Civilizing the Public Sphere

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Civilizing the Public
Sphere
Distrust, Trust and Corruption

Apostolis Papakostas
Södertörn University, Sweden

Palgrave
macmillan
© Apostolis Papakostas 2012
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Contents

List of Figures and Tables vi

Preface vii

Acknowledgments xiii

1 Civilizing Trust 1

2 Boundary Technologies and the Segmentation of Trust 24

3 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 46

4 What States Do People Trust and How Do They Emerge? 80

5 The Organizational Bases of Corruption 103

6 More Organization with Fewer People 125

7 Social or Public Capital? 160

Notes 170

References 177

Index 189

v
Figures and Tables

Figures

2.1 Exterior and interior view of the Berlin key 26

2.2 Keys used as rings and seals 28
2.3 Ornamental keys 30
2.4 Modern keys and sophisticated fittings 31
2.5 Key hierarchies 32
2.6 The hierarchization of space in four different types of
buildings, as represented in graphic form 35
5.1 A symbolic representation of organizational
differentiation in Sweden from about 1870 to about
1980 113
6.1 The organizational space of civil society 143

Tables

4.1 Boundary relations between state and society 90

5.1 Subjectively perceived corruption in some selected
countries 104
7.1 Occurrence of the most frequently used concepts in
The Handbook of Social Capital 161

vi
Preface

Theoretical and methodological clues

Among the many descriptions of Swedish society written by outside

observers, the one provided by the prominent American sociologist
Alvin Gouldner (1973) stands out. It is a perfect illustration of a gifted
sociological gaze, brief and with a minimum of observations; in about
two pages he managed to capture one of the most pertinent descrip-
tions of the Swedish public realm I have ever seen. According to
Gouldner, Swedish society was essentially “Apollonian” in nature –
a peaceful, well-ordered society that sought to implement reason in
many aspects of social life. The public architecture of Stockholm –
used as a metaphor to illustrate and describe Swedish society – was
well ordered. Squares and buildings had clear boundaries, and their
individual space was well demarcated from those of others. It was
a society where a kind of reasoned “gravitas” settled invisibly upon
spontaneity, transforming joy into education, movies into theater,
and conversation into discussion. This is probably one of the most
elegant descriptions of what is widely known as the Swedish model
and indeed of how the public sphere was structured in Sweden – a
well-ordered and functionally differentiated society with a relative
balance of countervailing forces and a rationally minded intellectual
avant-garde that attempted to implement reason by relying heavily
on the political power of social democracy and the capacities of an
expanding welfare state.
In retrospect – and 39 years later – it seems as though Gouldner
observed Sweden in its golden age, and the picture presented in stan-
dard accounts about the country stems from that time. But I would
insist that, even if that Apollonian calmness is not the defining
characteristic of contemporary Sweden to the same extent, as the
reader will observe by perusing this book, many of its elements have
deep roots in historical junctures; the picture provided by Gouldner
captures some substantial, durable elements of the public sphere in
Swedish life. In a general sense the Apollonian metaphor is used in
this book to describe what I mean by the expression civilized public

vii
viii Preface

sphere, although my use of the terms is influenced by the work of

Norbert Elias (1994).
This is a book mainly about Sweden and the Scandinavian social
context, but I had the privilege to live about half my life in another
country, Greece, which is used in two chapters as a counterfactual
illustration in order to understand notions of the Swedish social
landscape that are taken for granted. I must admit straightaway that
there has always been a strong temptation, and discursive pressure,
to use the literal opposite of the Apollonian metaphor, that is the
Dionysian metaphor, to describe Greek social life. It is an image that
has prevailed in the popular mind and in literary works of European
intellectuals of a romantic or anti-modernist stance since the time of
Lord Byron, and it is used in current tourist advertisements by Greeks
and other Europeans to attract the middle classes to spend a few sum-
mer weeks in the Greek islands. The power of this image is so strong
that, in the economic boom from 1975 to about 2005, many Greeks
even started to believe that they were the modern Balkan incarna-
tions of Dionysus, personified as Alexis Zorbas, the spontaneous and
undisciplined hero in Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel. Indeed, a variant
of this figure has been used in Europe and worldwide by the pop-
ular media as a way to understand or describe the anthropological
archetypes or cultural ethos related to the current economic crisis,
but I will refrain from this temptation; the reader will find several
arguments about that standpoint in this book. Instead, institutions,
organizations, and social practices in the two countries are used to
artificially create a number of simultaneous natural experiments and
to understand countries that followed different trajectories, with dif-
ferent historical temporalities and different outcomes. Swedish and
Greek societies are very complex and refuse classification by this type
of general concept. I simply use two countries that I am very familiar
with, given my personal biography, to discuss the social conditions
and mechanisms that can make actors, institutions, and organiza-
tions act and perform in a civilized manner in the public sphere. For
this purpose, I use several variants of comparison inspired by histor-
ical sociology and mainly the devices used to illustrate theoretical
arguments by using detailed comparisons of a small number of cases.
The perspective of the book is figurational (Elias 1994) or rela-
tional (Tilly 1998), a perspective that still is a minority movement
in the social sciences as a whole, where individualisms and holisms
 Preface ix

dominate. The book is an effort to understand the relations between

two layers of the social landscape. One layer is constituted by the
organizational fabric and its concatenation and intertwining with
other elementary social figurations, networks, or categorical pairs like
elites and classes. The other layer is constituted by a number of other
relational phenomena from the inter-human space or, to use another
terminology, the intangibles and imponderables of the social land-
scape (Sztompka 2008). As the subtitle of the book suggests, it is
concerned with three areas of the inter-human space in particular:
distrust, trust, and corruption.
The concept of trust is a newcomer in the social sciences. For
instance, in the impressive 17 volumes of the International Encyclo-
pedia for the Social Sciences, edited by David L. Shills (1968), there is
not a single entry about the concept. In the 1980s and 1990s the
concept appeared in a number of theoretical books on sociology.
Since then, these discussions seem to have stimulated an extensive
body of research in the social sciences, and nowadays the concept of
trust has become part of the standard vocabulary in political discus-
sions and everyday vernacular language (see Hardin 2006, Rothstein
2005, Schyns & Koop 2009 for overviews from different perspec-
tives). As Karen S. Cook, Russell Hardin, and Margaret Levi (2005),
and Russell Hardin (2004) point out, distrust and trust are relational
concepts, implying a three-part relation in the sense that A trusts or
distrusts B with respect to X. I agree with these authors about the
relational character of trust and distrust; I will further note that cor-
ruption is also a relational concept (see Chapter 5). But I will add
an important element – all three relations operate in what Arthur
Stinchcombe (2005) calls “boundary conditions on causal processes”,
that is, A trusts or distrusts B with respect to X but in a social context
that is defined by the boundary Y. In the first chapter of the book, we
will see, for instance, how a company (A) trusts that Eva Svensson
(B) will pay her bill (X) inside the delimited social space defined
by the boundary of the well-functioning Swedish state (Y) and has
this boundary as its social precondition. If the same Eva Svensson
lived in an upper-class district in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) rather than
in a working-class environment in a suburb of Stockholm (Sweden),
the Swedish company in Borås would never send her products by
mail trusting that she will pay the bill later. That is, Eva Svensson
is trustworthy when she lives in Stockholm but not when she lives
x Preface

in Rio de Janeiro. A boundary can create trust inside the boundary

or transform it into its opposite – distrust – outside the boundary.
The central concerns of this book are the concrete spatial, social,
and organizational boundaries; the transgression of them; and the
organizational preconditions (the factor Y above) in which distrust,
trust, and corruption operate. I believe this is the major theoreti-
cal contribution of the book in the discussion of these phenomena.
Throughout the book, the importance of the organizational fabric
of the social landscape is highlighted by discussing the shortcom-
ings of another approach, called neo-culturalist in Chapter 1, which
dominates influential academic works on these subjects.
In understanding the factor Y mentioned above, theoretical devices
based on the idea of the “social landscape” are used as under-
lying theoretical schema. This idea has been developed by some
Stockholm sociologists in the last 20 years (see Ahrne 1990, 1994;
Ahrne & Papakostas 2002; Papakostas 1995). Simply put, the idea
of the social landscape maintains that what is going on inside, out-
side, and between organizations is central in every analysis of society.
Organizations are the mechanisms that shape macro-processes, and
at the same time they are preconditions for everyday life. Organi-
zations are the most obvious components of society. In academia,
the word “organization” usually denotes a formal hierarchical social
structure. Following Göran Ahrne and Charles Tilly, I use the term
to encompass “all sorts of well-bounded clusters of social relations
in which occupants of at least one position have the right to com-
mit collective resources to activities reaching across the boundary”
(Ahrne 1994, Tilly 1998). In this way, my use of the concept of
organization includes states, companies, voluntary organizations, kin
groups, households, religious groups, secret groups, and local com-
munities. However, my major concern in this book is the analysis
of phenomena related to the organization of the state and volun-
tary organizations in civil society, so other forms of organization and
figurations appear only as complementary to the analysis.
Social scientists familiar with the conventional vocabulary of
dependent/independent variables will probably immediately notice
that this vocabulary is missing from the book. Instead I use the
vocabulary of social mechanisms. This is a conscious methodological
choice. In several chapters the book deals with the oppositional pair
distrust–trust or the social preconditions in which trust and networks
 Preface xi

may facilitate the privatization of public space, for instance, in the

form of clientelism or corruption. There is no necessity in social life
that distrust will be transformed into trust or that trust and networks
will facilitate corruption. In order to understand why and how such
transformations occur, one needs to employ the methodological tool-
box of social mechanisms in the social sciences. While boundaries
can, for instance, divide the social space into trust and distrust zones,
social mechanisms of structured skepticism (see Chapter 3) can oper-
ate across the boundary and transform distrust into trust. To my
knowledge, there are three rather distinct approaches nowadays to
the nature and uses of social mechanisms. One emanates from the
theoretical school of analytical sociology, with a group of Stockholm
sociologists as its major proponents (Hedström & Swedberg 1998).
According to this school, mechanisms are analytical devices and not
empirical realities. A second approach comes from the philosoph-
ical tradition of critical realism in the way it has been translated
into sociology by a number of British sociologists (Archer et al.
1998). Mechanisms are seen here as devices that could transform
social conditions and latent capabilities into social outcomes. A third
approach stems from the tradition of comparative macro-sociology
of a realist/relationalist stance, mainly developed by American social
scientists (Somers 1998, Stinchcombe 2005). My use of this toolbox
of mechanisms is heavily influenced by developments and later dis-
cussions in all three traditions. I am rather eclectic in my choice of
the specific mechanisms used in the book and hope the reader will
conclude in the end that my eclecticism is disciplined and guided by
the specific theoretical and methodological problems I am trying to
address.
My motivation in writing this book is an academic irritation
that emanates from an irony of my personal biography. I grew up
in a society that functioned with a multitude of abundant, multi-
faceted networks that permeated and encompassed many aspects of
life, from central government to everyday life. The most important
were beyond the reach of young pupils in my social environment
who were ambitious and had an inclination for studies. Institutions
and organizations based on universalistic principles were like small
islands in a sea of particularistic relations. One of these universalistic
institutions was the school system with its meritocratic system that
enabled me to start and continue my studies. Moving to a new
xii Preface

country that in some ways is at the other end of the continuum, with
a sea of many universalistic organizations, institutions, and islands
of networks, I thought I had left networks behind me. But here is
the irony – slowly, from the mid-1980s and more intensely through
the 1990s, the organizational foundation of Swedish society in gen-
eral and of the state in particular became the target of criticism both
inside and outside academia. The concepts of individual choice, mar-
ket, trust, social capital, and network started to appear, functioning
as structuring principles of the public sphere, mainly as part of dis-
courses on New Public Management, theories on governance, and
neoliberal political reform projects. I felt many times when my class-
mates at the university, or later some of my academic colleagues,
spoke or wrote about these concepts that they were recommending
historical anachronisms, dressed in post-modern academic discourse,
as structuring principles for the public sphere. Irritation with current
discourses has thus been a major reason for my writing of this book,
but I have tried to use the academic vocabulary and craftsmanship
of sociology to frame my discussions. I will finish these introductory
remarks by reusing a phrase from the young Arthur Stinchcombe:
If I manage to question the currently dominant discourses or moti-
vate somebody to question my arguments, the aim of writing the
book has been achieved.
Acknowledgments

This book was written while I was affiliated with Stockholm Centre
for Organization Research (Score) at the University of Stockholm
(Sweden) and worked as a Research Leader at the Centre for Baltic
and East European Studies (CBEES) at Södertörn University (Sweden).
I would like to express my gratitude to my former colleagues at
both places for the excellent and stimulating research environment
and vibrant seminar culture that they provided. Colleagues in the
Department of Sociology, Södertörn University, commented on drafts
of book chapters on several occasions. I would particularly like to
thank Lia Antoniou, Daniel Castillo, Lisa Kings, Jonas Lindström,
Zhanna Kravchenko, and Dominika Polanska for commenting on
and discussing with me almost every single idea in the book.
I have presented book chapters at a number of academic insti-
tutes, conferences, and workshops, but I would like to mention the
input of the seminars at the Quality of Government Institute, Uni-
versity of Gothenburg (Sweden), and the discussions I had with Bo
Rothstein while I spent some time at the institute in 2010. For a few
summer weeks in 2009 and 2011, I had the opportunity to discuss
chapters of the book with promising young scholars from Eastern
Europe and Russia while participating as a Core Resource Person in
the three-year project Comparative Study of Everyday Life, directed by
Andrey V. Rezaev at the International Center for Comparative and
Institutional Research (InterComCenter), St. Petersburg, Russia.
I had the privilege to cooperate for many years with Göran Ahrne
in studying the organizational aspects of societies. I also had the
opportunity to engage in discussions with Piort Sztompka about
understanding the intangibles and imponderables of the social land-
scape and with Daniel Bertaux about understanding the sociology of
everyday life. Dimitris Michailakis has served as my main academic
discussant in many conversations over the years and has endeavored
to make me understand the notion of “observation”. I am indebted
to all four for their inspiration.

xiii
xiv Acknowledgments

The text that follows is an English version of a book published in

Swedish as Misstro, tillit korruption – och det offentligas civilisering by
Studentlitteratur. I have tried to adjust the text for the international
reader by omitting, adding, or exemplifying parts, by trying to clarify
more explicitly some of the illustrations used as examples of the the-
oretical arguments, and by expanding some arguments. Some parts
of Chapters 5 and 6 have been published in Swedish journals and
as book chapters. I have made the proper acknowledgments in the
Swedish edition.
A slightly different version of Chapter 4 was previously published
in English as “Why Is There No Clientelism in Scandinavia?” in
Simona Piattoni (ed.). 2001. Clientelism, Interests and Democratic Repre-
sentation: The European Experience in Historical and Comparative Perspec-
tive (Cambridge University Press). A shorter version of Chapter 6 was
published as “The Rationalization of Civil Society” in Current Sociology
(Vol. 59, 1: 5–23). A longer version of the same chapter was pub-
lished as “More Organization with Fewer People” in Filip Wijkström
and Annette Zimmer (eds). 2011. Nordic Civil Society at Cross-Roads:
Transforming the Popular Movement Tradition (Baden Baden: Nomos
Verlag). I am indebted to the editors and anonymous reviewers for
comments on the works mentioned above and for the anonymous
reviewers at Palgrave Macmillan of the entire book in English. Finally,
I am indebted to Susan Long for proofreading and improving the
entire text.
Figure 2.1 is reprinted from Latour Bruno. 2000. “The Berlin Key
or How To Do Words with Things.” In Matter, Materiality and Modern
Culture, edited by P.M. Graves-Brown. London: Routledge.
Figure 2.2 is reprinted from Monk, Eric. 1974. Keys, Their History
and Collection. Princes Risborough: Shire Publications and The First
Internet Lock Museum.
Figure 2.3 is reprinted from Eras, Vincent J. M. 1957. Locks and Keys
Throughout the Ages: Lips Safe and Lock Manufacturing Company.
Figures 2.4 and 2.5 are reprinted from Phillips, Bill. 2005. The
Complete Book of Locks and Locksmithing. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Figure 2.6 is reprinted from Markus, Thomas A. 1993. Buildings
& Power. Freedom & Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types.
London: Routledge. The figure was originally published in Bill Hillier
and Julienne Hanson. 1984. The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
 Acknowledgments xv

I wish to express my gratitude for permission to reprint the figures.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any
have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to
make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

Stockholm, March 2012

1
Civilizing Trust

Why do we trust people we do not know?

During my two and a half decades in Sweden, I experienced the most

intense and wide-ranging discussions about Swedish society in the
cafés and corridors of Stockholm University while studying Swedish
in the mid-1980s. These discussions were distinguished by the dis-
tance and wonder with which recent arrivals experienced the new
and unknown. Swedishness and Swedish life were scrutinized, com-
pared, measured, ridiculed, caricatured, and evaluated. However, the
discussions did not necessarily reflect outsideness, since most partic-
ipants were in relationships with native (Swedish) partners. Rather,
they personified the particular quality of the stranger, described by
Georg Simmel, as being near but at the same time estranged, experi-
encing society from within while at the same time beholding it with
the distant gaze of the stranger (Simmel 1981: 149–51).
These intense discussions considered the lack of correspondence
between the reality we were used to and the new reality we were
encountering. The little details of social life were often discussed,
details that the native population did not even notice. Our Swedish
acquaintances were surprised and dumbfounded in equal measure
when we asked questions about different issues. Later I learned that
the questions often concerned matters that natives took for granted
and thought of as obvious, brought to light by strangers whose gaze
had not been inhibited by the native population’s “cognitive filter”.
Aspects of this new reality put us in awkward situations, which
you can laugh about later in life but which were quite embarrassing

1
2 Civilizing the Public Sphere

when they happened. Other experiences were astounding. I can still

recall how a slightly out-of-date English hippie spoke enthusiastically
about the disability-friendly buses in Stockholm’s public transporta-
tion system. A recurring answer to our questions was that this was
merely a matter of culture and that our experiences at most repre-
sented so-called culture clash. I have now forgotten most of what
we talked about. However, some of these questions have haunted me
ever since, and I have still not managed to answer them.
One guy from the Middle East could not hide his surprise that his
girlfriend, living in a Stockholm suburb, could send away for prod-
ucts from a mail-order company and have them delivered with a bill
that she would pay later. How could a company in Borås in southern
Sweden send products to someone who lived in a Stockholm suburb?
Why did the company trust that she would pay the bill?1 Another
student, an American from Boston, was visited by his parents. He
often talked of his fiancée’s surprise when her parents-in-law, about
to take an evening stroll, asked which places they should avoid in
the city. His parents were equally surprised to hear that there were no
such places in Stockholm.
Such questions rarely feature in the minds of Swedes. Their asking
and answering are taken for granted, reflecting a fund of tacit knowl-
edge shared by many. You call and order some products, you get a
bill, and you pay. If you ask why it is done this way, the answers
readily given are: “you do the right thing” or “you keep agreements”.
If you have plans for the future, it is best not to acquire a record of
non-payment, since that would make it more difficult to get a loan in
the future. Over the years, I have asked many people in Sweden, and
most often I have been told that it is either a matter of norms or habit.
Often the answers are lumped together into a vague but comprehen-
sive phenomenon called culture: an unreflecting and habitual course
of action, a common frame of interpretation and system of rules, and
a fund of tacit knowledge that is shared by almost all members of
society.
To use another term, these simple everyday events essentially refer
to questions of trust. Why is it that many people in certain places
around the world trust that others, largely unknown to them, will do
what they have promised, and why is it that people regard the public
space as a safe place?
 Civilizing Trust 3

The social science of trust

The question of trust has been widely discussed and debated over
the past two decades in the social sciences. All the major academic
publishers have published at least one book on trust, and nearly every
well-known sociologist has written on the topic. Trust is considered
an important part of social life; without trust social life does not work.
Trust is an elusive area of “weak moral bonds” that, together with
norms and a fund of tacit knowledge that is shared by many, form an
important prerequisite for the continuation of social life. Without its
“weak moral bonds” of ethical attitudes and mutual commitments,
hurrying through the subway exit would not be possible and people
would be able to drink from each other’s coffee mugs; people would
not pay their bills and they would not dare walk around the city.
In the social sciences, the notion of trust seems to have enjoyed the
same favorable fate as the theoretical movement that, in the last two
decades, has been dubbed “the Cultural Turn”.2 Instead of a social
life characterized by different and conflicting interests or egotistical,
scheming individuals, this movement depicts social life as a moral
community based on “soft” values rather than “hard” instrumental
motives (Sztompka 1999: 4). Alongside the concepts of social capital
and networks – two other often interrelated and sometimes over-
lapping concepts – trust has replaced older cultural concepts that
depict “social states”, “social atmosphere”, “collective morals”, and
“social climate” in the major works within the tradition. It is pre-
cisely the updating of concepts that distinguishes this tradition from
its predecessor, “culturalism”, whose popularity drastically declined
during the 1950s and 1960s. The principal idea in the old cultural-
ism was to explain economic development, or the lack of the same,
with reference to either the culture of geographical areas or that of
social groups, and in this sense this tradition can be thought of as
“neoculturalism”.
A common denominator in neoculturalist reasoning is explicitly
connected to Edward Banfield’s essay The Moral Basics of a Backward
Society (Banfield 1958). Banfield’s book was published in 1958 and
was widely read and discussed in the 1960s. Due to the extensive
criticism the book received, much of which remains valid to this
day, the book ceased to be a legitimate reference within academia.
4 Civilizing the Public Sphere

