270-5, 340, 342 social activism interviews, El Salvador
in Kwazulu Natal 368–9, 376 and Honduras 362, 365
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476 INDEX

women (Continued) Zapatista rebels 295–6, 301

social movements (Brazil) 343 Zelizer, Viviana 190–1
women in development (WID) 111–12 Žižek, Slavoj 24
work, organisation of 49–50 Zola, Irving 128
World Conference on Science (Budapest 1999) 95 Zolberg, Vera 171

Yuval-Davis, Nira 29–38