It reappeared, as if nothing had happened, 20 years later in Robert

Putnam’s Making Democracy Work (Putnam et al. 1993), Francis
Fukuyama’s Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Property
(Fukuyama 1995), and L.E. Harrison and S.P. Huntington’s Culture
Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (Harrison and Huntington
2000). Putnam’s discussion about the south of Italy is mainly based
on Banfield’s work, Fukuyama’s is based on both Putnam’s and
Banfield’s, and Harrison and Huntington’s book was dedicated to
Banfield. Further, the remaining literature in this field emanates,
directly or indirectly, from issues and reasoning similar to Banfield’s.
It is as if the parts of the world that do not enjoy some degree
of prosperity – the Third World poor, the former Soviet states,
unemployed immigrants, or the marginalized lower classes of the
developed world – have been permeated by amoral familism or its
cultural equivalent. This is what unites Palermo, Moscow, the fave-
las, and the ghettos. However, in Banfield’s defense, he postulates the
existence of culture, while his followers seem to take it for granted.
Banfield takes inspiration from Milton Friedman’s arguments from
the early 1950s about the analytical productivity of postulated
propositions that are not necessarily true per se (see Banfield 1958,
Chapter 6, Note 1). He does not present any empirical evidence show-
ing that the culture of amoral familism that he presumes actually
exists. His arguments about culture are postulated and characterized
by reasoning that “people behave in a family centered way, so there
must be a culture of amoral familism that explains this behavior” (for
the hypothesis to be useful, it only needs to show that people act as
if they follow the rules). In this sense, his book is more interesting
as a scientific hypothesis. His followers seem to take this reasoning
as fact.
A second common denominator is the absence of the state in the
discussion of trust and sometimes the destructive role that the state
has played in the production of trust in societies. The three central
concepts – networks, trust, and social capital – seem to be entwined in
a self-enhancing spiral stemming from interactions between people.
When the state does feature in concrete analyses, it appears as an
authoritarian state often conceptualized as a destroyer of trust. This,
for example, is the case in Robert Putnam’s study, where Frederick II’s
despotism in the 13th century is considered the root of the lack of
trust that prevails in the south of Italy to this day. In Fukuyama’s
 Civilizing Trust 5

book, it is often the French state – both the historical and the modern
one – that is assigned the same role, and this holds true for much
of the discussion about trust in the post-Soviet states. In the more
theoretical discussions, often stemming from game theory, the role of
the state is dismissed as a result of the so-called three-part settlement
in collective problems creating non-stable states of equilibrium (for a
survey of this literature, see Rothstein 2005).
A third common denominator is the relationship between culture
and the phenomenon of organization. In Banfield’s study the rela-
tionship is expressed quite clearly in the preface of his book: “this
book is a study of the psychological and moral conditions of political
and other organization” (Banfield 1958). Expressed this way, for soci-
ologists, this relationship resembles both Max Weber’s ideas about
the significance of the Protestant ethic for the development of capi-
talism and Emil Durkheim’s idea that a contract requires a society.3
The thought is simple: without trust, social capital, and the norm
of reciprocity, people cannot construct organizations. In the case
of the mail-order company from Borås, the rule that “you should
trust that people want to do the right thing” and the more general
trust said to exist in Sweden appear to be a fundamental condi-
tion for entrepreneurship in Sweden. Without this fundamental trust
the mail-order company would not be able to exist. As such, eco-
nomic growth or underdevelopment becomes intricately connected
to culture. In Banfield’s description of the importance of trust, he
concretizes this connection: “[the] inability to create and maintain
organization is clearly of the greatest importance in retarding eco-
nomic development” (Banfield 1958: 87). It is this line of thought
that is further developed by Francis Fukuyama in his books on the
significance of trust for economic development.
Further on in Banfield’s book, another aspect of the relationship
between culture and organization is introduced: if an organization
is established in a culture built on a distinction between the trust-
worthy and familiar social environment and the unreliable others,
that culture is so strong that the functioning of the organization
is significantly impacted by the culture. In the south of Italy, as in
Greece and many other places around the world, a contradictory sit-
uation in bureaucratic organizations is often observed. An extreme
form of bureaucratic indifference can be discerned when rules are
meticulously put into practice in some social situations and only
6 Civilizing the Public Sphere

partially implemented in others. Social anthropologists have tried

to determine the root of this phenomenon by reviewing practices
and attitudes and local cultures in villages. In villages across the
Mediterranean, a distinction is typically made between a limited
circle of close associates, consisting largely of family and relatives,
and others. Expressed in modern sociological terminology, this rep-
resents an “us and them” construction. According to these studies,
this “mentality”, for want of a better word, seeps into the state’s
organization, resulting in practices inwhich “the others” are treated
impartially while “our people” are treated in a preferential way.
In the early anthropological studies, the village mentality is thus used
to explain the functioning of central institutions in the course of
modern social life, and the functioning of modern life is anthropolo-
gized – mainly by using pre-modern anthropological and behavioral
archetypes as explanations (see Chapter 4). In the later literature,
and above all in Fukuyama’s book, another variant of the argument
appears: culture, including the correct norms, sufficient trust, and
social capital, is a requirement for enabling groups and organizations
to work efficiently. Trust, in this case, works as a kind of lubricant
for the machinery of society. Without this social lubricant, soci-
ety is charged with a form of “taxation” in the shape of increased
transaction costs.
The simplicity and seeming self-evidence of this argument elimi-
nate the need to prove, reflectively critique, or question the relation-
ship between culture and organization. This way of arguing seems so
close to common sense and displays the same logical structure and
vocabulary that people use to explain simple mundane events and
actions of the kind I described earlier. Interpretations involving cul-
ture therefore are often popular and unquestioned. In this chapter,
I later consider and discuss the third common denominator concern-
ing the relationship between organization and trust in further detail.
However, in order to do so I must first examine and review the first
and second denominators somewhat more thoroughly.

The ambivalence of culture

In the mid-1950s, Edward Banfield spent 10 months in the vil-

lage of Montegrano (fictitious name) together with his wife and
two children. With the help of an Italian student, they conducted
 Civilizing Trust 7

some 70 semi-structured interviews of the kind that today would

be considered biographical and collected material on the demo-
graphic structure of the village. Neither Banfield’s research topic nor
the village is unique; during this period, several villages across the
Mediterranean became popular sites for social scientists conducting
fieldwork, often with a social anthropological slant. The villages stud-
ied were often very poor, fairly isolated, situated in regions with
stagnant economies, or with modest or virtually non-existent eco-
nomic development. Using idealized and often naïve images of their
own countries as points of reference and studying the everyday life
of the people in these villages, they developed a problematic dis-
tinction between an idealized image of northern Europe and the
United States and an underdeveloped or corrupt image of southern
Europe, interpreted within the frame of historical stages. Such dis-
tinctions could be formulated for every country, and indeed many
of these researchers developed such distinctions both knowingly and
unknowingly. Part of the literature on ethnic entrepreneurship and
“cultures of poverty” is characterized by this. However, this litera-
ture is just as problematic as that discussed here (for an interesting
discussion, see Vermeulen 2001).
At the same time, in the northern European and American social
sciences, there was a general distrust of historical studies, and soci-
ology was to a great extent detached from the discipline of history.
Historical facts had not been collected using scientific methods and
consequently could not be used as foundations for scientific theo-
ries on development. If social scientists in the Western world could
not use their own past in scientific studies of development, a unique
opportunity revealed itself in these villages. Their underdevelopment
was nothing more than a manifestation of their being at an ear-
lier stage of development. Through the systematic study of these
“backward societies”, it was possible to create an adequate under-
standing of the own past and place it on a historical time axis, which
enabled the development of a scientific theory on the evolution of
society. Solving the theoretical mystery of how such backward soci-
eties evolve into modern societies – from Palermo to Milan or from
Moscow (the Montegrano or Palermo of our time) to Stockholm – has
always been central to the tradition, and this question has frequently
appeared in the contemporary literature on trust. The transformation
of a spatial asymmetry into an issue of historical stages, interpreted
8 Civilizing the Public Sphere

as cultural stages, reflects a scientific problem with all these stud-

ies. In this sense, you need not share all the political conclusions
of the Dependency School to realize that Andre Gunder Frank’s criti-
cism, as formulated in the article “Sociology of Development and the
Underdevelopment of Sociology” (Frank 1967) and other books and
articles from the second half of the 1960s remains relevant.
I started this book autobiographically, and there are several autobi-
ographical elements still to mention. On the other side of the Ionian
Sea, in the northwest corner of Greece in the region of Epirus, there is
another village, called Gorgomilo, which is not a fictitious name but
actually the village I grew up in. A few kilometers northeast, up in the
mountains, there are several summer villages whose inhabitants were
also the subject of a well-known social anthropological study similar
to Banfield’s, namely Campbell’s study Honour, Family and Patronage
(Campbell 1974). Campbell also wrote articles on clientelism, a phe-
nomenon that has tormented both Italian and Greek life. Dissatisfied
with the interpretation of social anthropologists on the malfunction-
ing of the political system with reference to the cultural codes and
social ethos of isolated villages, I and a group of European social sci-
entists attempted to shift the whole argument and instead start the
analysis from the epicenter of social and political life (Piattoni 2001,
see Chapter 4 of this book). I have always stayed in touch with my old
village and believe I have some life experience of the types of villages
studied by Banfield. Additionally, I have made the journey men-
tioned in the discussions on trust, from Gorgomilo to Stockholm.
In light of this, I will discuss the tradition of neo-culturalism further.
My first observation concerns culture and its ambivalence. It is part
of everyday life in the Mediterranean region to experience situations
similar to those described in these studies. The equivalent of Diego
Gambetta’s story about the inability of taxi drivers in Palermo to
cooperate (Gambetta 1993), which is often used to illustrate prob-
lems of trust, takes place in a slightly different way in the nearby city
of Filippiada, where I went to middle school. For instance, you often
observe people waiting for a taxi in Gorgomilo and, at the same time,
see taxis from Filippiada driving away after dropping off customers
in Gorgomilo. It would seem simpler and more profitable if the taxi
that dropped off customers in Gorgomilo picked up new ones on
the way back. To do this, however, would require a degree of coor-
dination which the 30 or so taxi drivers of Filippiada have not yet
 Civilizing Trust 9

managed to achieve. Gambetta develops some culturalist interpreta-

tions from an almost analogous situation in Palermo. When I ask the
taxi drivers themselves about the problem, they immediately answer
in terms of trust. The answer is always that they do not trust each
other. But when I examine their answers more closely, a completely
different social order appears, where the taxi drivers seem to use quite
sophisticated methods to achieve what business economists call “seg-
mented markets” through the use of personal, social, and other kinds
of networks and cleavages that form important elements in the web
that surrounds social life in the Mediterranean region. These types
of networks and cleavages do not exist for the taxi drivers in “mod-
ernized” Vallentuna, a suburb of Stockholm where I now live. Even
so, while I wait for my taxi in Vallentuna, empty taxis from other
companies, which use more “professional” methods to segment their
market, often pass by.
The inability to cooperate is not the only reality in the area around
Filippiada; the same people who talk using Banfield’s terms can also
invite an unknown stranger into their homes (hospitality is a very
strong cultural code in the area), make agreements by shaking hands,
and even keep them. The interest in cooperation, or in trusting each
other, and the interest in competing are intertwined, as in all forms
of social life reflecting any kind of social differentiation. This makes it
difficult to assess the development of formal organizations by simply
referring to the cultural scripts of cooperation or competition. Fur-
ther, the coexistence of cooperation and competition is not unique
in these villages; it also exists in northern European social life but on
another scale and in a partly different form. If you were to take seri-
ously descriptions found in the literature about the Swedish national
character, about the incompetent savages who thrive in the forests,
detest people, and love stones (low social capital),4 no one in Sweden
would be able to spell the word “organization”. In discussions about
Swedes’ ability to cooperate, reference is made to the parish culture,
but it would probably be more sensible to use another cultural qual-
ity, taken from Linnaeus’ description of the Swede as a monkey,5
since much of the organizational life in Sweden (as in other coun-
tries) is based on models developed in other countries (Thörnberg
1938, 1943). However, none of the cultural descriptions can explain
the enormous economic development that has taken place in Sweden
over the last 130 years.
10 Civilizing the Public Sphere

Further, in what is commonly described as the harmonious

Swedish model, cooperation and (bitter) conflict are intertwined.
To explain the Swedish model by referring to a typically Swedish
cultural tradition of cooperation is akin to conceiving of the imper-
fect functioning of the southern European institutions as inherently
and intricately connected to the village mentality of amoral famil-
ism. Trust and non-trust, or distrust, exist in all societies. Even in
the United States, a country which features prominently in the liter-
ature and tradition as highly developed in terms of trust and social
capital, trusting the public as a space has been and is problematic.
As a participant at a conference in central Chicago a few years ago,
I was instructed by the organizers to stay away from certain parts of
the city; I believe this recommendation was not a one-off occurrence,
that is, directed solely at this conference’s participants and with ref-
erence to this particular city, but is rather a standardized piece of
advice given by natives to visitors of America more generally. Descrip-
tions of reality using the terms found in the literature that I discuss
here are akin to – to borrow Frank’s terminology – “serious distor-
tions of social reality” (Frank 1967). Unwittingly, and perhaps more
problematically, we could find ourselves engaging in a version of the
moral economy that Norbert Elias acquainted us with in his stud-
ies on the established and outsiders (Elias 1999). Success, usually a
result of complex, prolonged, and asymmetrical processes in soci-
ety, is explained with selective post hoc idealized descriptions of the
best cultural characteristics of the winning groups, while failure is
explained by the weaknesses of the losers. It is no coincidence that
the authors of an anthology about the economic and political devel-
opment in the south of Italy use the subheading “orientalism in one
country” to characterize the whole discussion (Schneider 1998), and
it is probably this type of literature that has made researchers with a
postcolonial perspective look for signs of ethnocentric narcissism in
large parts of contemporary social science.
After these general remarks, it is time to return to Banfield’s study.
As I mentioned initially, Banfield’s ambition was to survey the psy-
chological, social, and moral requirements for political and other
organizations. Another way of addressing this problem is to study
and compare instances where organizations have developed with
instances where no organization has developed. This, however, is not
done in the study. Banfield here chooses to conduct a study of the
latter kind; according to his description, there were no organizations
 Civilizing Trust 11

in Montegrano and the predominant village mentality was character-

ized by an egotistical family mentality. Banfield looks upon the latter
as a prerequisite for the absence of formal organizations as it takes
some sort of trust and an ability to cooperate to maintain formal orga-
nizations, elements missing in Montegrano and which explain, in
his view, why there were no organizations there either. In footnotes
there are parallels made to Max Weber’s discussion about the Protes-
tant ethic as a requirement for the development of capitalism, and it
seems to me as though Banfield is trying to deal here with the pos-
itive side of the correlation between culture and organization, that
is, that certain cultures promote the development of organizations.
But there is a problem here. According to a well-known connoisseur
of Weber, 100 years after the formulation of the thesis, social scien-
tists still do not agree on whether it was a “major break-through or a
dead-end street” (Poggi 1993). Even if Weber’s argument proved to be
correct, it only holds true for why capitalism initially developed and
was a success in Protestant regions. The same does not apply to the
uneven expansion of capitalism around the world where it has built
organizations, for example Tayloristic companies, based on control
and not on trust. In other words, the requirements Weber discusses
do not apply in all instances where capitalism later spread. Organi-
zations and capitalism are what comparative historical sociologists
call historical causes. Once formed, they have their own power and
exist independently of the causes that once created them. Somehow
Banfield expects the residents of his village in the south of Italy –
where 1941 of the 2006 inhabitants could be considered illiterate – to,
by their own efforts, (re)discover capitalistic enterprise, political par-
ties, and/or governmental organization, even when the vast majority
of the world has not.
The village Banfield discussed seems quite unusual to me for a
Mediterranean village. The household structure, for instance, does
not fit the one historians have typically described as Mediterranean
(Laslett 1983). However, I accept in principle that the mentality
Banfield labels amoral familism was the predominant cultural script
in local social life and have no reason to question Banfield’s state-
ment about the absence of formal organizations. Indeed, I even
emphasize the significance of these.
A population’s ability to read and write appears to be an impor-
tant prerequisite for building and maintaining organizations; this has
long been noted by sociologists studying organizations (Stinchcombe
12 Civilizing the Public Sphere

1965). This fact explains why capitalism and bureaucracies are some-
what widespread in Protestant regions, why educated workers estab-
lish unions, or why teachers start sports and culture clubs. With
few exceptions on the European continent, it is in the state-owned
and usually state-run schools that people have learned to read and
write (including cases where priests were used as teachers). But this
development has been very uneven, in terms of both when gen-
eral compulsory schooling was introduced and each pupil’s access
to it. Sweden is unique; a general education theoretically accessible
to everyone was institutionalized as early as the 1840s. Twenty years
later almost every child in Sweden had access to education, and in
1890 more than 90 per cent of the population could read and write.
It is no coincidence that Swedish social movements were established
in connection with this process from the 1870s onwards. In the vil-
lage of Montegrano, as in many places in rural southern Europe, the
situation has been different.
In one appendix, Banfield presents municipal statistics for school
attendance. Of an original sample of 2006 people, almost half did
not finish the five-year compulsory school (980 people), while 961
people graduated. To start a voluntary organization, you often need
a “critical mass” consisting of people who will constitute the nucleus
of the organization. In the municipal statistics of Montegrano, there
were around 65 people in the village that might have had this level
of education, but it is not clear whether they still lived in the vil-
lage. I do not know how statistics were handled in the south of
Italy at the time, but a qualified guess would suggest that most edu-
cated people lived in the cities, despite being included in municipal
statistics. Because of the difficulties in securing work in their com-
munity, educated people often left the countryside. Also taking into
account the low quality of schooling, it is a reasonable conclusion
that even those who graduated verged on illiterate. In addition, while
some degree of a cooperation ethic is required to enable organiza-
tions to function, you cannot create organizations based on morality.
With what resources would the people of Montegrano build organiza-
tions when, according to Banfield, they could not even afford to buy
stamps? In Banfield’s study, one researcher discusses the prerequisites
for building organizations with reference to a specific sample’s culture
in a particular instance when that sample lacked both the ability –
due to the almost total absence of the state – and the resources to
 Civilizing Trust 13

create organizations. They are asked to take a stand on certain issues

(like formal organizations), which they have basically never experi-
enced, and, more problematically, this correlation is interpreted in
causal terms.
From the example given above, it would be possible to argue in
favor of another type of reasoning, namely that in the absence of
state-provided education Montegranians lacked the knowledge of
some basic and critical skills essential for forming and maintaining
organizations as well as an effective example of how they operated.
This may explain why certain cultural manifestations, for example
amoral familism, acquire a predominant position in some local cul-
tures. Nonetheless, this is an expression of resignation, to only care
for your children when everything in the public realm is not func-
tioning, and, as such, an expression of a distanciation from the
social.

The state and the civilizing of trust

Keeping our attention on the state, we can now consider in greater

detail the second denominator found in literature: the state’s destruc-
tive role and criticism of third party mediation in social conflicts.
In Putnam’s argument, issues surrounding trust and social capital
in the south of Italy originate to a large extent in the 13th cen-
tury due to the despotism of Frederick II. As with all discussions
considering long-lasting historical effects, this is not without its
problems.6 Even with limited knowledge of the historical develop-
ment of European states from 1300 to the present day, it seems
reasonable to say that, across most of the European continent, lead-
ers of Frederick II’s ilk were the norm and not the exception, often
displaying much greater cruelty to their own people. Despite this
probable historical reality, it has generally not prevented the devel-
opment of organizations at later times in history. Across much of
Europe, path dependencies have been broken; as such, placing the
south of Italy in a historical tunnel without consideration of the
horizontal interdependence chains, which constitute the conditions
for constant underdevelopment, reflects a degree of cultural blind-
ness often found in the social sciences. It is about the same as
when you transform the poor, the deviant, or urban areas into prob-
lems in themselves without examining the reasons they appear as
14 Civilizing the Public Sphere

such. In Putnam’s argument, the south and north of Italy are two
separate entities.
Indeed, such an argument always seems more plausible when
referring to countries with which one is not too familiar. This implau-
sibility is exposed when transferring that logic and reasoning to the
Swedish case, and the possible conclusion that the more humble
development of the north of Sweden reflects northern Swedes’ appre-
ciation of solitude, fishing, and tree stumps over most other things.
Similarly, based on that logic and reasoning, the growing Ottoman
Empire of the 14th century should theoretically provide the future
spatial location of a strong civic spirit given the Empire’s religious tol-
erance and millet system – clearly not the case if we consider today’s
reality. As such, the idea of long-lasting historical path dependencies
is rendered absurd.
If anything, the absence of the state, and not its presence, seems to
be part of the problem. Similarly, the state’s destructive role and/or
monopolistic tendencies are not altogether necessarily detrimental,
as is often maintained by the literature. Let us now return to one of
the issues I raised earlier: trusting the public area as a space. Like
other Europeans, Swedes can take an evening walk in almost any
Swedish city without risking their lives. Areas that could prove haz-
ardous are almost non-existent, or the risk is so statistically slim that
it could almost be considered non-existent. Being in the public space
without fear suggests that one is able to trust that others, namely
unknown people, will act in a civilized manner. If you were to ask
today’s Europeans whether they trust that other, unknown people
will behave in a civilized way, the answer will probably be that they
do, and it would then be simple to construct a theory on trust in
other people and civilized behavior. Much of the literature on trust
is based on such self-evident correlations and tautologies. Another
issue more strongly linked to reality would be to study whether other
people really do behave in a civilized manner. Here, it would be pos-
sible to study the actual development of violence and relate it to
people’s trust in the public space. Let us look more closely at this
using Stockholm as an example and through the work of economic
historian Johan Söderberg, who has studied violent crime from 1475
to 1990 (Söderberg 1993). The most striking finding in Söderberg’s
research is that the number of acts of violent crime decreased, from
approximately 90 incidents per 100,000 inhabitants per year in the
 Civilizing Trust 15

beginning of the period to about two per year toward the end of the
period. In other words, the risk of being subject to others’ acts of vio-
lence in the public space is rather small, which is why the people
of Stockholm can take evening walks without risking their lives. The
next question then is why the risk is so small.
According to Norbert Elias, in his book on the development of civ-
ilized behavior, the social life we call modern, at least in the West,
is based on the monopoly mechanisms, like the state monopoliza-
tion of violent means and taxation (Elias 1994). The first monopoly
ensures that the population has limited possession and use of
weapons and that only state officials are allowed to use weapons
in certain circumstances and under certain conditions. Control of
weapon possession is reinforced with the registration of weapons and
compulsory training for the possessor. As a result, the state’s terri-
tory becomes pacified. However, not all states have succeeded in this
respect, reflecting that political ambition and the state’s capacity to
deal with problems may not necessarily coincide. Indeed, the latter
dimension implies that the state has sufficient capacity to act and
intervene in social life and logistically implement decisions. This is
what Michael Mann called “the infrastructural power of the state”
(Mann 1993: 59) and which also partly relates to the state’s taxation
monopoly.7
Historically, there are two fundamental ways of handling the col-
lection of taxes: tax farming, common in the great empires, and
direct state tax collection, which has been a central aspect for the
development of European states. For direct state tax collection to be
effective and efficient, records of the population and its resources
were needed – a practice successfully implemented by many states.
As a result, people became identifiable individuals with first names,
last names and addresses, and the state acquired infrastructural
power. In this way, the monopoly of violence and the monopoly of
taxation became related to each other, or as Norbert Elias pointed
out, “two aspects of the same monopoly” (Elias 1944: 346). The
fact that individuals acquired a last name and an address had many
consequences.
Let us now return to the company in Borås that trusts that the
woman living in a Stockholm suburb will pay her bill once she has
picked up the products from the post office. Without knowing any-
thing about her, the company in Borås could have formed an idea
16 Civilizing the Public Sphere

about her social capital by conducting a statistical exercise. Approx-

imately 88 per cent of all adult women in Sweden work outside the
home and about 85 per cent of these have joined a union. In other
words, the likelihood of her having joined a union is 0.72. The like-
lihood of her being a member of an organization generally is higher,
since about 90 per cent of women between 16 and 84 years of age
are members of some kind of organization or club. Still, most of
these memberships are somewhat fabricated, since only about half
the members of a given organization are actually active. That likeli-
hood could easily be reduced by half; the chance of the woman being
an active participant, and thus trained in the art of cooperating with
others, is at most 0.45. However, this is a very uncertain indicator
of trusting others. Even if the 0.45 were enough to create a culture
of trust including the population in the sample of those actively
involved in civil society organizations, it would still be unclear if the
rest of the population could be trusted.
What motivation does the woman have for paying the bill? Is it to
follow the cultural rule of “doing the right thing”? Possibly. Another
explanation, that by paying she avoids negative sanctions from those
closest to her is not an option. Sweden is an atomized society, and
other people in her surroundings cannot know that she has not paid
the bill. Does she pay because she thinks a lot of other people do, as
is maintained by the prevailing assertions in the literature on trust?
Hardly.
I do not know what readers would tell their financial manager if
they were to ship products with some general reference to cultural
codes of cooperation or a civic ethos. In Sweden it would probably
work, but not based on such premises. There is an important founda-
tion upon which the transaction between the company in Borås and
the young woman in the Stockholm suburb takes place. Even if the
transaction originates in some distant location, this is not a transac-
tion with an unknown individual, but with Eva Svensson, who lives
at Örtagårdsvägen 34 in Huddinge. For the company in Borås she
is not an unknown individual, but a concrete individual that actu-
ally lives at Örtagårdsvägen 34 in Huddinge. Because of reliable state
records and the continuous updating of population registers, includ-
ing people’s names and addresses and other dwellings across Sweden,
the company knows that if Eva does not pay, they can go to her home
(or engage a representative to do so) and find Eva there. The contract
 Civilizing Trust 17

between two unknown participants, which in this case is important

for the economic activity to take place, has certain social prereq-
uisites. They do not exist in the obscurity of social interaction, in
cultural rites, or pre-modern traditions but in the most fundamental
aspect of the European state: thorough record keeping of its citizens.
However, many states in the world have not adopted this fundamen-
tal state function but only the derived qualities, namely those that
developed in Europe as a consequence of the basic monopolies, for
example the institutions associated with politics. The mechanisms
here are slightly different from those in a European state where the
establishment of a monopoly on the means of violence was con-
nected to taxation. In many of the states founded later, the monopoly
on the means of violence was established through export, loans, and
military aid, and not via the building of basic state infrastructure.
Without this substantial foundation to stand on, a peculiar lopsided-
ness has developed in many states of the world (compare Badie 2000,
see also Chapter 4).
The fact that Eva has a last name and an address is a prerequisite
for the informal contract between her and the company in Borås.
The company must trust that she can really pay before using the
control apparatuses mentioned above, and I believe they do. Why?
We saw earlier that a prerequisite for the collection of taxes has been
state records of the population and their resources. These records
transform concrete individuals and resources into abstract individ-
uals and resources in the form of more or less sophisticated statistical
abstractions of the population and its resources. This is a matter of
the state making organizational observations of the same individ-
uals and resources, and based on these observations it is possible
to create accurate statistical representations of people and resources.
What the company in Borås actually trusts is the representation of
Eva Svensson created through the state’s observations of its citizens.
Eva’s other qualities, whether she is kind or malevolent, sloppy or
orderly, economical or wasteful, are not relevant. These qualities and
assets that are not observed by organizations, or made visible by orga-
nizations, represent what Hernando De Soto calls “dead capital” (De
Soto 2001) – capital that cannot be transformed into another type of
capital, in this case, into social capital.
Due to circumstances relating to the creation of the taxation
monopoly, which we will not explore here, in Sweden virtually all
18 Civilizing the Public Sphere

people and a significant proportion of assets have been observed

by the state, and representations of them have been created. As a
result, assets are transformed into representations to be used to esti-
mate the reliability of individuals. Due to the sheer number of assets
registered, this translates into a large number of individuals; more
individuals can be considered reliable. Through the social mechanism
of observing and representing resources, trust of concrete individuals
is transformed into trust of many abstract individuals and, as such,
is generalized. However, this is not enough. As a result of the records
kept by the state of its citizens and their addresses, the abstract indi-
vidual can be retransformed into a concrete individual as a last act of
control.
The question of whether Eva Svensson is a trustworthy person
consequently turns into two questions. One relates to the reliability
and scope of the observations and processes that transform concrete
individuals into abstract individuals and concrete resources into rep-
resentations of resources, and the second relates to the process that
makes abstract individuals identifiable and enables the localization
of the represented resources. The question of whether to trust a con-
crete individual is transformed into a question of being able to trust
that a third party, namely the state, has made reliable observations of
the individual in question and his/her resources. States in the world
vary in their ability to do so. For example, there are states that do not
know how many people inhabit their territories or where they live.
I have raised this question over the course of the last few years during
my travels to academic departments and research centers in the Baltic
countries and Eastern Europe. The answers I have received confirm
what I already suspected: there is no way of precisely knowing who
and how many live, for example, in St Petersburg, Vilnius, Gdansk,
or Kiev. To give another example, a well-informed and experienced
district police commissioner in Athens told me a decade ago that one
of the first things he trained his superintendents and inspectors in
was using the telephone directory, since it was the most reliable reg-
ister the state could use to locate its citizenry, excluding those who
had opted out of being listed in one or more of the 30 or so dif-
ferent directories. The only time I have seen a reasonably complete
collection was in the head office of the Greek Telecommunications
Administration in Athens. What is normal in many states is that there
are a number of registers, registers for compulsory military service,
 Civilizing Trust 19

compulsory school attendance, voter eligibility, and driving licenses,

to name but a few, whose records may not be up to date and whose
information is arguably selective.
When it comes to keeping records of the population’s resources,
Hernando De Soto writes in his book The Mystery of Capital: “The
poor inhabitants of these nations – five-sixths of humanity – do
have things, but they lack the process to represent their property
and create capital. They have houses but not titles; crops but not
deeds; businesses but not statutes of incorporation” (De Soto 2001:
6). In western European societies, this registration and representation
has been one of the state’s most fundamental underpinnings. The
need for taxes, initially to finance war and given the lack of major
lending institutions, forced states to develop systems to register land
ownership and other resources; European states vary here in terms of
the introduction of such records. As the economy was increasingly
monetarized and individuals largely supported themselves through
earned income, these records became records of income. In states
founded more recently and as a result of voluntary or forced mod-
eling on the European state prototype, this internal penetration of
territory is lacking.
It is possible to make a rough distinction here between states that
largely accumulate their resources by penetrating their internal ter-
ritory and states that in the main accumulate their resources from
sources outside their own territory (Badie 2000, Tilly 1990a), and
I believe a great part of the mystery of capital lies in the lack of state
mechanisms that penetrate the internal territory in the latter type of
states. Generally, this is also part of the mystery of trust. Referring
to only one aspect of this, De Soto writes about the same countries:
“The lack of legal property thus explains why citizens in develop-
ing and former communist nations cannot make profitable contracts
with strangers and cannot get credit, insurance, or utilities services”
(De Soto 2001: 55). De Soto emphasizes the significance of legal prop-
erty. However, Eva Svensson, like many Swedes, has no property but
only a salary. This does not prevent her from making transactions
with strangers and from a distance. It is a salary made visible by the
state’s observation of it. In other words, it is the organizational obser-
vation of a resource as such that causes a resource to be regarded as
an asset, and legal property is just one of its forms. For many people
in the world, like for Eva Svensson, it is the visibility of their income
20 Civilizing the Public Sphere

through registration that transforms them into reliable partners in

exchanges with other people.
So far we have illustrated how the matter of trusting a stranger is
transformed into a matter of scale and of the quality of the mecha-
nisms available for the observation and representation of social life.
It is these same mechanisms that expand the scope of trust, lower
transaction costs, and make risk-taking calculable. We have noted a
few of the forms of such mechanisms, but there is much to be said
about the content of the mechanisms, that is, the substance of what
is being made visible. As far as Sweden is concerned, if you were to
describe this succinctly it would be: a segmented but constant flow of
income throughout life for the overwhelming majority of the popula-
tion. It is a characteristic feature of Swedish social development that
many activities that take place as informal activities – or, if you prefer,
unpaid labor – in other countries have become activities framed by
organizations in general and the state in particular. The expansion
of organizational life and the framing of activities in organizations
have made many more people’s activities visible and evaluated in
different ways. When Maria Coletti in the Mediterranean looks after
her little children or takes care of her father-in-law, she does not get
products delivered to her in the hope that she will pay later. On the
other hand, Eva Svensson, who has been employed in eldercare ser-
vices and who now works at a kindergarten, does. In other words,
the expansion of organizational life leads to the possibility of work
being observed by, and representations of it being made by, the state.
This visibility ensures that more people are considered reliable. The
expansion of organization results in an expansion of trust; that is,
organization is the mechanism that expands the scope of trust and
generalizes it across a broader population.
Another organizational expansion associated with the redistribu-
tional functions of the state is a slightly different mechanism. The
welfare state may not have effectively succeeded in redistributing
resources across different social classes in Sweden, and that is why
the flow of resources registered in official statistics is segmented;
that is, different groups have different incomes. However, the redis-
tributing mechanism has succeeded somewhat better in creating a
constant flow of resources over the course of people’s lives. For a
relatively large number of people, their income is the main source
for supporting themselves. Working income, however, is unevenly
 Civilizing Trust 21

dispersed in people’s lives. Periods of study, having children, unem-

ployment, illness, and retirement often create an unpredictable sit-
uation. In Sweden, the transfer system has managed to even out
these irregularities in a person’s lifespan (Furåker 1987). Instead of
a flow characterized by unevenness, the flow is relatively constant
and increases slightly until retirement. While the mechanism regis-
tering people’s resources generalizes trust across many people, this
mechanism is of a slightly different nature: it generalizes trust from
income-generating periods to periods of need, from discrete income
earning periods in a person’s life to a single period of that person’s
entire adult life.
Let us now return to the state’s registration of resources. One of the
most conspicuous aspects of the Swedish state from a long-term per-
spective is the thorough nature of its records of land and other assets.
We have seen how this makes resources visible and creates represen-
tations of resources. We are now going to look at another aspect of
this. In many places around the world, feuds between neighbors are
the foundation of many social conflicts, resulting in longstanding
and, at best, bitter legal disputes. In the second half of the 1970s,
I worked in tourism on a little island in the Greek archipelago. The
job was seasonal, with a lot of work during the summer period and
almost total underemployment over the winter. In contrast to the
fast-paced summer life, the rainy winter season did not offer much
liveliness and stimulation to the young people on the island. By coin-
cidence, I discovered that the daily scenes taking place during the
district court’s sessions would make even the documentary soaps of
today pale in comparison, and the district court became the place
that staved off boredom for a couple of rainy winters. Feuds between
neighbors and divorces were the most popular cases. They often orig-
inated in unclear property matters, and local villagers would get
involved in the dispute. The conflicts, which sometimes lasted for
years, could escalate and in some cases go beyond the realm of what
was considered civilized. Entire villages could be mobilized to tes-
tify to different incidents, and testimonies often contradicted one
another. Resigned judges were put in impossible situations. They had
no objective script for settling the disputes. The Greek state does not
have a thorough register of land ownership, and it is only in the last
decade that a national and reasonably definitive system for settling
property matters has materialized. (However, the process has been
22 Civilizing the Public Sphere

delayed due to uncertainties and legal disputes and is expected to

be completed in 10–15 years.) In Greek crime statistics, cases related
to property disputes between neighbors are overrepresented. But this
represents only a small fraction of the energy wasted in this war
between neighbors, which in periods of intense political conflicts also
acquires a political or ideological framing with fatal consequences.
Stathis Kalyvas, a professor of political science at Yale, has shown in
his detailed studies how social disputes are transformed in periods of
intense political conflict and how such old property disputes between
neighbors had fatal consequences during the Greek Civil War that
took place after World War II. Political murders during the civil war
often originated in old disputes between neighbors (Kalyvas 2000:
175–79).
Trust is an important prerequisite for cooperation and for building
organizations according to researchers in the tradition. But how can
you trust people that you are in a perpetual feud with? The Swedish
state’s thorough land records provide a good answer. By creating a
clear representation of property (largely thorough cartography and
registers) early in its modern history, in conjunction with the estab-
lishment of its taxation monopoly and refining it during its land
consolidation reforms, the state has virtually eliminated any grounds
for feuds between neighbors and consequently civilized the terri-
tory even further, especially with regards to rural areas. Relationships
between neighbors were regulated by the state, and instead of turn-
ing into feuds between neighbors they become cases dealt with by
the state’s administrative apparatuses. In Sweden, topographers were
important in this process, and one is systematically amazed by the
extent of reforms such as the land consolidation reforms and how
they were implemented without social conflicts, with topographers
and not the courts as protagonists. If there is a cultural tradition of
not yelling at each other in Sweden, this is where it has its roots.
Instead of wasting energy dealing with local conflicts, ordinary
people in Sweden could use their time for other creative purposes,
among other things to form voluntary organizations, which accord-
ing to some researchers stimulates the development of a culture of
trust. For many observers, the self-organization of farmers in Sweden
is a remarkable phenomenon, both historically and in more mod-
ern times, and in many interpretations of the historical development
of the country this is considered one of the main factors providing
 Civilizing Trust 23

Swedish development with its distinctive character. Another kind

of study would be needed to support this with evidence, and it is
by no means certain that this will ever be proven. But a compari-
son with the historically almost non-existent organization of Greek
farmers clearly illustrates that the underlying civilization process in
the Swedish countryside, with state topographers (land surveyors) as
conductors, was an essential prerequisite for the self-organization of
Swedish farmers. In stark contrast to Greek farmers, they have not
had to waste energy on largely irresolvable property disputes. Instead
they have been able to direct their energies toward forming associa-
tions, in much the same way that neighbors join housing associations
and neighborhood watches without quarrelling about whether one
neighbor’s tree overshadows the other’s garden. The neighbors’ chil-
dren play football in the same sports association, while the women
in the neighborhood belong to the same sewing circle and make cur-
tains together. They have no reason to distrust each other since much
of what could be the source of any disagreement has long since been
neutralized by the state. All in all, it seems to me that the generally
high degree of organizational life in Sweden has some of its roots
in the state’s civilizing of territory through the distinct regulation of
inter-human relations.
2
Boundary Technologies and
the Segmentation of Trust

Acts of distrust in everyday life

Many people have fixed morning routines. They shower, eat

breakfast, read the newspaper, and brush their teeth; they may also
listen to the radio. In general, people are creatures of habit, and by
and large every person has his/her own routines. Some people carry
out these routines meticulously and in a specific order; others cannot
be bothered.
People are different, and so are routines. Some routines can simply
be ignored; others are carried out with great determination. A simple
sociological test on the rigidity of routines can be done by observ-
ing the reactions when routines are not executed in their usual order.
A somewhat stale taste in your mouth as you make your way to the
train is a reminder of sloppy brushing but, with a shrug of your shoul-
ders, you still continue to the train. You could buy some chewing
gum at a newspaper stand, or perhaps you have a toothbrush at your
office. Even a methodical person can be careless when it comes to
routines.
However, there are some routines that even the most careless per-
son always executes. Such routines cause the stressed-out morning
commuter to go back home and check whether they have been car-
ried out. Generally this type of routine has to do with the possibility
of putting one’s life in danger. Did I check to see that the stove was
turned off? Did I unplug the iron? Although other routines are not
associated with danger in the same way, they still may cause people to
return home. The routine of locking the door belongs in this category.

24
 Boundary Technologies and the Segmentation of Trust 25

In spite of recommendations and professional advice, people can

still be careless when it comes to their morning routines. Many
people do not brush their teeth thoroughly despite their dentist’s rec-
ommendations; others skip breakfast despite the dietitian’s “decree”
about the importance of starting their day off with a good breakfast.
Yet few people are careless when it comes to locking their door. This
routine is a form of rite that we all carry out every day, and at night
we lock ourselves in. The imperative of this routine is so strong that
many people seem unable to trust themselves to remember to lock
the door each time they leave the house. It is not unusual for many
people to turn to technology to make sure that they have locked the
door, using one mechanism to close the door and another to lock it
automatically. The imperative to lock the door appears to be so strong
that some people would rather run the risk of being locked out than
forget to lock the door behind them. Other mechanisms are more
sophisticated. One such mechanism is a special kind of key; it is used
in Berlin neighborhoods and has raised a number of issues for Bruno
Latour (1992, 2000). The key is constructed in such a way that the
owner of the key only knows that the door is locked once he holds
the key in his hand. Evidently the key cannot be removed from the
keyhole if the door is not locked; this applies irrespective of whether
one is locked inside or outside.
The Berlin key is special for another reason: it ensures that the door
is locked whether the homeowner is at home or not. In this way the
key reveals the two basic functions of all keys: they lock in resources
when one is not at home, and they lock out other people when one is
at home. Thus the key materializes two social dichotomies, drawing
a dividing line between guarded and unguarded resources as well as
between inhabitants and strangers (Figure 2.1).
People guard their keys very carefully, and almost all keys have
a hole that makes it possible to put the key on a key ring, place it
on a chain to be worn around the neck or put it in a bundle with
other keys. To part with one’s keys or leave them on a table is consid-
ered a sign of bad luck in some cultures, and many people, including
the author of this text, further “safeguard” their keys by fastening
them at the waist. On the whole the use of keys is an act of dis-
trust, and fastening keys at the waist is another way of demonstrating
both the importance of keys and the multifaceted nature of this dis-
trust. First of all, the very use of keys indicates a distrust of others.
26 Civilizing the Public Sphere

Figure 2.1 Exterior and interior view of the Berlin key (reproduction from
Latour 2000)

Second, people who fasten keys at their waist reveal a distrust in their
own ability to keep track of their keys and a distrust of other peo-
ple who might take and use the keys. People may be willing to lend
many of their possessions, but they are very careful with their keys;
some go so far as to keep some of their keys a secret. There are very
 Boundary Technologies and the Segmentation of Trust 27

few people to whom one lends one’s keys – most often this group
would include someone in the family, a close friend, or perhaps a
dependable neighbor. However, some keys are shared with others.
Key ownership is a very common phenomenon in social life today.
Everyone has his/her own key, and many people have several. The
key rite does not occur only with the comings and goings at one’s
own front door. It is more widespread than that, and every person
carries out the rite many times each day. Bicyclists lock their bicy-
cles, automobile owners their cars, business owners their stores, and
factory owners their plants. The presence of keys is so ubiquitous
nowadays that everyone has at least one key, and almost everyone
carries around several keys all the time. If one were to label our soci-
ety on the basis of the universality of a routine, then no other name
could hold a candle to “The Key Holders’ Society”.1 The Key Holders’
Society is a society of distrust. To use a key is an act of distrust. Every
time people carry out the rite, they draw a demarcation line between
those who have the same key and those who do not. You only trust
those who have the key, not others.
Consequently, every set of keys represents a partition of social
space into zones of trust and a ranking of people into confidence
zones and, in this sense, an “amoral keyism” prevails in society. Peo-
ple trust those who have the same key and only those who have the
keys can pass.
However, it is not only keys that partition social space. Physical,
social, and organizational barriers, and the artifacts associated with
them, do the same thing. They demarcate social space and create
zones of conditional trust. Today the field of sociology is filled with
an abundance of literature on trust. However, they do not seem to
consider “space”, “artifacts”, and “organization” in their analyses.
The interaction has been removed from its spatial aspects and mate-
rial relations. With the production of trust and distrust as its focus,
this chapter aims to explore and shed light on the material history
of the boundary technologies of contemporary life and on the social
relations that these technologies create.

Keys and key hierarchies

Historically the ownership of keys signified hierarchy, and the wear-

ing of a key represented status. Old keys unearthed by archeologists
28 Civilizing the Public Sphere

were made to be worn as jewelry; they also denoted status. To use

a key implied access to valuable resources. When the word “key” is
used in one ancient manuscript that is still popular, the association
between status, key, and assets is crystal clear: “She went upstairs
and got her room key, which was made of bronze and had a han-
dle of ivory; she then went with her maidens into the store room at
the end of the house, where her husband’s treasures of gold, bronze
and wrought iron were kept”, writes Homer about Penelope in The
Odyssey (Homer 2006). The Romans transformed the key into a sta-
tus symbol, and those in power wore their keys around their necks;
many extant Roman rings depicting keys were made to be worn as
ornaments. Not only did the wearing of a key signal status but it
also showed that the key was a very personal possession, one not
easily separated from its owner. Sometimes, as the keys in Figure 2.2
illustrate, the key and the identity of the key’s owner were so closely
intertwined that many keys could also be used as seals.
In many places around the globe, people still wave their car keys
around to indicate status, and “latch-key children” living in Sweden’s
high-rise estates of the 1970s and 1980s wore their keys with pride.
However, key ownership has now lost some of its significance as a sta-
tus symbol. The use of keys, or the equivalent of keys, has increased,
and the key industry has become much more sophisticated.
While keys vary considerably in their design, almost all of them
have one common denominator, namely, a hole that makes it
possible to fasten the key to its rightful owner or to bundle it with

Figure 2.2 Keys used as rings and seals (reproductions from Monk 1974, and
The First Internet Lock Museum)
 Boundary Technologies and the Segmentation of Trust 29

other keys, for example, for the gate, the front door, a desk drawer or
even a safe. One key may be strictly “private”, another shared with
the family, still another shared with everyone at work, and some keys
may be shared with only one’s closest colleagues. One can divide the
keys in a set of keys into roughly two categories: the keys one owns
and the keys with which one is entrusted.
Every bunch of keys is thus an expression of a twofold social order.
On the one hand, moving from the inner circle of the most private
keys outwards, keys reveal a great deal about how individuals rank
their surroundings; on the other hand, the keys entrusted to an indi-
vidual reveal how the surroundings value that individual. Thus, every
set of keys represents two different trust geographies, and one can
divide people connected to a set of keys into groups on the basis of
trust zones. Seen from the inside – the viewpoint of the individual –
the keys represent every individual’s personal partition of the world
into trust zones and his/her ranking of individuals: farthest in is
the zone that is totally private, while farthest out are the zones one
shares with others. Seen from the outside, every set of keys repre-
sents the world’s ranking of the owner in two different ways. They
reveal the locked doors of social life through which the owner can
pass and show how every “entrusted” key reflects a highly structured
key hierarchy.
Normally key hierarchies are built as variants of a simple, logi-
cal hierarchy with a number of levels, where a “grand master key”
can open locks that are further down in the hierarchy but where
the reverse cannot take place. Simultaneously, the entrusted keys
embody not only an opportunity but also a boundary and a classifica-
tion. Keys and their more modern equivalents represent a structure of
opportunities as they represent the passages through which individu-
als can travel in order to reach accumulated resources. Inversely keys
and the use of keys also show the passages through which individ-
uals cannot pass without permission, and, since the use of keys and
the locking of doors is increasing around the world, people’s access
to accumulated resources is becoming more selective and regulated.
Most societies with which we are familiar have had some type of
key, and in museum exhibitions one can find keys from ancient Egypt
and Greece, classical Rome, India, and China as well as from less
familiar places, such as Tanimbar, Surinam, and the Faroe Islands.
Keys are depicted in the relics of many cultures and mentioned in
30 Civilizing the Public Sphere

written works such as The Odyssey and the Bible. As the Roman
Empire expanded so too did the use of keys; after its fall, the use
of keys declined for centuries, probably as a consequence of the lim-
ited resources available to people following the empire’s demise. The
use of keys became more exclusive and symbolic, and keys from this
period are regarded as works of art made by specially trained artisans.
In museums and private collections, one can admire elegant, tech-
nically sophisticated examples of keys and locks, which were part of
apprentices’ final exam work (see illustrations in Figure 2.3).
Ornamental keys often locked the doors of churches, convents,
the homes of the nobility, or the coffers in those buildings. Until
the Industrial Revolution, only a fairly small proportion of the
population used keys. With advances in technology and the devel-
opment of mass-production processes, key ownership became more
widespread. Industry could produce inexpensive keys, and mass pro-
duction meant that more people owned something – a house or a
coffer – to lock and something of value to lock inside them.
Through a series of ingenious inventions, technological advances,
and the development of new products, keys and locks have become
more and more sophisticated. Chubb detector locks and cylinder
locks, which were developed during the Industrial Revolution, made
it possible for keys to have more precision-manufactured notches and
more notches per key, while locks with sensor mechanisms were also
precision-manufactured (see Figure 2.4 for illustration). Mass produc-
tion meant that keys could be made in large numbers. Keys and
locks became more diverse; the fittings between keys and locks could

Figure 2.3 Ornamental keys (reproductions from Eras 1957)

 Boundary Technologies and the Segmentation of Trust 31

Figure 2.4 Modern keys and sophisticated fittings (reproductions from

Phillips 2005)

be precision-manufactured; and in theory every lock could have a

unique key, thanks to small adjustments in the mass-produced series.
However, unique keys for unique locks created problems for the
large building complexes erected during and after the Industrial Rev-
olution. The division of labor and the differentiation of functions in
large organizations magnified the problems. In principle it was neces-
sary to manufacture duplicates for every unique key.2 The owner of a
business needed duplicate keys for every door; division heads needed
a set for every door in their respective departments; and perhaps the
cleaning crew would also require a set. Nevertheless the problem was
resolved by using complex permutation systems and by arranging the
keys into key hierarchies in which groups of unique locks could be
locked by a group key and groups of locks could be opened with keys
that were higher up in the hierarchy. This meant that keys for large
buildings were arranged in key hierarchies, in which a master key
could open all doors, section keys only doors in their own section,
and individual keys only a particular room (see Figure 2.5 for illus-
tration). Beginning from about this period, the use of entrusted keys
became increasingly prevalent at the same time as keys became linked
to key hierarchies.
Widespread technological development also brought with it
another revolution for keys. If one divides a key into two parts, we
will obtain a “front” part (the blade) and a “back” part (the bow).
32 Civilizing the Public Sphere

Figure 2.5 Key hierarchies (reproduction from Phillips 2005)

It is primarily the front part that was developed during the Industrial
Revolution. As the fitting between the key and the lock became more
refined and as keys were arranged in hierarchical relationships, the
back part of the key became flatter, simpler, and more anonymized;
in this sense, industrial mass production functioned as an equalizer
of status. The symbolic, the ornamental, and the personal became
standardized and conventional. For instance the more conspicuous,
status-laden symbol of car keys refers mostly to the make of the car
to which the keys belong. Car keys denote the symbolic properties
of the vehicle rather than the social relationship between the key
holder and the key – something that ornaments, symbols, and seals
previously represented. As the fitting between the key and the lock
has become “tighter”, the social relationship between the key holder
and the key has become weaker. This relationship has also been deter-
mined by the imperative of risk reduction. For reasons of security,
lost keys should not be traceable to their locks. You cannot put your
name or signature on a key; there is an obvious risk that the lock
 Boundary Technologies and the Segmentation of Trust 33

would be identified. Since keys generally lock unattended doors, it

is clear that a “recognized” key in the wrong hands could have fatal
consequences.
One way of managing this problem has been to combine two secu-
rity systems, one with keys and one with mechanical or electronic
codes that can authenticate an individual’s identity. The individual
is confirmed as being the rightful owner of the key, and the key can
open a unique lock. In this way, one recreates and resumes the rela-
tionship between the key and the key holder by joining something
that the individual has in his/her head with something the individ-
ual has in his/her hand. In this way, the individual is bound to key
hierarchies through a series of relatively unbroken relationships.

Spatial boundaries

Keys are useless without locks, and locks are on gates or doors. For
the most part, but not exclusively, keys go with locks and build-
ings. While keys lock the temporary openings of buildings, buildings
constitute a more permanent division of physical and social spaces.
Here one can differentiate between the outer perimeters of build-
ings and their internal boundaries. Outer perimeters constitute a line
of demarcation between those with legitimate reasons for being in
the building and those without such reasons who belong outside,
while internal boundaries distinguish between occasional guests and
those individuals who have a legitimate right to be there on a more
permanent basis.
Different types of buildings – from castles to houses – are both
physical and social realities and constitute materialized and sed-
imentary social relationships. In principle they can be read as a
series of binary codes, which create lines of demarcation between
the human being and nature, and between human beings. For exam-
ple, in dwellings, binary codes and their related symbols create lines
of demarcation between residents and non-residents, private and
public, as well as intimate and non-intimate spheres (Glassie 1975,
Habermas 1988). In public buildings, these physical and social bar-
riers constitute fundamental classifications of “strangers”, “visitors”,
and “residents”.
In his book Buildings and Power, the architectural historian Thomas
Markus convincingly describes how the material design of buildings
34 Civilizing the Public Sphere

creates and divides social relationships (Markus 1993). He describes

buildings as multilayered entities consisting of different zones.
The outermost zone, which is delimited by the main body of a
dwelling, keeps strangers in their place by restricting interaction
between strangers and those with a legitimate reason for access; it
keeps strangers outside and permits visitors and residents to pass.
Demarcators inside the building separate visitors and residents and
define the interface between the groups. Visitors meet residents at
some type of physical barrier, for example, locked doors and delim-
ited corridors, benches and cashiers’ desks in banks and businesses, or
the bar in pubs. The physical barriers define the zone that is intended
for residents; however, this in turn is a segmented zone with fluc-
tuating access for different groups of residents (see Figure 2.6 for
illustration).
Buildings are more than matter; they are also texts. As texts, they
consist of drawings, building regulations, pictures, instructions for
use, exhibitions, educational material for art and architecture, trends,
and literary narratives. These sorts of texts constitute part of the tacit
knowledge that creates two types of taxonomies: a building taxon-
omy and a social taxonomy. The first characterizes specific buildings
as different types of buildings and the second creates an activity tax-
onomy, which describes the activities carried out at different places
in the building and the people who carry them out. Taken together,
they form a type of knowledge that divides and classifies spaces
and human beings, constructs a correspondence between them, and
channels different groups of people into different types of places and
buildings. In this way, material and social domains are tied together.
Through this intertwining and correspondence, as well as through
the access requirements that exist at the boundaries, zones of trust
made up of various forms of trust within and between the zones also
develop. In this way, trust becomes conditionally context-bound to
the extent that social structures draw a line of demarcation between
human beings and resources. Without a specific reason, I cannot
distrust the people who pass by on the sidewalk below my office win-
dow; in the same way a bartender has faith in his customers as long
as they are standing on the other side of the bar, far away from his
cash register and alcohol supply.
Markus’s work elucidates the material demarcations of space and
the social relationships those demarcations create. Erving Goffman’s
 Boundary Technologies and the Segmentation of Trust 35

Figure 2.6 The hierarchization of space in four different types of buildings,

as represented in graphic form (reproductions from Markus 1993, originally
published in Hillier & Hanson, 1984)

intricate studies of social intercourse in the 1960s and 1970s are more
of a social cartography of the domains of social life, their bound-
aries, and the symbols and codes that human beings use in their daily
activities in order to signal that they are acting in a domain-specific
manner (Goffman 1974). Goffman calls these domains “regions”
and defines them as any location that is demarcated, to a certain
degree, by perceptions or “perception barriers”. For every appearance,
Goffman distinguishes three different regions. In order to reference
the location at which the appearance takes place, Goffman uses the
36 Civilizing the Public Sphere

concept “front region”. This is separated from a back region, which

is often nearby, via crossroads or guarded corridors. Both regions are
separated from the exterior via material or symbolic crossroads that
define a group as a social institution’s outsiders. Goffman is interested
in the forms of expression of these appearances and does not write
explicitly about trust. However, his relatively detailed illustrations are
excellent examples of how the trust that is created in different regions
is, on the one hand, region-specific and, on the other, conditioned
by the fact that the boundaries between zones are well maintained.
If the keys in previous examples present individuals’ division of the
social space into different trust zones, Goffman’s illustrations refer
to a more transient and flexible social equivalent, in which every
act creates its own zones. In what might appear as back regions, col-
lective habits develop, such as a decreased work pace, the exposure
of more intimate parts of the body, trusting and intimate relation-
ships among women, and/or the practice of violence against patients
in mental hospitals. What is characteristic of all these trust relation-
ships is that they are made possible by and only appear within the
perceptual and perception frameworks of a well-demarcated domain.
They represent the divisions between insiders and outsiders, such as
those practiced by participants in all social interaction with the help
of silent, uncoded, internalized classification schemes.

At the boundaries of organizations

Often these divisions of space are manifest at the boundaries of orga-

nizations and contribute to maintaining them. One can define an
organization in many different ways; however, one of its fundamen-
tal aspects is that it defines a social relationship as a dyad by setting
forth a line of demarcation between those who belong to an organi-
zation and those who do not (Weber 1983, Tilly 1998, Ahrne 1994).
Affiliation is a basic characteristic of organizations (Ahrne 1994). All
the methods we have discussed up to this point have been used by
organizations in order to create and guard the line of demarcation
between those who belong to them and those who do not.
By way of this dichotomy, organizations distinguish between two
forms of social relationships: those that take place within an organi-
zation and those that take place outside of it. The simplest and per-
haps most primitive means of distinguishing between outsiders and
 Boundary Technologies and the Segmentation of Trust 37

insiders has been to erect physical barriers and to make a distinction

between these two groups; the most conspicuous examples of this are
the large-scale walls in huge empires and the city walls so prevalent in
the Middle Ages. However, in practice, no organization has developed
a hermetically sealed boundary between itself and its environment.
Instead, access at the boundary is regulated by different forms of
selective entry, and any stay in an organization is controlled, super-
vised, and evaluated. A somewhat subtle way of bringing this about
is to channel different groups to the right location with the help of
architecture, by placing different types of physical or symbolic bar-
riers inside organizations. Another method is to provide individuals
with a unique organizational identity, which is recorded within the
organization. This practice presumes a widespread, well-developed
written language and, in this sense, is a modern construct.
A first step in equipping individuals with an organizational iden-
tity has been to provide them with unique first and last names, and to
associate secondary identification terms – such as date of birth, place
of birth, and information about their parents or their lineage – with
them. Often, but not necessarily, this identity is usually represented
numerically, as is the case with the Swedish system of personal iden-
tity numbers, even though the highly standardized Swedish system
is the exception rather than the rule. A second step is the creation
of comprehensive records for those people who have the right to
be part of an organization either permanently or temporarily, and
a third step is the creation of a system that represents the records
on separate identity cards that are carried by the organization’s mem-
bers. All types of boundary “crossings” in organizations imply the use
of these documents and representations of individuals in different
combinations, even in instances where one is recognized and does
not need to present them. Here one can make a rough distinction
between two different sorts of documents and representations: docu-
ments and representations that are used internally in an organization
and documents that are used to pass through the outer boundaries of
an organization, with an identity card as an example of the former
and a passport as an example of the latter.
It is relatively easy to associate identification documents with the
growth of the state, even though the church was involved to a cer-
tain extent. It was the state’s need for taxes and soldiers that created
the first, albeit rudimentary, systems for charting the population and
38 Civilizing the Public Sphere

its resources. However it was primarily the rise of the modern insti-
tution of citizenship in the aftermath of the French Revolution that
led to the systematized recording of information about the popula-
tion and to the issuing of identity cards (Brubaker 1992, Scott 1998,
Torpey 2000). Through processes of imitation, the system of register-
ing the population and issuing identity cards spread to most parts of
the globe, and, as a result of international accords, the passport sys-
tem became universal. While the ability of countries to manage this
system has varied, on the whole states have improved their capacity
markedly, in particular, their ability to guard their borders. In this
sense, it is only those country borders located in unguarded areas,
such as in the oceans and mountains, that can be crossed without
documentation.
The system of “registered affiliation” (see Ahrne 1990), originally
the preserve of the state, has been mirrored through imitation in
other types of organizations, although the general propagation of
reading and writing proficiency has been an important prerequisite
in this dissemination process. Associations have membership rolls
and membership cards, companies have share registers and shares,
employees have company cards, and political parties have member-
ship rolls and party books. More recent types of cards and registers
used in organizations other than states are simpler, because they are
based on the use of state identification cards as both the basis for
verifying individuals and for creating organizational registers. In this
regard, the growth of the state is a fundamental condition for the
growth of organizational entities in general.
Physical or symbolic barriers and identification documents are rel-
evant for the internal surveillance in organizations and the external
boundaries of organizations. At first glance, the relationship between
internal surveillance and border control would appear to be the
reverse, since internal surveillance and border control are associated
with high costs. Indeed, the more rigid is the control at an external
border, the less is the need for the internal surveillance that permits
freer movement in the area bounded by the border. Similarly, uncon-
trolled external borders seem to require more internal surveillance.
The exaggerated praise from anarchists and liberals for the medieval
city offers an illustration of the first case: the romanticized free-
dom of movement, openness, and reciprocity within the city’s limits
entailed more rigid surveillance at the city’s gates; the rigid external
 Boundary Technologies and the Segmentation of Trust 39

surveillance at the city walls was a vital prerequisite for internal open-
ness. An illustration of the second case is found in migration research:
when migration to Sweden prior to the 1970s was open and entailed
almost no border control, internal surveillance was more intense.
The Labor Market Administration kept track of immigrants, allowing
them to work only in certain occupations and requiring permission
for them to relocate to another place. Around 1970, when border
control became tighter, the movements of immigrants were followed
less closely. They were allowed to seek employment anywhere they
wished and to move more freely around the country (Frank 2005).
Inside organizations life is controlled and examined, and individ-
ual performance and other qualities are tested and recorded with
more or less accuracy and more or less precision. Both the permanent
inhabitants of organizations and more occasional ones are observed,
recorded, and evaluated: schools have registration systems for teach-
ers and students, daycare centers have systems for documenting
children’s development, and hospitals have systems for evaluating
midwives’ performance as well as monitoring patients’ vital statistics.
The growth and expansion of organizations has led to a situation in
which more and more individuals are the subjects of organizational
observation and examination, and many aspects of an individual’s
life are examined and evaluated. In essence the growth of the orga-
nizational testing and surveillance industry reflects a distrust of the
individual: a test supposedly reveals an individual’s true personality
that individuals try to hide, while surveillance has its foundations in
the perception that individuals behave differently when not watched
(see Hanson 1993). However, the observation of individuals by orga-
nizations is usually represented in documents, such as tests, exams,
certificates, and grades, or symbols of advancement, and in order to
be trusted individuals utilize the organization’s observations to sup-
port their claims on our trust. Trust is not based on the person who
is to be trusted but on the organization that examines and issues
certificates with codified information about its observations. Even if
I possess sufficient knowledge about sociology, I am not entrusted to
teach at the university if I cannot show my doctoral diploma from
Stockholm University, Sweden. In the same way, my insurance com-
pany does not rely on a self-declaration of good health unless it is
confirmed at a hospital or at least by a doctor, who typically displays
his/her diplomas on the office walls. People are not trusted on the
40 Civilizing the Public Sphere

basis of their capabilities, or lack thereof, but rather through the cod-
ified representations of those capabilities that organizations create.
The organization then becomes the mechanism that sheds light on
the individual, allowing a complete stranger to be trusted by another.
Individuals have many talents and skills, but if they have not been
observed or documented by an organization, they cannot form a basis
for the trust of strangers. The explosive spread of the curriculum vitae
from the academic world to other sectors of society represents just
one aspect of this process, through which organizational observa-
tions of an individual are brought together in one document. The
individual is trusted to the extent that the organizations that make
the observations are trusted.

A fusion of keys and identity cards

However, on the whole, it appears that the reversed relationship

between border control and organizational surveillance has changed
character in recent years. Technological development has made the
use of border control techniques, identity cards, and other methods
for identifying and observing individuals cheaper and employable
on a different scale altogether. The practices of border control and
surveillance inside organizations can be used simultaneously and by
many different people. At a time when many people talk about the
diminishing importance of boundaries, it seems that in actuality the
use of border and surveillance technology has escalated, which gen-
erally gives the impression that the two technologies are intertwined.
Let us now see how.
On the one hand, we have seen the growth of the key industry
and, on the other, the growth of identity cards and related docu-
ments. Previously we divided keys into two parts, the back, which
relates to the bearer, and the front, which relates to the fitting of the
lock. We have also seen how the back part was anonymized, how the
relationship between the owner and the key was weakened through
industrial methods of mass production, and how the fitting between
the key and the lock became stronger. Technological development
has once again strengthened the first relationship through an even
stronger link between the individual’s personality and the lock by cre-
ating functional equivalents, which make a relationship between the
individual and the keyhole more direct. This has occurred because
 Boundary Technologies and the Segmentation of Trust 41

technology has made possible a fusion of the key and the identity
card, which is materialized in different types of coded cards.
The first development applies to the lock itself, which seems to
have followed general technological advances, whereby technology
has become more widespread in everyday use but at the same time
more hidden. Here the lock has lost its keyhole and is no longer
visible from the outside of a door but rather is built into the door
mechanism itself; similarly the keyhole, which previously verified the
key, has changed places and is no longer in the door but next to it.
Moreover it is no longer a keyhole but an electronic scanner; this
scanner verifies cards, not keys.
Today there are more than a dozen different types of cards, from
simple cards with barcodes to more advanced varieties that include
biometric information. In their simple form entry cards are devices
that identify individuals, and pin codes are devices that verify the
individual. In this sense, the simple cards are only the functional
equivalent of keys. More sophisticated entry cards, however, reflect
the fusion of an identity card and a key. Electronic systems control-
ling access eliminate the physical use of keys by artificially bridging
the distance between the individual and the fitting of the old key-
hole, and by making the lock invisible. Information about an indi-
vidual can be stored on the card, and the electronic scanner can read
the individual’s identity directly rather than indirectly via a key. Sup-
plementary routines involving pin codes or other types of readers and
scanning devices can verify that the bearer of the card is its rightful
owner.
Cheap computers and other instruments for scanning information
have led to a veritable explosion in the use of cards and electronic
scanners. This explosion is more obvious in newer buildings than in
older ones. For example, in a relatively recently built complex such
as Södertörn University, Sweden, the author must use his card three
times to move back and forth between two workplaces. However, the
explosion is also evident in older buildings. At Stockholm Univer-
sity’s Department of Sociology, where the author was once a student,
a card is now needed to take the elevator to the ninth floor after
regular hours; this was not the case two decades ago.
If keys and locks originally had two functions to materialize – the
distinction between human beings and between guarded/unguarded
resources – the function now seems to have changed character, since
42 Civilizing the Public Sphere

electronic border control systems exist primarily to shut out more

people and shut in more expensive and concentrated resources. This
is fairly evident from the two university examples I cited above.
There may be some truth in the claim that the process of locking up
academic life goes hand in hand with the democratization process,
which has reduced the distance between the instructor and students,
thereby creating new requirements for distancing. Nevertheless it
is rather obvious that the process of locking up operates along-
side the increased use today of expensive equipment in the social
sciences and humanities faculties for research and other purposes,
activities that were previously rather labor-intensive. The primary
function of locking up is to prevent students from gaining access
to relatively unguarded resources in the corridors of academia. For
example, at Södertörn University, where the architects’ ambition
from the beginning was to create an open university, one without
social and spatial distances between staff and students, the radical
(from a pedagogical standpoint) head of the sociology department
decided to install a security system with pass cards for staff after
sociology students began to use, with no permission, the expen-
sive, technologically advanced copying machines at night and on the
weekends. What we see here is just one illustration of a long process
in which the two primary functions of locking up – to maintain the
distinction between human beings and between guarded/unguarded
resources – have slowly turned into an arrangement that creates and
maintains a distinction between the human being and unguarded
resources.
More advanced border control systems go even further in every
aspect described up to this point. Previously we have seen that an
important prerequisite for organizational border surveillance was to
furnish individuals with first names and last names – an organi-
zational identity – and create an organizational directory, whereby
individuals would be identified directly or indirectly by being recog-
nized by a human or artificial organizational border guard. Modern
equipment makes it possible to create organizational directories
without providing individuals with an organizational identity, since
modern electronic scanners can read the biometrical data of human
beings and store the information in organization directories. In their
most extreme forms, new border surveillance systems use the individ-
ual as a fitting by converting electronic readings of an individual into
 Boundary Technologies and the Segmentation of Trust 43

identification, verification, and keys all at the same time. The unique
features of individuals, such as fingerprints, iris and pupil character-
istics, face shapes, and voice characteristics are now used as keys,
which are quickly read with advanced scanning methods and veri-
fied through a database check. All of this can happen in significantly
compressed timeframes. For example, it takes just a few seconds for a
modern system to identify individuals by comparing several hundred
thousand iris points.3
In more sophisticated variants of electronic pass systems, bound-
ary control and internal organizational surveillance are built into the
same process by providing individuals with a proximity card and sen-
sors, which register their movements in buildings. In order for all
these systems to work, they must be connected to a system of barri-
ers that define which individual has access to what, in both a physical
and an electronic sense, and all the systems must be built on a num-
ber of fundamental principles. In a well-known instruction manual
for security construction, these principles are formulated with the
following three Ds:

Define: provide clear boundary markings of the area to be

protected
Delay: delay unwanted traffic, but not necessarily
Direct: direct traffic to proper entrances.
(Konicek & Little 1997: 58)

In a remarkable way, these electronic forms for border control and

surveillance do the same thing that architecture did physically in
older buildings: they erect electronic walls that separate the visitors
from the inhabitants, structure their interaction, and sort the inhab-
itants into different categories. However, at the openings of these
barriers, namely their access points, it is the anatomy of the body that
is used as a fitting to an ever greater extent. The pin code in combi-
nation with the key used to link what individuals had in their heads
with what individuals had in their hands. Nonetheless what the indi-
vidual had in his/her head (the pin code) could be transferred to other
individuals in the same way that a key could be lent to another per-
son. At no other point in history has organizational border control
been able to link an identity to access points as rigidly as it does now,
44 Civilizing the Public Sphere

when keys have in some way been “imprinted” in the human body.
The body is the key.
At the beginning of this chapter, we saw how the Berlin key easily
revealed the dual function of all keys. The Berlin key locks out other
individuals when the inhabitants are at home and locks in resources
when no one is at home. The first function creates and maintains a
social distinction between human beings while the second establishes
a line of demarcation between guarded and unguarded resources.
We have also seen how the functions of keys and identity cards have
gradually changed in character and been transformed into a func-
tion that creates and maintains the social distinction between human
beings and guarded resources, largely by enclosing the unguarded
resources and selecting those individuals who have access to the
resources in a more rigid, sophisticated way. This function of keys
existed previously, but now, with technological development and
the subsequent accumulation of resources, the function manifests
itself in purer and more generalized forms. As a result of protracted
rationalization processes that are going on in all kinds of organiza-
tions, these organizations have become less labor-intensive and more
resource-intensive (see for instance Chapter 6). This means that more
resources will be guarded, and access and surveillance will become
trickier to regulate and more selective.

The segmentation of trust and the problem

of transparency

We have seen how the use of keys and other architectural, social,
and organizational methods for demarcating borders creates private,
spatial, social, and organizational zones of trust by segmenting social
space. Within the social or physical frameworks of every zone, spe-
cific forms of trust and different trust problems arise. The trust
developed in each zone is conditional trust. It functions as long as
the right people are in the right zone, which, in turn, is dependent
on the proper functioning of border configurations. If, for example,
we return to Goffman’s theatrical metaphors, the audience’s appre-
ciation of a play would not be considered genuine if some of the
actors mingled with the audience, and what colleagues confide to
one another in locked academic corridors is not the same as what stu-
dents hear in teacher–student encounters. In the same way, I have no
 Boundary Technologies and the Segmentation of Trust 45

reason to distrust the people walking on the street outside my house

as long as they stay away from my clearly demarcated property. Trust
works as long as a physical or social border separates the groups in
question. Problems arise when the theatre-going public mingles with
the actors, when teachers hang out with students or when passersby
set foot on my lawn.
We have seen that the trust that develops through border controls
is a form of trust conditioned on the basis of the zone created by
the borders. It is also a hierarchical, one-way, asymmetrical form of
trust. If, for instance, one considers the order of precedence for indi-
viduals with the help of keys, a group’s guarding of its domain, or
an organization’s division of space into zones, it is rather obvious
that this is about trust based on conditions laid down by individ-
uals, groups, or organizations from within. For those who do not
have keys, who have been excluded from a group, or cannot cross
an organization’s line of demarcation, the problem manifests itself
in reverse: instead of creating trust, the borders create a problem of
transparency, and this problem is common to all closed social rela-
tionships. At one and the same time, boundaries create trust within
a delimited area and a reason to be on one’s guard; when the prob-
lem of trust is resolved with the use of boundaries, the problem of
transparency is created. I believe this is the rationale for current dis-
cussions about the problem of trust. New boundaries in social life
create trust within boundaries but a problem of trust with regards to
the outside. As a result of the many and new social and organiza-
tional boundaries being created, the issue of trust in contemporary
society is manifested as a major problem. In the next few chapters,
we will discuss in more detail several types of boundaries, old and
new; the ways they can create or resolve problems of trust; and the
social technologies available for producing trust in segmented spaces
and closed social relationships.
3
Structured Skepticism and the
Production of Trust

Pathologizing distrust

There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and
preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches,
and the like . . . But prudent minds have, as a natural gift, one
safeguard which is the common possession of all, and this
applies especially to the dealings of democracies. What is
this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you
must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm.

The quote above is taken from the Second Philippic, a speech to the
Athenian demos given by Demosthenes in 344–343 BC with the pur-
pose of highlighting the dangers awaiting democracy in Athens if the
Macedonian King Philip gained ground. Even though the words of
Demosthenes are an elegant rhetorical overestimation of democracy’s
ability to defend itself – and in a cynical way history has proba-
bly reminded us of this – it should be stated without reservation
that skepticism is conceived of as a basic constituent for democ-
racy’s functioning ever since democracy was founded in the cities of
ancient Greece. Indeed, most of the forms of democracy and its prac-
tice are institutionalized forms of skepticism. That those in authority
are elected and re-elected, that a number of democracies have formal
limits as to how many times a person can be re-elected, that there
are constitutional principles and controls for the division of power –
these are all examples of democratic principles and practices founded
on the distrust of power and its consolidation, or intended to protect

46
 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 47

against the abuse of power. In fact it is “one of the paradoxes of

democracy to institutionalize distrust for the sake of trust” (Sztompka
1998). This chapter extends the scope of the discussion from democ-
racy to Western society and explores different, more structured, and
social forms of skepticism, and how this structured skepticism relates
to the production of trust in society.
In the previous chapter, we saw how different types of material,
social, and organizational barriers segment the social space and cre-
ate zones of trust and trust hierarchies. The trust developed within
or between these barriers is situational trust in the sense that trust
exists to the extent that a boundary between two social domains
is maintained. When borders are not maintained, the special kind
of trust that develops within the delineated area is undermined or
transformed into surveillance.
Material and social boundaries of this kind segment social space
and divide social relationships. They are relevant to trust in two ways.
Firstly, they create a special type of trust between participants in each
zone, and, secondly, they rank the physical and social space in dif-
ferent zones of trust. The segmenting of space allows social life to go
on fairly unproblematically, given that the boundaries work or that
people understand and accept the symbolic markers that often exist
in social life instead of boundaries. The literature on trust has neither
space nor material life as points of reference for understanding how
social life works. Yet the boundaries in this way produce both trust
and distrust. With trust, they resolve numerous problems for those
within the boundary and at the same time create problems of trust
for those outside. By resolving the problem of trust through the use of
material, social, and organizational boundaries, problems of distrust
and transparency are created.
It is a general tendency in the social sciences, and particularly so
in the literature on trust, to understand phenomena that occur as
oppositional pairs by concentrating on only one side of the pair.
Social scientists too often study exclusion without understanding
inclusion, changes in society without understanding stability, and
poverty without understanding wealth. The literature on trust has,
with few exceptions, concentrated on trust without understanding
its opposite: distrust. Of the many social scientists who have writ-
ten about trust, only Niklas Luhmann treats trust and distrust as two
functional equivalents. In his view, both trust and its opposite can
48 Civilizing the Public Sphere

have the same function: to reduce complexity in differentiated social

formations (Luhmann 1979). In this sense, Luhmann’s work on trust
is theoretically more interesting than that of his followers, who seem
to have read his thoughts about trust through secondary literature
about Luhmann, and therefore miss one of the essential arguments
in his discussion. Distrust appears in later works as a social pathology
in contemporary democracies that needs to be cured with more trust.
In reality, as the quotation at the beginning of the chapter suggests,
there seems to be no valid reason why the opposite cannot hold true,
namely that too much trust in modern democracies becomes a patho-
logical condition that needs to be cured by distrust or – to use an older
term not yet contaminated with negative connotations – skepticism.
The temptation to adopt this point of view is not without signifi-
cance, especially when we consider the ease with which academics
writing on trust mythologize trust, networks, and social capital via
the social-anthropologization of the contemporary world, by largely
using concepts and analytical terms taken from pre-modern and
non-literary social formations and occasionally using anthropologi-
cal archetypes to explain the nature of current society. If there was an
amoral familism in the south of Italy, it was due to the extremely low
level and accessibility of education in this area and the state’s uneven
development in the region (see Chapter 1). In literary societies, the
foundation of trust changes and becomes dependent upon written
language and derivatives of written language, like records, identity
cards, promissory notes, contracts, marital contracts, employment
contracts, certificates, grades, references, and the social technology
that formalizes and objectifies everyday life, making it visible through
the textualization of both social relations and intentions.
In Sweden, for instance, where historically education was accessed
by the vast majority of the population relatively early, intrafamily
and intergenerational relations were regulated through written agree-
ments. The most well known of these were “exemption contracts”
(undantagskontrakt), which were used in large parts of the Swedish
countryside and which regulated the parental handover of the home-
stead in exchange for an “exemption”, an obligation to support the
parents. The exemption contracts are an early example of how social
distrust – namely parents not trusting their own children to fulfill
their promise of supporting them after taking over the homestead – is
transformed into trust via the written language. All in all, in what we
 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 49

call “modern society” or “Western society”, the written language and

its derivatives are important mechanisms for managing social distrust
and exist as basic prerequisites for the production of trust. In modern
societies you do not need to shake hands to reach an agreement, nor
do you need to place confidence in mechanisms derived from mys-
tifying codes of honor or aristocratic virtues to maintain contracts,
even if people probably do both, given the role that tradition has in
shaping modes of conduct. I usually wear a tie when I attend doc-
toral defenses to honor this special occasion in a doctoral student’s
life, but this ritual upgrading of the supervisor’s attire has very little
to do with the content and form of the ceremony itself.
Let us shift our attention now to another social practice that is
partly based on the written language but has been transformed into
a social technology, producing trust by institutionalizing social dis-
trust and thus creating mechanisms for the generalizing of trust –
“structured skepticism”. To avoid the special kind of mystification
that often occurs when examples taken from “exotic” and relatively
unknown societies are used, I will illustrate my reasoning with the
simple, familiar, and over-explicit examples of fairly modern, well-
known institutions. I also consider these institutions of “structured
skepticism” to be significant breakthroughs in social development
and the real social capital in our societies, in contrast to the litera-
ture on trust and all of the traditions that consider social capital to
be the sum of relatively private social relationships. If there is such a
capital as “social”, it should be embedded in social institutions and
not exist as private relationships. Much of what appears in the liter-
ature on social capital is nothing more than the elite’s privatization
of the public, and calling it “social” is nothing but a legitimization
of this privatization of the public, which has increasingly occurred
in many different ways over the course of the last few decades (see
Chapters 5 and 7).
Choosing modern institutions and exploring their relationship to
distrust and trust are also motivated by an additional logic. More than
a hundred years ago, the social anthropologist Jane Ellen Harrison
published several studies on ancient Greek culture (Harrison [1903]
1991). Harrison, a student of James George Frazer, was inspired by
him and his studies of institutions in primitive communities such
as magic, religion, and superstition. Frazer also became famous for
his ideas that the “wild” and the “civilized” shared qualities and
50 Civilizing the Public Sphere

that “superstitions” help maintain institutions like private owner-

ship, marriage, and piety in social life in general (Lienhardt 1968:
552). With Frazer’s conceptual framework in mind, Harrison turned
to ancient Greece and published several books on its religion and
society. Frazer’s work was eventually completely revised by following
detailed fieldwork, but his basic comparative institutional approach –
as well as Harrison’s – continues to be used in much of sociology
and social anthropology. Harrison – like her mentor – was criticized
repeatedly for using conceptual frameworks developed for primitive
societies to study ancient Greek society and, therefore, for missing
the critical historical breakthrough that ancient Greek society repre-
sented. The same criticism can be directed at the literature on trust
and social capital and especially at social scientists who conceive of
networks as the structuring principles of the future. By using concep-
tual frameworks from non-literate societies, this literature formulates
hypotheses and draws conclusions about contemporary relationships
that are either contingent upon non-literate societies or on some of
the few perpetual constants in human action; they nonetheless miss
discontinuities, historical breakthroughs, and critical junctures and
thus turn the peripheral into the key point of their argument.

Post hoc skepticism

Transparency in doctoral defenses

One conspicuous aspect of the public is its “habitual” nature.1 Prac-
tices are carried out in a predetermined order that often seems irra-
tional. Those routines frequently cause irritation, since they require
time and resources. A public defense of a doctoral thesis in sociol-
ogy in Sweden may be delayed by an average of six months due
to such practicalities as printing the dissertation and organizing the
event. Organizing a scientific seminar, preferably an informal one,
would have been simpler, since the status routines of academic life
are equalized here, and academic conversation can thrive.
In this way, it is not surprising that these routines are perceived
as “formalism”, “being a stickler for detail”, bureaucracy, “ritualism”,
or, in the case of academic public defenses, “rites of passage”, associ-
ated with other terms that have pejorative connotations and are often
used to capture their old-fashioned and improper nature. Dismissing
routines notoriously is a mistake of categorization. What is old need
 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 51

not necessarily be improper,2 and what is new does not always reflect
the more up-to-date. In recent years, we have been inundated with
anachronisms dressed in a post-modern linguistic suit.
Most academics who lecture at Swedish universities have doc-
toral degrees; that is, they have defended their dissertation in a
recognized scientific discipline. To become a doctor you first need
to finish your undergraduate studies in one subject and then be
accepted by a university to conduct research. Doctoral studies con-
sist of a combination of participation in courses and production of
a special kind of research, research that is partly independent. As a
graduate student, you have at least two supervisors assigned to you
who are normally professors or at least associate professors. Often a
good and sometimes close relationship develops between the super-
visor and the student, especially when the student conducts research
within the same theoretical school as the supervisor or develops some
of the supervisor’s ideas.
A basic prerequisite for becoming a doctor is that the graduate stu-
dent writes a dissertation. Consequently, it is not possible to receive a
doctoral degree without presenting the results of your research or sci-
entific thoughts in written form (a dissertation), even if the person in
question possesses the theoretical and methodical skills expected to
be awarded a doctoral degree. Since written texts are representations,
in this case, of the doctoral student’s research, they are associated
with a basic authorship issue. Who has actually written the disserta-
tion? Today this may seem an odd question, but this has not always
been the case. When the university system was initially established
and for some period after that time, it was not unusual for doctoral
students to hire others to write their dissertation or for the disserta-
tion to be more or less written by the professor, who was also in the
position of approving it. For instance, it is claimed that Carl Linnaeus
wrote several of his students’ doctoral theses.
A simple way to solve the question of the authorship of written
texts is to witness the production of texts, and that is more or less
what examination supervisors do in the examination hall. The text
(the answers to a test) is produced by a student in a definite place,
and for every text the real producer can be identified. A doctoral the-
sis cannot be “witnessed” throughout the production period, which
lasts on average more than four years, for economic and practical
reasons. For that reason, questions surrounding the authorship of
52 Civilizing the Public Sphere

theses are answered retrospectively via the questioning of candidates

in an effort to re-establish the connection between the text and the
author. Another issue relates to the assessment of the scientific foun-
dations of the dissertation. But who is the best judge and under what
conditions? Could it be the supervisor? A professor from the same
department? Where should this take place?
A dissertation takes a long time to write, and over the course of
the writing a set of social relationships develop around the doctoral
student: a relationship with the supervisor, a relationship to a group
of scientists to which the doctoral student may belong, or a relation-
ship to a theoretical school that the home institution or some of its
internal groupings belong to and/or associate with. All these relation-
ships raise questions around public defenses. The two hours allocated
to a public defense is probably one of the most rule-governed acts
in academia and, as with all institutions of structured skepticism,
one of the most structured spaces in social life. Generally, the set of
established rules and regulations is an attempt to structure time and
space and to address any issue regarding social relations that have
arisen over the course of research production and any institutional
and organizational interests associated with it.
A first set of rules concerns the stringent regulations governing the
time and place of the defense, which seem to be a common denom-
inator in almost all forms of organized skepticism. However, a basic
prerequisite for these is that the research must be objectified. The
dissertation has to be printed beforehand and defended at a pub-
lic defense. In the Swedish context, when the dissertation has been
printed, it must spikas; that is, the dissertation or a piece of paper con-
taining a short summary of the dissertation as well as the time and
place of the forthcoming defense must be formally and publically
announced and presented at the university. The spikning ceremony
must take place at least three weeks in advance during the semester.
Technically, while a dissertation can be examined over the vaca-
tion period, three semester weeks must pass before the final defense.
Nonetheless, as a rule the dissertation must be defended during the
semester period, since those who may object should be able to attend.
The defense itself cannot take place in just any lecture hall or sem-
inar room. Each university has a list of pre-specified locations in
which public defenses can take place, and those locations must be
large enough to accommodate a substantial audience. Almost all of
 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 53

these halls have the shape of an amphitheater, and there are special
places reserved for the key participants of the defense. The opponent
and the doctoral candidate are located at the front, and the members
of the evaluation committee – typically three academics, in rare cases
five – sit in the front row. The audience sits behind the committee.
The defense itself is chaired by a chairperson who structures the
discussion. The doctoral candidate is initially asked to note any addi-
tions or errors in the dissertation, and then the opponent is given
an opportunity to comment extensively on the work. The opponent
commences with a summary of the main arguments in the disserta-
tion and then begins a dialog directly with the candidate. After this
dialog, the opponent usually summarizes his or her impression of the
dissertation and the discussion, and the chairperson asks the mem-
bers of the evaluation committee if they have any questions. Being a
member of an evaluation committee is an unpaid, honorary task, and
the professors and senior lecturers who take part often do not have
time to scrutinize the dissertation. As a means of ensuring that the
committee members have also read the dissertation, a tradition has
developed at a number of universities and faculties whereby the com-
mittee members produce written comments about the dissertation,
but this is not yet a general, formalized practice. After the members
of the evaluation committee have commented, the audience may ask
questions. Shortly after the audience’s questions, if there are any, the
defense is over. The evaluation committee then meets separately and
discusses whether to approve the awarding of a doctoral title and
diploma.
The supervisor and the doctoral candidate are the two given
and non-exchangeable participants in the situation. There are rules
regarding who can be an opponent or part of the evaluation com-
mittee. The opponent typically is, at the least, a senior lecturer
and is not associated too closely with the candidate’s university or
with the two non-exchangeable participants. The supervisor cannot
become a member of the evaluation committee. One of the mem-
bers has to be active at another university, and one has to be active
at another department. We generally categorize these rules as per-
taining to rules governing “conflict of interests”. What is interesting
is that these rules try to achieve and clarify a social and organi-
zational differentiation in the roles of the main actors, separating
potentially close relationships and the interlacing of roles that can
54 Civilizing the Public Sphere

develop in long-term relationships, but also neutralizing different

interests during the assessment of academic work. Firstly, the rules
involve a differentiation of the roles between the doctoral student
and the supervisor. Secondly, the rules stipulate a differentiation of
the roles associated with “the professor”, who previously could have
been both the supervisor and the examiner. Finally, the rules stip-
ulate an organizational differentiation of the roles of the examiners,
with board members having organizational affiliation in different dis-
ciplines, departments, and universities. Refining and differentiating
the realms and roles has been one of the central social technologies
used in public life and democracy to produce trust; further illustrative
examples are provided throughout this book. In Chapter 4, I discuss
how a differentiated organizational life developed in Sweden but not
in Greece, and in Chapter 5, I consider and reflect on the conse-
quences of the current organizational intertwining visible in Sweden
today.
The audience is the most unregulated participant during the pub-
lic defense. There are no rules regarding admittance, and everybody
is free to ask questions. However, the role of the audience during
the actual defense has become that of a silent observer, since it is
unusual that anyone in the audience asks questions. But even a silent
audience that observes the defense has an important role to play.
The script for this role, however, should be sought in the domains
of informal life, and it represents academia’s informal evaluation of
its own institutions in everyday life. Although the audience is quite
silent during the defense itself, in a set of informal situations before,
during, and after the act, the audience is transformed into what in
ancient theater productions was called the chorós, a group of people
who “comment on the plot” behind the main act. As soon as the
chairperson declares the official part of the defense closed, this aca-
demic chorós starts – in the corridors, coffee rooms, and lunch rooms,
on cigarette breaks or in the mingling afterwards at the defense din-
ner, and especially in meetings between those who observed the
defense and those who did not. As opposed to the chorós of the the-
ater, which makes public comments, the academic version is more
“informal” in nature and takes place within the frames, to use soci-
ological terminology, of back stage interaction, the microcosm that
Erwing Goffman and his followers have a special liking for. It is
here that the dissertation is ranked according to informal academic
 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 55

scales, the opponent is either praised or considered to have failed,

and departments are rumored to be good or bad environments for
research. But it is also here that routines are commented upon and
submitted to informal scrutiny, and it is here that the silent audience
says what it does not dare say during the main act. “How was the
opponent?” is the most common question you hear after a defense,
but more scrutinizing questions are also asked: Was the opponent an
old friend of the supervisor? What about the evaluation committee?
Was it an “internal” examination? Without a doubt, the informal
judgments are based on the answers to these questions.
A defense lasts around two hours, for about the same time as an
academic seminar. Academic seminars are often far more informal
and, in most cases, the academic discussion is more stimulating, fruit-
ful, and vibrant than that found at defenses. In stark contrast to
seminars, the defense appears to be governed by rules, bureaucratic
but more so ritualistic. In this brief summary, I have accounted for
more than 10 rules associated with the act of defending a disserta-
tion and have described several routines, and I could make an even
more detailed description by chronicling several routines before and
after the defense itself. One could also argue that this is an irrational
activity. However, the defense act, as it is played out in Swedish aca-
demic settings, is a perfect example of post hoc skepticism consisting
of five basic elements. Firstly, it is based on the written language and
its objectification. Secondly, it corresponds to post hoc scrutiny since
it takes place afterwards. Thirdly, it has structured frames of time and
space. Fourthly, the entire act is based on refining and differentiat-
ing the roles of the participants involved. Finally, it is an act that is
witnessed by an audience. We shall now turn our attention to experi-
ments in order to elucidate some other substantial aspects of post hoc
skepticism.

Transparency through experiments of thought

This rigid examination could have been compared to an examina-
tion to become a journeyman in a trade or craft; once the doctoral
student has been examined and publicly demonstrated his or her
skills, the need for scrutiny is not as evident. The defense consti-
tutes the first, but not the sole, example of scrutiny associated with
academic life; others include appointments to posts, promotions,
the awarding of research funds, and the publication of research.
56 Civilizing the Public Sphere

Having an academic career implies constant exposure to questioning

via institutionalized mechanisms of distrust, and, paradoxically, the
more rigid the mechanisms, the more trustworthy the science and
the scientist.
Research is a long process that takes place within a broad spectrum
of practices, from laboratories – as is often the case with the natural
sciences – to isolated villages in South America or Africa, which is
often the case for social anthropologists. The defense, the structured
form of examination, occurs just once in a lifetime, even though
researchers can conduct research over the entire duration of their aca-
demic career. The issues surrounding the trustworthiness of research
often have more to do with the discovery of effective methods by
which to assess the validity and value of that research. Before mov-
ing on, it should be noted that none of the processes associated with
academic scrutiny necessarily produce a “true” science per se. This is
a much more complicated issue that will not be discussed here. What
will be considered are some of the social mechanisms developed and
employed to make scientific research trustworthy.
Robert Boyle (1627–1691) was an Irish natural philosopher and
chemist and is widely known as the originator of Boyle’s law, which
postulates the constant relationship between the pressure of gas and
its volume under constant temperature conditions. But he is also
known as the founder of the scientific practice that we today call the
experimental method, and there seems to be a scientific consensus
that he should be considered as such. His experiments with the air
pump now have a canonical place in scientific and pedagogical texts
and in the history of science (Shapin & Schaffer 1985: 3). It is this
practice that will now be considered to illustrate social technologies
that enable post hoc skepticism to produce trust.
Boyle tried to establish what is more colloquially today called “mat-
ters of fact”, namely facts that exist or can demonstrably be shown
to exist. For Boyle, experiences, even those resulting from controlled
experimental conditions, were not reliable if they were only experi-
enced by one person. As such, the idea is a fundamental declaration
of no confidence in one’s own experiences or those of others. Taking
this basic distrust as his foundation, Boyle developed a social technol-
ogy for making the experiences of others (in experimental situations)
reliable and thus created the dictum “facts existing or presumed to
exist”.
 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 57

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, two sociologists of science,

argue in their study of the academic dispute between Boyle and
Hobbes (Shapin & Schaffer 1985) that Boyle’s program uses three
technologies: a material technology that included the construction of
the air pump in which the experiments were performed, a literary
technology that made it possible for the results produced in the pump
to be made known to those who did not witness the experiments, and
finally a social technology that included the conventions that experi-
mental philosophers and scientists would use to be able to assess each
other’s scientific claims.
The air pump can be viewed today as quite a simple mechanism.
In its time, however, it was an expensive piece of equipment, con-
ceivably the cyclotron of its day. It consisted of a spherical glass
container to which a pump aggregate had been adapted. In the sphere
there was a sealable opening through which the actual experiment
apparatus could be inserted. When the device was inserted, air could
be pumped out using the mechanical aggregate, and experiments
could thus be performed in a vacuum. Together with other contem-
porary inventions, like the microscope and the telescope, these new
scientific innovations provided answers to the question of distrust
regarding the human capacity to perceive. These innovations, for bet-
ter or worse, assisted, expanded, and even replaced the senses. What
is trustworthy is that which the senses perceive, but this is further
supported and corrected by specially constructed instruments.3
According to Shapin and Schaffer, Boyle realized that the ability
of scientific experiments to produce facts depended not only on the
results of the experiments but also on a relevant scientific authority
accepting that the experiments produced the results in the proper
way. To receive this acceptance, Boyle worked on several fronts.
The first was to enable people, who could not witness the experi-
ments or their duplication, to perform the experiment, not in real
life but as an experiment of thought. As such, in lieu of literally wit-
nessing an experiment, those interested could do so “virtually” and
thus be able to gauge its reasonableness. This partly explains why
Boyle put a great deal of effort into creating naturalistic and richly
illustrated images of the air pump and the experimental environ-
ment with the help of engravers, establishing the conditions for
transgressing the boundary between science and artistic illustration,
and, as such, simplifying, concretizing, and objectifying the invisible.
58 Civilizing the Public Sphere

A more contemporary example of this can be seen in the exhibition

“Design4science”, held at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm during
the spring of 2008, with its beautiful illustrations from the field of
molecular biology.4 In addition to his contribution in transgressing
the boundary between science and art, Boyle advanced the literary
genre that later came to be known as the “experimental essay”, a
detailed and balanced text that described the equipment used dur-
ing an experiment and the environment in which it took place, and
which shed light on the way in which the experiment was performed
and its success or failure.
Another practice developed by Boyle was the performance of exper-
iments in public, enabling audiences to both witness and assess the
experiment. Laboratories, while being structured spaces, were also
relatively private spaces. In order to challenge their isolated nature,
Boyle performed his experiments at the Royal Society in London, a
well-structured semi-official space in which the air pump experiment
could be witnessed by others and where he could repeat and thus
further confirm his original results.
Boyle’s technological advances for establishing reliable science pro-
vide us with two central mechanisms for creating trust in relatively
closed spaces. One is the experiment of thought, whereby what peo-
ple cannot visibly assess for themselves can be reproduced mentally
with the help of conventions and rules; the other is visibility, mak-
ing the experiment visible and further verifying the results through
replication in public or structured semi-public spaces. I use the term
semi-structured public spaces here since the Royal Swedish Academy
of Sciences and its members continued to witness experiments in
a secluded space; the philosopher Hobbes considered such experi-
ments as not taking place in a public but in a private space. In a
famous quote he is said to have objected that “it is only my scien-
tific enemies that have gathered there”. The conventions that later
developed regarding the regulation of public defenses reflect how
objections similar to Hobbes’ were addressed by both opening up and
structuring the public sphere, mainly by assuring that the evaluation
committee is independent and unaffiliated with the main protago-
nists and by introducing regulations for the presence of the general
public.
Experiments of thought and visibility are important social tech-
nologies for producing trust in two other forms of structured
 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 59

skepticism. Radical transparency is a social technology that makes

power and the decision-making of power visible, while rule-based
transparency uses rules as frames of evaluation in experiments of
thought to transform distrust into trust in relatively closed organiza-
tions and thus neutralize the influence of interests in the decision-
making processes. We will continue with the second and third
mechanisms of structured skepticism.

Radical transparency

For visitors to capital cities, sites with a panoramic view are obvious
excursion destinations. It is almost impossible to imagine a capital
without such a setting, and many cities have several. Nature has often
provided a terrace on a hill or cliff, often captured by one of the city’s
powerful historical figures and turned into a castle, palace, church,
or monastery. If nature failed to play its part, then one of the city’s
powerful figures, past or present, has ensured that the capital city
has been bestowed with a church belvedere, city hall, skyscraper, TV
tower, or amusement park. Powerful actors in capital cities across the
world seem to have competed to provide their city with privileged
panoramic view sites and in this way present their version of the city
to visitors.
Belvederes are often equipped with binoculars, and the important
buildings in the city are typically depicted on maps so that visitors
can easily recognize them. While the temporary visitor settles for
just observing the city, the more ambitious visitor can perform more
sophisticated exercises. The belvedere is a surprisingly good outpost
for studying the history and social life of a city or country. Binocu-
lars and maps are useful tools, while research on the iconography of
cities provides those interested with a number of good leads. The first
clue concerns the space and dimensions of the city. Vertically, build-
ings can be interpreted as approximations of power configurations
and competition between different participants and groups; horizon-
tally, it is clear how social life has changed and been differentiated as
new key actors all break out from more complex social structures and
mark their relative independence by positioning themselves in the
urban power field with a building of their own. Buildings are a signa-
ture of power, as one famous political scientist put it (Lasswell 1979).
Other clues can be found in the patterns of the architecture, public
60 Civilizing the Public Sphere

monuments, and hierarchization of the public sphere (Therborn

2002). The iconography of the city’s strata of monuments, other
architecture and urban buildings is certainly an excellent tool for
deconstructing time in its global, national, and local rhythms.
It is generally accepted that buildings depict symbols of power,
representations of power configurations, or competition for power.
Michael Foucault’s recent popularity in large parts of the social sci-
ences has contributed to the metaphorical use of the architecture of
buildings to study the anatomy of the exercise of power in mod-
ern society and the subsequent disciplining of the population. The
Foucauldian metaphor is based on Jeremy Bentham’s 1791 draw-
ing depicting a prison called the Panopticon. The Panopticon is a
circular building with cells in the periphery and an all-seeing surveil-
lance point in the middle. The logic of the building ensures that the
internees are prevented from speaking to each other, and the supervi-
sor can observe them but not be observed. In this way, an asymmetry
of power is created between the supervisor and the supervised.
There were not many prisons built in the world that could mate-
rialize Bentham’s ideas, even though many think that the opposite
is true. For example, in most prisons internees can communicate
with each other and see their supervisor. Still, while the metaphor
offers an interesting illustration of the anatomy of power in mod-
ern society, it is not the only interesting illustration. Modern society
might not be as multi-faceted as the types of buildings in existence,
but, as Thomas Markus has noted, there is no reason to hold on to
just one metaphor to describe the exercise of power, the anatomy
of power, and the disciplining processes in modern society (Markus
1993).
Another process that runs through modernity is equally apparent,
and it moves in almost the opposite direction from the Foucauldian
one. It is the process of trying to civilize the elites and elucidate their
actions and decisions. I call it the mechanism of radical transparency
and will illustrate this with a comparison between two buildings,
the opera and the parliament, that can be viewed from a belvedere
in most of the world’s capitals. Observed from the distance of the
belvedere, the opera house and parliament are placed next to each
other and often constitute the main subject in harmonious postcards
of capital cities. But the proximity and harmony of the picture can
deceive the senses. In what follows, I will use the history of their
 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 61

construction to shed light on the historical breakthroughs that sepa-

rate them and use the architecture of the opera house largely to make
clearly visible the historical rupture that parliamentary buildings and
associated regulations implied.

Opera houses and discretionary power

Seen as an artistic genre, the opera originated in Italian cities in the
decades immediately before and after 1600. Initially created as an
“enjoyment for princes” and as a “strengthening of the power from
within”, the opera was employed subsequently and for a substan-
tial period, that is almost until the early 19th century and in some
instances after that, to entertain or venerate sovereigns, aristocrats,
or other wealthy patrons. Only in exceptional cases did it entertain a
broader audience, despite the fact that some seats were intended for
purchase in early-17th-century Venice (Grout & Grout 2003, p. 60).
The opera rapidly became a success in many Italian cities, most
likely reflecting the political situation there, where each city assumed
it should have its own opera house. But political, religious, and social
factors led to opera performances being restricted to just a few periods
during the year. For example, performances were not allowed during
Lent, on Sundays, or during religious festivals. Moreover, the possibil-
ity of holding performances during the summer was limited since the
nobility – which largely visited and financed the opera through their
sponsorship of theater boxes, principally for their own use – usually
stayed at their summer estates during that time. As a result, opera
performances were usually only held between Christmas and Shrove
Tuesday. These restrictions supposedly helped to extend Italian opera
further afield in Europe. This expansion, alongside developments in
artistic proficiency and the organizational and entrepreneurial skills
of impresarios, as well as the European aristocracy’s knowledge of
Latin, their need for culture and a more easy-going society, resulted
in a slightly freer opera culture. This diffusion seems to have been
more prevalent in German cities, where it appears that every town
built its own opera house. Opera establishments were concentrated
in the capital cities of the more centralized monarchies of the time
and, after 1800, in the newly formed nation-states. Soon every capital
and every town with cultural and political ambitions had their own
opera house, with opera established as high culture par excellence.
The enduring dominance of Italian artists and composers eventually
62 Civilizing the Public Sphere

diminished as the needs of the newly created states required the

creation of their own national myths and cultures. Similarly, new
genres developed along with a more varied repertoire that appealed
to the cultural ethos of the bourgeois classes and later to the political
ambitions of the working class movement.
Largely in synchronicity with the nationalization of the opera,
another process occurred across much of Europe at varying speeds
and intervals – the weakening of the nobility, its subsequent decrease
in number, and a change in the social composition of the audience.
Theater boxes were originally intended for the nobility, but from the
19th century onwards they were increasingly used and patronized by
the emerging and growing bourgeoisie. Over time, opera audiences
consisted of middle-class tourists, who could now easily transport
themselves to the capital by virtue of the development and expansion
of public services.
However, there is a relative constant in this expansion and differ-
entiation, which can be found in architecture.5 With the exception of
some newer opera houses that are built in the shape of an amphithe-
ater, where the intention of such architecture is to maximize the
visual experience and acoustics, opera houses across the world have
been built like beehives in a style labeled teatro all’italiana. Apart from
the modernist opera houses of later times, for example the Opera
House in Sydney, such buildings are richly ornamented both on the
outside and inside. Looking at opera houses around the world, you
can see how the classical tradition is mixed with national symbolism
and the architectural currents of those eras. The spatial architecture
of the hall, however, has remained fairly constant.
Ancient Greek theaters, like the ones in Epidavros or Dodoni, and
a number of theaters from the Roman Empire era, were built in the
shape of an amphitheater with an aim to equalize status, in the sense
that they were built for the citizens of the city, with an exception
perhaps for the first row, which was used by those with higher sta-
tus or the holders of authority. The vast majority of the seats were
more or less equal in value and transparency, and the elite sitting in
the front row could be observed by the audience. The architecture in
teatro all’italiana broke with this style of architecture. Built for and
financed by medieval noble families, or later by royal families, and
intended for the aristocracy or ambitious capitalists, the older opera
houses were principally constructed as relatively secluded spaces for
 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 63

discreet social intercourse for the elite rather than as an aesthetic and
acoustic experience. In the history of the opera, there are examples of
opera singing being accompanied by the sound of silver cutlery; the
Teatro di San Siro in Naples functioned as a gambling house. The sys-
tem of subscriptions for a theater box in the balconies transformed
noble families into the owners of them; they could more or less do as
they pleased. In his book about the culture of the Europeans, Donald
Sassoon describes the situation: “In upper-class circles it was regarded
as unfashionable to arrive on time. Listening to music or staying until
the end was deemed bourgeois, typical of Street merchants. Atten-
tiveness was a social faux pas. Conversations could take place in each
box and across boxes. People greeted each other loudly, got drunk
and sang” (Sassoon 2006: 233).
The opera houses of the beehive type are probably the most obvi-
ous historical examples of how social relationships in the form of
hierarchies and power asymmetries materialize in architecture. They
are reversed theaters in a specific way, if we use the theater metaphor
with its social meaning. It was the audience that was the show,
Sassoon argues, with the audience in the subscribed boxes more
or less constituting the scene: “One should regard the eighteenth-
century opera as a social event, in which the audience was part of
the performance and the opera houses as one of the public spaces
where the Parisian nobility could gather. Some of this continued
into the nineteenth century” (Sassoon 2006: 234). The boxes consti-
tute the scene, while the real unpenetrated back stage is behind the
boxes, providing the opportunity to gather discreetly.6 Additionally,
opera houses are also a form of panopticon, where the owners of the
boxes can observe as they please and perform for the audience with
discretion maintained in a controlled way (being observed under cir-
cumstances that they themselves can govern). The contrast to the
audience in the stalls is striking. That audience is always observable
and is more or less unable to observe what goes on behind the rails
of the boxes.

Parliaments and the desecration of power

The parliament buildings of the world’s capitals are as majestic as
their opera houses. Parliament buildings are generally newer than
opera houses, and the overwhelming majority of them were built
after 1800. Their exterior is as ornamental as that of opera houses,
64 Civilizing the Public Sphere

and it would be almost impossible to tell which building is the

parliament and which is the opera without a rather close study of
architectural styles and knowledge of architectural periods, although
national symbols are more amply represented in parliament buildings
than opera houses.
The Swedish Riksdag (Parliament) building is situated near the
Royal Opera House. However, distances can be measured in different
ways. Geographic distances are easy to measure, while social ones are
more difficult. Although the Opera and the Riksdag are placed near
one another in Stockholm and appear in postcards as a harmonic
cityscape, generally speaking, between them there is a long history of
social revolution, rebellion, mobilization from below, losses in war, or
mixture of them that is specific to the nation – and this history has
more or less meant that the positions of the audience and power have
been reversed. The modernization of social life has not only entailed
a refinement of the surveillance mechanisms of power and its disci-
plining of citizens but it has also meant that the social technologies
of citizens have developed in the opposite direction in an effort to
discipline or, if you prefer, to civilize the actions and decisions of
elite groups.
The Swedish Riksdag will soon start preparing for the celebration of
its 600th anniversary. History books consider a meeting held in the
town of Arboga in 1435 during a dramatic period in Swedish history
to be “birth certificate” of the Riksdag. However, this should instead
be viewed as a good illustration of how later historical narratives have
been used to construct a sense of rootedness, continuity, and unity
in times of long and often conflict-ridden historical processes.
The word Riksdag generally has three senses in Swedish: firstly,
the political and decision-making body; secondly, the period of the
year when the Riksdag assembles (nowadays called a Riksdag session);
and, thirdly, the actual building. Together they form a strictly reg-
ulated and fairly permanent meeting and decision-making process
today with distinct regulations for time and space, but that has not
always been the case. Let us first consider place and the parliamentary
session.
It took almost 350 years for the Swedish Riksdag to assemble per-
manently in Stockholm and 450 years before it moved to its current
location at Helgeandsholmen in Stockholm. For a long time, parlia-
mentary meetings were informal meetings which could take place in
 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 65

the open, for example in churchyards or convents. The Parliamentary

Act of 1617 bestowed the Riksdag with a more solid structure, but
neither the estates nor the parliamentary session had permanent
assembly halls. In addition, the Parliamentary session was limited to
three or four weeks. The first estate to receive a permanent assembly
hall was the nobility, which acquired the House of the Nobility in
1660, and that house constitutes a symbol of the power, the nobility
obtained during the realm of Gustav Adolf II and Axel Oxenstierna.
In the latter part of the 18th century, the Burghers moved to a new
exchange building erected at Stortorget, and the Peasants moved to
Bondeska palatset near Riddarhustorget. In the mid-1830s, the estates
acquired a common house, the Riksens ständers hus on the island of
Riddarholmen. The current parliamentary building was inaugurated
in 1905 and during the 1980s was integrated with the headquarters
of the Riksbank, the Swedish Central Bank, which was situated next
to it. During reconstruction, a new plenary hall was built, and it is to
this that our attention will now be directed.
The architecture of plenary halls across the world and the spatial
placement of the members of parliament reveal a small part of the
political culture of a country.7 For example, in many parliaments
the government is placed in a special part of the hall, facing the
members of parliament. The halls reflect clear constitutional distinc-
tions between the government and the parliament as well as the
parliament’s ambition to scrutinize the government’s activities. The
left–right dichotomy reflects both the spatial left–right but also strong
political dividing lines (see Goodsell 1988).
Plenary halls all over the world are built as amphitheaters or mod-
ifications of them. At the very front is the area for the chairman, and
then there are seats for the members of parliament in the amphithe-
ater, and further toward the back of the hall there is room for the
audience. The architecture of such halls is the opposite of that of
opera houses; or rather the roles of the audience and the elite have
been reversed in the sense that, in plenary halls, it is the audience
that observes and the elite that is being observed.
One of the main mechanisms available in modern democracies
for creating trust in political institutions – alongside participation in
mass movements and political parties – is distrust of political deci-
sions made or debated in relatively closed environments such as
those illustrated here with reference to opera boxes and the corridors
66 Civilizing the Public Sphere

of opera buildings. In order to ensure trust in political decisions, such

decisions should be made, formalized, and made visible in social
spaces that more or less resemble the architecture of parliamentary
halls. In Stockholm, the opera building is situated less than 200
meters from the Riksdag building. Yet, metaphorically speaking, com-
pelling elites to move from the discreet and relatively secluded forms
of opera buildings to the transparent social structures of the Riksdag
should probably be regarded as the greatest achievement of modern-
ization. This is despite theories about “the decline of the parliament”
formulated as early as the end of the 19th century, when the majority
of countries across the world did not have a parliament, and in light
of all the discussions about decisions not always being made in the
parliament.
The architecture of the Riksdag8 and the constitution and ordi-
nances regulating the forms of work there are typical examples of the
idea of radical transparency, meaning that decisions are legitimate and
trustworthy if they are made in the presence of the public and if the
interests behind such decisions are made visible under clear procedu-
ral frames of time and space developed beforehand. If the doctoral
defense constitutes the most rule-structured institution of academic
life, the Riksdag is probably its equivalent in politics.
The extensive set of rules structuring the work in the Riksdag’s
plenary hall is a result of complicated political, constitutional, and
legal struggles and doctrines, and I have no intention of discussing
them here. I will however emphasize three aspects of this framework:
the strictly regulated admission and presence of people in the hall,
the documentation and publication of the Riksdag’s work, and the
presence of the public.
With the exception of a few ceremonial occasions, the amphithe-
ater of the hall of the Riksdag is a place upon which only members of
the parliament and, occasionally, the cabinet may tread. As a result
of discussions about and struggles for the separation of powers, not
even kings – who for a significant period of time had a casting vote in
the Riksdag – have been allowed to be present during Riksdag delib-
erations. In Sweden, in the historical period called the Age of Liberty,
the king could be present in what was considered by many to be the
predecessor of the modern Riksdag during deliberations and had two
votes at his disposal according to the Riksdag act stipulated in 1723
 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 67

(Hadenius 1994: 81). But in the Riksdag Act of 1866, the presence of
the king and cabinet members was regulated in a separate article:

Sec 53. Neither the Parliament nor the individual Chambers may
deliberate or decide upon a matter in the presence of the King.
Members of the Government Offices have access to each Chamber,
and are entitled to take part in its deliberations but not in its deci-
sions, unless they are Members of the Chamber. However, in cases
where Members of the Government Offices have a mandate under
the Constitution to govern the Kingdom, or where the Regent is
acting on behalf of a King who is in his minority, they may not
attend the deliberations or decisions of the Chambers. In cases
that personally concern one of the Members of the Chamber, he
may attend the deliberations but not the decision.

The rules of admittance and electoral laws that were subsequently

made more stringent prevented space from being accorded for the
inappropriate influence of power and at the same time made visi-
ble the interests and motives shaping decisions. In this sense, the
space of decision-making was made more accessible. Until 1809 the
parliaments of the world were relatively closed spaces, and the pub-
lic had no insight into the procedures of political decision-making.
Sweden was the first country to add a provision in its constitution of
1809 that eventually became a standard for all parliaments. It stip-
ulates that the Riksdag keep minutes of its meetings, and a clean
copy of the minutes must be made in a reasonable amount of time,
printed, and made accessible to the public.
However, what was said during the meeting and what was pub-
lished did not have to be identical. Riksdag members could check
their statements before they were published, and the estates could
choose to exclude an entire discussion. Until 1830 the Swedish pub-
lic only had access to the edited texts, and the meetings of the
estates were not open to the public. But after the French Revolution,
there were demands across Europe for the public control of decision-
making, and various parliaments introduced the principle of allowing
the public to witness parliamentary deliberations and decisions.
These developments were adopted by the lower estates in Sweden,
especially the Burgers, who voted to open up their assemblies to the
68 Civilizing the Public Sphere

public and demanded that the other estates also ensure admittance to
their meetings. Not surprisingly, it was the nobility and the peasants
who resisted. Among the nobility it was noted, among other things,
that there were “the dangers of a fanatical intrusion from the galleries
in deliberations; the constraint that indulgence for the general popu-
lace could place on the Representative; . . . the inexperienced speaker’s
timidity in performing in front of such a body of listeners; . . . and
the incongruity of a proposal with the provisions of Parliamentary
Law concerning approval of the minutes to safeguard the right of
each Representative to express his opinion or the right of an Estate to
preclude a full discussion” (Starbäck & Bäckström 1885–1886: 206).
It is not altogether difficult to understand the objections and resis-
tance. The regulations and the practice previously applied provided
room for discretion for those in authority. Individual members of the
Riksdag had the possibility to control and modify their public con-
duct, and the estates had the possibility to conceal entire discussions.
However, in March 1830, the Law for the Audience at the Assem-
bly of the Estates of the Realm was drawn up. After this, the public
or functional equivalents of it like the press witnessed the delibera-
tions on decisions in real time. Still, not all decisions are made in the
Riksdag, nor are decisions implemented only by the Riksdag. We will
now shift our attention to other forms of structured skepticism that
are relevant to decision-making and practice in public organizations.

Rule-based transparency

Parliaments are the main mechanism in modern democracies that

make visible the interests manifest in contemporary societies. Consti-
tutional rules and electoral laws structure the sampling processes and
thus regulate what interests are expressed in parliament. The form of
organization commonly known as “bureaucracy” has another logic.
It is one of the primary mechanisms for neutralizing interests, or,
in the words of Max Weber, a mechanism for controlling personal,
social, and particularistic interests (compare to Albrow 1972).
Discussions about bureaucracy are old and lengthy, as is the crit-
icism of bureaucracy. To summarize the critics, bureaucracy is a
series of “evil circles” that prevent it from dealing with exceptional
cases, learning from its mistakes, or changing and thus making it
impermeable, which leads to the concealment of its practices.
 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 69

This criticism is often based on empirical studies, and I do not

question their empirical validity. However, I see two theoretical
misapprehensions in the criticism. The first is that developments
involving certain social phenomena have been regarded as unique
problems for bureaucracy, and usually for the state bureaucracy. Take,
for instance, the problem postulated that bureaucracy is so difficult
to change. With time we have realized that inertia is not unique to
bureaucratic organizations but is a problem that in many ways affects
all types of organizations and, in the long-run, all types of structured
social relations (see Ahrne & Papakostas 2002, Papakostas 1995, and
especially Papakostas 1998). Another problem emphasized relates to
questions of transparency. Bureaucracy, like all types of closed social
relations, creates different boundaries. But compared with other orga-
nizational forms, bureaucracy is in fact a more open social institution
since it includes mechanisms for structured transparency that we
will consider in detail below. If we use the organizational forms
of the estates as an illustration, the estates appear to me, despite
their democratic structure, to be more impermeable organizations
for outsiders; the same can also be said about other types of social
associations, such as secret societies, camarillas, networks, and other
types of informal relations and associations that have recently been
heralded as bearers of “social capital”. They are based on inter-
nally dense social relations and trust or, to use modern terminology,
social capital within closed social relations, but they are not to be
trusted.
The second misapprehension that I see in this context is that the
partial malfunctions in bureaucracies have been emphasized as being
malfunctions inherent to the logic of bureaucracy. As I will demon-
strate soon, bureaucracies are organizations controlled by regulations.
These regulations are usually constructed to deal with the average
individual in a certain group. If the cases for that group that are to be
addressed in a bureaucracy are distributed “normally” in the group, or
can be aggregated in terms of categories, the rule based on the average
individual can be applied satisfactorily to all cases that are not excep-
tional. In exceptional cases, bureaucracies need either a signal that
the case is exceptional and should be treated as such or an organiza-
tional arrangement that addresses exceptional cases. It is then here,
in the handling of exceptional cases, that bureaucracies need orga-
nizational adaptability and flexible solutions. This problem, which
70 Civilizing the Public Sphere

relates to the residuals of bureaucracy, has today been transformed

in public and academic discourse into a more generic problem of
bureaucracy, and flexible organizational solutions for more or less
routine cases have been implemented, a practice that has in general
increased the costs of the public sector. In addition, regulations in
the public sector have increasingly assumed the character of frame
regulations, and this practice has resulted in individual organizations
and officials acquiring more discretionary powers and thus additional
autonomous space for interpretation, resulting in increased arbitrary
behavior in the interpretation of rules. The declining trust noted
in the public realm probably has its foundation here, because who
can trust the public when “citizens [with similar needs] attending
different agencies received different programs, those attending the
same office were granted variable opportunities, and the same person
attending the same bureau was often treated differently each time”,
as a study of shifts in contemporary Western public bureaucracies
finds (Considine 2001: 171).
Bureaucracy as a form of organization is marked by predictability of
outcomes, and, as I argue, enables “an experiment of thought” similar
to that discussed earlier in the section on experiments. Experiments
of thoughts can relate the nature of a case to a bureaucratically made
decision and thus assess the validity of the outcome. The matter of
fact of bureaucracy refers to the sets of rules and regulations and the
written decisions justifying how a case is handled. I call this type of
transparency rule-based transparency.
We have previously seen that experiments of thought in scien-
tific experiments are possible as a result of scientific conventions;
experiments of thought are possible in bureaucracies as a result
of a formal rule that works like a screen against which individual
cases are compared. For this formality to work, the rules must be
constructed adequately, and a number of internal and external con-
ditions are needed to facilitate the application of formality. In his
book When Formality Works, Arthur Stinchcombe summarized these
conditions under three headings: firstly, mechanisms that represent
the problems and solutions existing in given areas of society in an
adequate, economical, and comprehensive way; secondly, formality
must be communicated effectively to the parties involved for them
to understand the idea behind it; and thirdly, adjustment mecha-
nisms are needed to capture changed conditions and adjust formal
 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 71

abstraction systems to new circumstances (Stinchcombe 2001). I am

of the opinion that contemporary social science has relinquished the
idea that formality has functioned and can function under certain
conditions. I also regard “flexibility”, “informality”, “collaboration”,
and other key concepts and recopies of how the public should
be organized, which have increased in popularity and have largely
steered the organization of the public in new directions as part of the
problem and not as a solution to the problem.
It is not easy to describe what a bureaucratic organization is since
the term bureaucracy has acquired many meanings, both in every-
day language and in scientific discussions. Below, I only use the term
bureaucracy to mean a form of organization, and I mainly discuss
state bureaucracies. Despite claims about the diffusion of bureaucracy
across modern societies, it is quite easy to ascertain that bureaucracy
as a form of organization for the work of the state remains relatively
rare from a global perspective. Organizations that can be regarded
as reasonably good approximations of bureaucracy have existed in
some rather atypical states in northwestern Europe and, more spo-
radically, in the rest of the world. It seems as if the large share of the
population in these countries, which claims that it trusts the public,
is rather an expression of the historical connection between bureau-
cratic organizations and trust for the public. In his latest research, Bo
Rothstein – criticizing Putnam’s work – has illuminated and empha-
sized several aspects of this connection (see for instance Rothstein
2005, Rothstein & Stolle 2008b). I am also of the opinion that the
mechanism that makes bureaucracies work when civil society is well-
developed is not represented by the development of “civil spirit”,
but rather that civil society in this context has two functions. One
function relates to the idea that an autonomous civil society can –
paraphrasing an expression from Lennart Lundqvist (1998) – work
as “the guardians of bureaucracy”. The other function refers to the
aggregation of citizen interests in terms of categories, a basic pre-
requisite for the formality of a bureaucracy to work. Democracy has
historically not been a prerequisite for bureaucracy. However, democ-
racy can make bureaucracy work by creating, renewing, and making
durable the mechanisms that enable the formality of bureaucracy
to work. In the modern world, democracy and bureaucracy func-
tion as each other’s necessity, and neither of them can work without
the other. Without democracy, bureaucracy cannot work; similarly
72 Civilizing the Public Sphere

neither can a democracy exist without the regularity of formal rules

and the predictability of bureaucracy.
In contrast to the parliament – which seeks to integrate inter-
ests and make them visible in political decision-making processes –
bureaucracy is a form of organization that neutralizes interests and
attempts to keep them at bay, by introducing rules and routines
that create a number of dividing lines, for instance, between the
leader and the organization, a post and the holder of that post,
or the private and the public. A bureaucratic organization is above
all an institutionalized way of addressing society’s distrust in the
interference of particularistic interests in decision-making processes
and the implementation of decisions, irrespective of whether these
interests are expressed by elite groups, such as specific economic or
political interests and in society’s sometimes dense social relations,
or by the private matters and relations of individual post holders.
Max Weber has provided us with a description of this form of orga-
nization (Weber 1983). However, no organization has ever worked
this way, and nor was it Max Weber’s intention to write a guide for
bureaucratic organizations. Instead one can speak of bureaucracies
that tendentiously are close to the ideal type, and research in his-
torical sociology provides us ample knowledge about the social and
historical conditions that make this possible.
However, for a bureaucracy to work as a bureaucracy, it has to be
relatively screened off from the various interests in society. In the
international literature this is usually discussed as a question of
bureaucracy’s insulation from particularistic interests. Historically,
the states were embedded in society without sufficiently clear bound-
aries relative to particularistic interests. The most common examples
are the wealth of kings and states not being separated and officials
earning their living by charging for their services. Economic or politi-
cal elites could also interweave their interests with the interests of the
state, while networks between the “grassroot bureaucrats” of states
and the general public could subject the implementation of decisions
to “network sabotage”. This versatile social penetration of states was
later broken through processes of differentiation and disembedding,
and a relatively autonomous state bureaucracy developed, primar-
ily in some countries in northwestern Europe.9 This constituted the
model that was exported to and imported by other countries with
varying results, reflecting the historical and social circumstances
specific to each country.10 In the following chapter, I will discuss
 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 73

the conditions necessary for the development of autonomous, impar-

tial, and rule-governed organizations with reference to the Swedish
and Greek historical sequences of development. It is worth bear-
ing in mind that we can only ever discuss a relative autonomy,
since no state bureaucracy can be completely screened off from its
environment.
However, a boundary between the bureaucracy and its social envi-
ronment is an important prerequisite for a bureaucracy to work in
accordance with its inherent organizational logic, since the social
relations relevant to the organization and those outside are divided
into two by the boundary. But more prerequisites are needed.
An important input in all bureaucracies is the rules that are supposed
to constitute the nucleus of the bureaucracy. For a bureaucratic orga-
nization to be at all meaningful, it requires a mechanism that aggre-
gates citizens’ demands and expectations and defines them according
to social categories. In modern democracies, this is achieved through
political parties or other associations in civil society, but there have
also been functional equivalents in the form of reform-oriented social
scientists who have played the same role, albeit where there is a
democracy deficit. Based on this definition of interests in categories,
rules are constructed within each category to handle an average indi-
vidual or one who has been fictively constructed through political
processes.
Besides rules, citizen cases constitute an important input in a
bureaucratic organization. The cases of concrete citizens in a bureau-
cracy must be transformed into abstract organizational cases through
administrative, observational, and classifying schedules, with the
concrete citizen transformed into an abstract citizen described in
characteristics relevant to the organization. The bureaucratic orga-
nization makes decisions by applying rules to citizens that have been
constructed administratively. This gives the bureaucracy a calcula-
ble transparency, one that enables experiments of thought in order
to evaluate whether decisions are taken impartially. With a reason-
ably stable set of rules and regulations and with a mechanism that
can transform concrete individuals into abstract individuals, the out-
come becomes predictable as an application of a general rule in an
individual case.
A relative screening off from the particularities of society is an
important prerequisite for a bureaucratic organization to be able
to transform individuals into abstract administrative cases. Another
74 Civilizing the Public Sphere

prerequisite is that the set of rules is codified in a reasonably rigorous

way so that it can be easily interpreted by administrators and exten-
sive enough to grasp the problems in an area and provide solutions.
We have learned from Max Weber that an important prerequisite for
a bureaucratic organization is written language and that the office is
the center of the bureaucracy. You could say that the significance of
this is that decisions must be justified in writing and made by the
relevant office. Decisions that have not been put down in writing are
not decisions, and decisions not made at the office are not legitimate
since the situation surrounding the decision may be affected by non-
relevant factors. Another prerequisite is that citizens must be able to
understand this organizational abstraction process and the principle
of applying general rules to individual cases. For bureaucracy to be
able to function, it also requires citizens to have a relatively high level
of education, accept that they are transformed into abstract individ-
uals and moreover understand the operational logic of a bureaucracy
applying general rules to individual cases. If there is no possibility to
conduct experiments of thought using rules as a frame for evaluation,
no bureaucracy can be legitimated or trusted.
Without this type of social knowledge, a bureaucratic organization
is transformed into an alien entity, and it seems to me as though
the distrust toward “organization” that Edward Banfield discovered
among the illiterate population of the mountain villages in south-
ern Italy has its foundation in this. Without the social knowledge
of building organizations to aggregate their interests and without
the ability to perform the required experiment of thought, citizens
retreated to the practice of amoral familism, which Banfield inter-
preted as culture. The villagers regarded their cases as unique, since
the mechanisms that were supposed to structure interests in terms
of categories were non-existent and since they had not developed
an ability, through education, to understand the transformation of
an individual case into an abstract case by implementing a universal
rule. In other words, along with an ability to transform individual
cases into abstract cases addressed with the help of universal rules,
a working bureaucracy requires mechanisms for aggregating inter-
ests and a relatively high level of education among the population
in order to be considered trustworthy and legitimate.
It is perhaps this very triangle – a bureaucracy screened off
from particularistic interests, differentiated from mechanisms that
 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 75

aggregate the interests of citizens in terms of categories and a pop-

ulation with a high level of education – that constitutes its organi-
zational underpinnings and contributes to creating public trust. To a
growing extent, this triangle has been replaced in recent times by
other triangles where bureaucracy is interlaced with economic and
social interests (see Chapter 5), and the mechanisms of civil soci-
ety that are supposed to aggregate citizens’ interests have lost their
material proximity to citizens and thus their ability to adequately
aggregate citizens’ interests in terms of categories (see Chapter 6);
the sets of rules and regulations have become elastic. I will return
to the issue of intertwining and the rationalizations of civil society
in the following chapters, but before doing so I will address the issue
of elastic rules and regulations.
Earlier we identified an important prerequisite for formality to
work as being a set of rules and regulations and the effective com-
munication of these to people who will apply them or be subject to
their application so that they understand the purpose of the rules.
The rules must sufficiently abstract to effectively consider the cases
of groups; rules that are too narrow require too much effort to effec-
tively deal with a group’s cases and also result in many exemptions in
the form of exceptional cases. In some instances, this leads to the cre-
ation of more rules in order to deal with the exceptional cases, one of
the “vicious circles” associated with bureaucracy. The set of rules then
becomes too wide-ranging and difficult to survey, which leads to a
“fussy” bureaucracy instead of a bureaucracy that addresses the inter-
ests of citizens. Many state bureaucracies in Western Europe ended up
in this situation some two decades after World War II, when there was
widespread dissatisfaction with “fussy bureaucracy” (Ahrne 1985).
The Gordian or agnostic solution to this problem was to dismiss
the idea that formality could work at all. In a series of reforms
implemented in almost every Western European country with vary-
ing speed and scope, excessively detailed sets of rules have been
transformed into “frame laws” that presumably deal with each indi-
vidual case based on its own conditions and uniqueness. Frame laws
are important tools for managing difficult cases within some fields
of state intervention in social life, and implementation according
to frame-based sets of rules has been well justified in these fields.
As general solutions for public reform, however, these frame laws
have been unfortunate. Drawn up in terms that are too general, they
76 Civilizing the Public Sphere

have contributed to a decrease in the communicability of the rules.

With neither officials nor citizens knowing how to implement the
rules, the foundation for the “rule-based transparency” of bureau-
cracy is undermined since the “screen” that is supposed to be used
to understand and evaluate a specific outcome becomes ambiguous.
In this situation of “unstructured tyranny”, various informal and
unexpressed rules develop that originate from the closed and “trust-
ful” relations of primary groups (compare Abrahamsson 2007). This,
combined with the basic tendency to decentralize and autonomize
state authorities, which is visible in almost every country, has led
to the growth of organizational cultures that are hard to interpret
with “soft and discreet codes”, which even the most gifted and expe-
rienced researchers in the field of interpretative methods have not
been able to decode.

Proactive skepticism

Skepticism, a concept that has a long history and many connotations,

is a subject of study in a number of disciplines in the social sciences
and the humanities.11 Doubt is its foundational element, and an open
society is the premise for its existence. In its most common form,
skepticism appears randomly and in an unstructured manner. A sim-
ple illustration of this is my earlier examination of Edward Banfield’s
1958 work, published in the year I was born. An open society and
freedom for researchers and academics to choose their research ques-
tions are basic prerequisites in academia, but there are circumstances
that give rise to this form of skepticism. I happen to come from a
village in western Greece whose social structure very much resem-
bles the reality Banfield studied in southern Italy in the late 1950s,
and ever since I read the book as a doctoral student of sociology 20
years ago, I have considered the central arguments of his book to
be upside-down. Despite these times of strongly governed research,
I have had the rare opportunity to direct my research interests to this
field, thanks, in part, to the exceptional openness that prevails in the
environments in which I have conducted research since becoming a
doctor. One cannot underestimate the significance of basic academic
freedom and the circumstances necessary for the development of crit-
icism or skepticism, particularly in the field of the history of science
and in what we more generally refer to as the Western world.
 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 77

However, in this chapter I noted three other structured social prac-

tices of skepticism. It seems as though social life does not trust chance
or circumstance to examine itself, and, as such, mechanisms have
developed that capture in a more or less structured manner the
basic forms of social distrust and civilize it by transforming it into
structured skepticism. In this sense, structured skepticism becomes
a mechanism that channels and transforms social distrust into social
capital embedded in the social organization of society and generalizes
trust from closed social relations into general trust for social insti-
tutions. Three forms of structured skepticism have been introduced:
post hoc skepticism, illustrated by the examples of the doctoral defense
and scientific experiments; radical transparency, demonstrated via the
contrast between opera houses and parliament buildings; and rule-
based transparency, illustrated through a conditioned bureaucracy.
Nonetheless, one more form should be added: proactive skepticism,
which essentially implies a society with institutionalized practices
of skepticism. Institutionalized practices of skepticism have a civi-
lizing effect on all society primarily by establishing mechanisms that
separate, make visible, and neutralize interests that are manifest in
social life and transform reasonable expressions of social distrust into
structured practices of skepticism and thus civilize trust.
Without this transformation, social distrust could be transformed
into the cultural practices of “amoral familism” or widespread cyni-
cism and apathy for the public and the political realm. In the hands
of political entrepreneurs, it can be transformed into populist mass
movements against the basic conditions of democracy. The increas-
ing populism visible across much of Western Europe may simply
reflect the fact that the current forms of organizing the public realm
impede and obstruct institutions in generating and practicing struc-
tured skepticism. Despite its local variations, contemporary populism
in Europe has a common and often overlooked denominator: it tries
to capture existing social distrust and channel it into an asocial
movement directed against the conditions of democracy.12 It would
appear that social reformers recently provided an unexpected gift to
the political entrepreneurs of populism by suggesting and leading
the way for reforms that undermine and weaken the institutions of
structured skepticism (see Chapters 5 and 6).
Structured skepticism has so far been described as different institu-
tions existing on a social macro-level. Through processes of emulsion,
78 Civilizing the Public Sphere

these institutions have become institutions for the social organiza-

tion of everyday life. Variations in countries’ constitutions, with their
institutionalized or implied principles for the division of power and
differentiated roles, constitute the prototypes for the rules and activ-
ities of associations in civil society (compare Skocpol et al. 2000) and
thus become – through everyday practice – deeply imprinted on the
collective mind. It is in this way that the collective overreactions
to rule transgression seen over the past few years should be under-
stood. When politicians mix the private and public economy, when
decision-makers make decisions informally, when politicians social-
ize with the representatives of interests whose motives and goals are
not visible through public channels, or when the ambition of politi-
cians is to make decisions around the kitchen table, as a well-known
politician in Sweden noted in a radio interview a few years ago, this
constitutes not only a banal breech of the rules but also an attack on
the Western collective conscience and its institutions; it likewise pro-
duces intense reactions (see Jacobsson & Löfmarck 2008, Jacobsson &
Sandstedt 2005).
Since the times of Antigone, we have learned through this col-
lective conscience to admire individuals who protest against trans-
gressions and defend moral and ethical principles. Civil courage has
always been considered a virtue in Western societies. However, in our
times, civil courage has been transformed into a form of worship
expressed as collective tributes to the actions of fairly exceptional
individuals. The extreme media attention to various “lexes”, such as
“Lex Sarah” in Sweden, is just one example of this. Sarah Wägnert is
an assistant nurse who dared to step forward and report negligence in
a home for the elderly and received considerable media attention in
the fall of 2007. In March 2008, a search for “Lex Sarah” on Google
resulted in 225,000 matches, and a search for Sarah Wägnert on the
Internet shows that she remains a popular lecturer and attraction at
large events, like the 2006 Gothenburg Book Fair.13 But even though
I feel deep personal sympathy and appreciation for people who pos-
sess the inner strength to stand up to misconduct, I cannot just
applaud. The worship of the actions of exceptional individuals shows
that criticism, skepticism, and the right to express a dissenting opin-
ion – usually practiced each day by each and every one of us in our
routine activities without particular sacrifices – have today, through
reforms of the public realm, become the privilege of extraordinary
 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust 79

people. Ostracism, originally directed against power, has now to a

large extent become an instrument against those who express a dif-
ferent opinion, and resides in the hands of the powerful through soft
regulations, like organizational cultures, emphasizing loyalty to the
workplace and the intention of management. In such a climate of
silence, it is then unsurprising that actions of civil courage acquire
cult status.
4
What States Do People Trust
and How Do They Emerge?

Introduction

As demonstrated in Chapter 3, a well-functioning bureaucratic

organization of state activities is an important precondition for the
production of trust. But to claim that the vast majority of states in
the world work in a bureaucratic way is far from true; indeed, the
opposite holds true. Universal rules, if they exist, are implemented
in a rather particularistic fashion with limited and occasionally no
transparency, and are frequently combined with different forms and
degrees of corruption. I will explore corruption further in its more
common manifestation in the following chapter. In this chapter,
I consider in greater detail the social preconditions necessary for the
development of bureaucracy as a form for organizing state activities
and the development of the specific form of political corruption gen-
erally termed clientelism. In this endeavor, I will examine the case
countries of Sweden and Greece. Sweden has an international repu-
tation as a country where its citizens trust the state; in Greece the
opposite seems to be the case. I will now turn my attention to what
kind of states people trust and how they emerge.
In his book on the development of the state, Göran Therborn
writes, from a neo-Marxist perspective, that “[i]n the historical devel-
opment of this social dynamic a number of temporalities affect the
organization of the state” (1978: 45). Neo-Marxists are not alone in
recognizing that temporalities affect the organization of the state.
In a standard text on the state, written from a neo-Weberian posi-
tion, Gianfranco Poggi states that “the particular course taken by

80
 What States Do People Trust and How Do They Emerge? 81

the Western state was a highly contingent affair” (1990: 105) and
that the development of particular states must be understood with
an emphasis placed on this contingency (ibid. 99–100).
While agreeing on the importance of temporality and contingency,
Therborn and Poggi have different temporalities and contingencies
in mind. For Therborn, as for other neo-Marxists, the differences
between particular states should be understood with reference to
social classes and, more specifically, to the different rhythms of two
politicized class struggles: one between feudal lords and the capitalist
bourgeoisie, and the other between the bourgeoisie and the prole-
tariat (compare Mann 1993: 45). For Poggi and the neo-Weberians, it
is rather the temporalities of the state system and the availability of
state models that provide the key to understanding the course taken
by particular states.
Advocates of each theoretical tradition tend to argue in a rather
exclusive fashion as though there were only classes or only states sur-
rounding a particular state. In reality, however, both social classes and
other states constitute parts of the organizational environment of a
particular state and interact in ways that are not necessarily clearly
understood. Of course, the environments in which the states exist
are in themselves expressions not only of the temporalities of classes
and other states but also of the temporalities of other social forma-
tions, like voluntary organizations and families, or of social processes,
such as urbanization and the spread of literacy. These processes,
which are not typically considered in relation to the development
of the state, are equally important in developing our understanding
of it. I employ the same concepts of temporality and contingency
to explore the development of clientelism, or the lack of it, in two
European countries: Greece and Sweden.

Why is there no clientelism in Scandinavia?

There is broad agreement that Swedish public bureaucracies pos-

sess two forms of autonomy: from the central state and from the
particularities of civil life. Alongside these, there also exists a third
form, which has largely been taken for granted, namely autonomy
from political parties. The Greek state can be viewed as the opposite:
political control of state bureaucracies by government is exhaustive.
Ministers are usually responsible for and intervene in many matters
82 Civilizing the Public Sphere

that would be defined as bureaucratic rather than political in other

countries. For instance, it is not uncommon for changes in minis-
terial posts to lead to changes in the chain of command inside the
bureaucracy. State bureaucracies, in turn, are strongly influenced by
the particularities of civil life, and political parties are intertwined
with the state authorities to an extent unknown in Scandinavia. For
instance, it can take just a few moments to comprehend the polit-
ical sympathies of civil servants in Greece, while in Sweden one is
typically only able to make a qualified guess, if ever, after many years.
Non-Swedes probably question the extent to which clientelism
does not exist in Scandinavia, bearing in mind that it similarly
implies the existence of fascist practices without fascist parties or,
if you prefer, of a form of socialist politics without socialist parties.
To avoid the tendency of “Western” intellectuals to contrast ideal-
ized political models with corrupt practices, I will address this directly,
albeit somewhat briefly.
To my knowledge, Swedish academia has not researched
clientelism in Sweden in modern times. Reviewing the major socio-
logical works produced on the Swedish state, I found no instances of
the words “clientelism” or “political patronage” (Papakostas 1997).
Instead, young sociologists seem to be more concerned with prob-
lems stemming from the impersonal implementation of univer-
sal bureaucratic rules and the transformation of individuals into
administrative cases (for example, Johansson 1992) – questions that
researchers in other parts of the world would consider luxuries.
My personal impression is that some practices defined as clientelistic
elsewhere are not defined as such in Sweden. Therefore, one would
probably find more “particularism” in Sweden than one generally
assumes. The Swedish language does not have an appropriate indige-
nous word for clientelism, and, when journalists refer to clientelism
in other countries, they usually have to add that this is a prac-
tice where politicians exchange favors for political support. As such,
by and large, the practice of clientelism is relatively unknown in
Sweden.
Evidence from scientific research suggests that Swedish bureau-
cracy has worked in a fairly universalistic manner. In truth, some
of the cases that would be defined in terms of clientelism elsewhere
are explained in terms of administrative efficiency in Sweden.1 The
nature of the discourse in public debates tends to be bureaucratic and
 What States Do People Trust and How Do They Emerge? 83

rational rather than political, and although power struggles between

sectional or class interests are essential in understanding the form
and content of state institutions (Ahrne 1989, Korpi 1983, Therborn
1989), the implementation of the rules follows universalistic patterns
and is not mediated by political patronage. According to a standard
text on Swedish public administration, no patronage or spoils system
has existed in modern times (Heckscher 1958), and a strong legalis-
tic tradition of loyalty to the government and the public interest has
dominated the civil service (Mellburn 1979, Rothstein 1996: 80).
Students of labor movements know that asking counterfactual
questions like Sombart’s “Why is there no socialism in the United
States?” (Sombart [1906] 1976) are largely unhelpful in generat-
ing answers; indeed, it is perhaps more conducive to attempt to
explain how the actual outcomes were arrived at “as the gradual
crystallization of a limited array of patterns out of broad spec-
trum of possibilities” (Zolberg 1986: 401). My major aim here is to
answer questions stated factually, such as why state rules came to
be applied in a universalistic rather than in a particularistic manner
and why political parties became horizontal organizations based on
class rather than vertical networks. I use the expression “rather than”
with the intention of avoiding the fallacy of retrospective determin-
ism and interpreting actual outcomes as inevitable consequences of
antecedent factors. At certain points of time, social structures allow
several degrees of freedom, opening up a broad array of possibilities,
only one of which is actualized.
When Werner Sombart asked his question about socialism in the
United States, he had the predictions of Marxist doctrine in mind. He
believed that socialism was inevitable in modern capitalist industrial
societies and wanted to explain the relative delay in the development
of class consciousness in the United States. One cannot rely on an
equally strong theoretical proposition to ask a similar question about
clientelism in Scandinavia, bearing in mind the virtual ubiquitous-
ness of clientelism in Mediterranean Europe. There is no theory that
predicts the inevitability of clientelism, although advocates of mod-
ernization theory would argue that clientelism should disappear as
societies become more modern.
Clientelism is not associated with a particular type of society. How-
ever, some may think that it is more typical in un(der)developed
societies or that it depends on some kind of “mythical” preservation
84 Civilizing the Public Sphere

of traditions and anthropological archetypes of the inhabitants of

these societies. For instance, it is not unusual to find clientelism
in Greece attributed to the “oriental values” stemming from its
Ottoman past, or even to the patrimonial structure of the Byzantine
state. Such a narrow cultural explanation falls short when clientelism
is detected in societies without an “oriental” past, a Byzantine state
or a “Greek” anthropological nature.2
If culture fails to explain clientelism, could economic development
do better? Would people living in a prosperous society with a high
standard of living ever become engaged in clientelist exchanges?
One anticipates that the answer would be yes to the first ques-
tion and no to the second, and I certainly believe that there is
more substance to economic explanations than cultural ones. Yet
clientelist practices are not a common phenomenon in all eco-
nomically underdeveloped societies; similarly they are also found
in prosperous ones. For instance, a detailed Greek historiographic
study of the labor mobility of the urban poor reports that in about
80 per cent of the cases where people found jobs it was a result of
kinship networks and not political intermediation (Pizanias 1993).
Consideration of the practices associated with clientelism demon-
strates that they are not purely economic. Intermediating entrance
into working life is a common clientelist practice, but not the only
one. In reality, nearly all administrative matters become opportuni-
ties for clientelist exchanges. Clientelism is more a social and political
phenomenon than an economic or cultural one, and the Greek expe-
rience – and, of course, the experience of many other countries
(compare Eisenstadt & Roniger 1980: 46) – suggests that it does not
automatically disappear with economic development.
Still, social scientists have taken the development of universalistic
state structures as a natural evolution automatically coinciding with
economic development. A closer reading of the historical facts
and the sequences of development in Europe, however, calls this
assumption into question. As a Swedish political scientist correctly
observed (Blomqvist 1992), the development and maintenance of
universalistic state structures must likewise be explained as much as
the development of particularistic state structures. Indeed, I would
propose that it is rather more difficult to explain the development
of the taken-for-granted universalistic state in a few quite atypical
societies in the world.
 What States Do People Trust and How Do They Emerge? 85

A macrosociological explanation

I will now sketch the contours of a macrosociological explanation

by contrasting the Swedish and Greek sequences of development
to illustrate my argument. The comparison between Sweden and
Greece provides the researcher with a situation comparable to mul-
tiple natural simultaneous experiments enabling one to analyze the
different trajectories that lead to the development of predominantly
universalistic structures in one case and to a mixture of universalistic
and particularistic ones in the other.
Interpreting social practices as the outcome of history is as falla-
cious as saying that culture or economy can alone explain everything.
The historical features deemed important for a specific development
must be clearly identified. Explaining present practices with reference
to historical legacies that have persisted for centuries – a popular
research activity in some variants of historical institutionalism3 –
is problematic, especially given the plurality of social forms in any
country’s past and the low rate of innovation in terms of new ones.
It is always possible to find some roots for practices accepted today
in the past. The issue then is not to show that a legacy from the past
exists or that there are degrees of continuity between present and past
practices, but rather to examine how and why some of these became
dominant while others were suppressed.4 For example, there were
many manifestations of particularism in the early modern Swedish
state, among them patronage, many of which disappeared and gave
way to more universalistic practices.5 Similarly, the ambition to create
a universalistic state was present in Greece from the time of national
liberation, but during the course of modernization Greece did not
manage to free itself from particularistic practices. So, considering
Greece and Sweden from the viewpoint of the spectrum of possible
alternatives, these societies were more similar historically than has
previously been assumed. They have become more different as this
spectrum of alternatives gradually narrowed down to the established
alternatives.
In order to make my argument clear, I will use a comparative
logic in which historical outcomes are understood with reference to
the concept of timing and place them at the intersections of social
processes with different temporalities. In the words of one art his-
torian, it is like seeing historical outcomes as the product of many
86 Civilizing the Public Sphere

disparate “wheels of fortune” (Kubler 1962). There are many social

processes and numerous ways to describe and analyze them. I am
principally interested in organizational processes in a broad sense,
and my approach is materialistic, similar to Michael Mann’s “organi-
zational materialism” (Mann 1993: 36). The underlying theoretical
theme is based on the idea of the social landscape developed by
Göran Ahrne (1990, 1994) and the theoretical movement of orga-
nizational realism. One of the ideas behind this is that organizations
are the fabric of social life; social phenomena should be understood
primarily with reference to organizations and the relations between
them and not with reference to an all-encompassing system or a logic
intrinsic to societies. Combining Kubler’s metaphor of the disparate
wheels of fortune with the idea of the social landscape, historical out-
comes appear to be the product of the relative timing and historical
conjunctures of four histories with different temporalities: the histo-
ries of states, enterprises, voluntary associations, and families. Thus,
one must understand the forms of the state in terms of the state’s
relations to these other organizational contexts.
In a book about modernization in general and about state mod-
ernization in particular, Marion J. Levy writes that “No activities of
the members of any governments can be fully understood in terms
of the structures of the governments alone. The structure of politi-
cal allocation in terms of which the members of the society operate
in organizational contexts other than that of government are always
to some extent relevant to the governmental context itself” (Levy
1996a: 394). I define such an organizational context as a constella-
tion of organizations (Ahrne & Papakostas 1994) and understand the
development of state structures in Sweden and Greece with reference
to their respective constellations.
Clientelism is usually studied as an exchange relationship between
individuals with unequal power resources. The cultural frame for this
relationship has been the major focus of analysis: the literature on
clientelism, with its deep roots in social anthropology, has mainly
tried to understand clientelism as a phenomenon stemming from the
morals or cultural codes of small “backward” societies (Piattoni 2001).
Without denying that local cultures have some impact, I conduct a
macroanalysis, moving from powerful organizations to the local com-
munity. I consider clientelism as a problem of “boundary setting”
and of the “intertwining” of different types of organizations, where
 What States Do People Trust and How Do They Emerge? 87

complicated historical sequences of organizational establishment cre-

ate different boundaries and entanglements between different types
of relatively “modern” organizations. Examined from this angle, both
clientelist and universalistic practices are consequences of different
historical methods for drawing organizational boundaries.
This means combining and going beyond two other traditions in
the social sciences, one that perceives clientelism as an organizational
attribute of the state – a specific form of particularism – and one
that views it as an organizational attribute of a given political party.6
Clientelism in particular and particularism in general can then be
perceived as the result of the problem of intertwining between social
organizations operating with different logics.
I also use the metaphor of vacancy chains (White 1970) to illustrate
how, at different times, some sequences of organizational establish-
ment create open spaces where certain social practices can flourish,
while other sequences do not allow such openings to appear. How-
ever, two reservations must be made. In the strict vacancy chain
model, effects are felt through the system because moving individuals
leave an opening behind them. Organizations do not necessar-
ily leave an opening behind them when they expand into a new
space. The other reservation relates to the notion of intertwining.
In new social spaces, social practices and organizational principles
can become intertwined in a plurality of forms that are impossi-
ble in strict vacancy chain models where one person occupies the
open position. Nonetheless, while used loosely and evocatively, these
concepts prove valuable.
For example, the organizational culture of modern Swedish welfare
authorities seems to be characterized by a mixture of bureaucratic
remoteness and popular proximity. In other words, friendliness in
Sweden does not imply preferential treatment – two concepts that
are often conflated under the rubric of “particularism”. Looking back
at the organizational history of modern Swedish public adminis-
tration, one finds that they have resulted from the intertwining of
social movements and Weberian-style bureaucracy (Lindqvist 1990).
In the Greek welfare administration, and in public administration
more generally, no such mixture is found; it is either remoteness
or proximity. Access to familiarity inside the bureaucracy is possi-
ble only through personal, often family, networks; otherwise, Greeks
face bureaucratic indifference to a degree unknown in Scandinavia.
88 Civilizing the Public Sphere

In other words, both friendliness and preferential treatment are

assigned on a selective basis. This organizational culture results from
the intertwining of kinship, or extended families, and bureaucracy.
This is one aspect of the particularism of Greek authorities, the other
being the intertwining of political parties and state bureaucracies.
I will later employ concepts from relational sociology (Tilly 1998)
to analyze the problem of intertwining.
The differences between the Swedish and the Greek cases I have
thus far mentioned can be summarized as four analytically distinct,
but in reality profoundly interrelated boundary relations.
The first of these includes relations between the realm of politics
and the realm of the state. One aspect of these relations concerns
the degree of organizational differentiation between the realm of poli-
tics and the realm of the state. In ideal-typical situations these can
be completely separated or completely interlocked, but in real situ-
ations there cannot be complete separation or complete interlocking:
it is a question of degree rather than of category. Thus, on a scale,
I would place Sweden toward the separation end and Greece toward
the interlocking end. A second aspect of this same relation concerns
the relations of domination between the above-mentioned realms. Here
again there can be, at one end, cases of the total politicization of the
state or, at the other end, cases of the complete bureaucratization
of politics. Generally speaking though, in countries with democratic
traditions like Greece and Sweden, there tends to be a balanced
situation between these extremes. Each country then represents par-
ticular deviations from this pattern. In Greece the government is
formally the highest state authority, while in Sweden the principle
of the administrative autonomy of state authorities is institutional-
ized. However, in practice, the difference is not as great as it seems.
Swedish ministers also exercise informal control over state authori-
ties, while the primacy of politics is an entrenched feature of Greek
political culture.
The second set of boundary relations is typified as the problem
of the “insulation of the state bureaucracy from the ‘particulari-
ties of civil life’ ” (Bendix [1964] 1996: 139–41). One aspect of such
insulation is that discussed above, which is achieved through the
separation of the realms of politics and the state. Other aspects con-
cern the insulation of state activities from economic, kinship, and
local interest. The totally insulated state is, again, an ideal-typical
 What States Do People Trust and How Do They Emerge? 89

construction. In the real world, states can be characterized as predom-

inantly universalistic or predominantly particularistic (Levy 1996a:
141). By and large, there are two ways of creating insulation: through
institutional devices and/or through social differentiation. Laws for-
bidding public employees from having a second occupation or from
working at their place of origin are examples of such administrative
devices. Recruitment on the basis of social distinctions, for instance
recruiting from non-indigenous population religious groups or from
a special social stratum, is another example of insulation, but this
time through social differentiation. The Greek state is characterized
by a high degree of institutional devices but is inadequately insulated
from civil life. In modern terminology, it is embedded in social rela-
tions. In Sweden, one finds surprisingly few institutional safeguards
intended to create distance between the state and society, yet the
state is socially insulated.
The third boundary relation concerns the modes of inclusion of
the lower social classes in national politics. One must distinguish
between the “integrative” and the “incorporative” modes of inclu-
sion (Mouzelis 1986: 73–94). The integrative mode denotes a hori-
zontal and autonomous inclusion, as was the case in a number of
the core capitalist countries, while the incorporative mode denotes a
vertical and less autonomous, often plebiscitarian and paternalistic,
inclusion, which is characteristic of many countries of the semi-
periphery. Clientelism can be seen as one of the historical sub-types
of the second mode.
The fourth boundary relation regards the form of state–citizen rela-
tions. Citizenship is usually studied from a comparative perspective
using T.H. Marshall’s distinction between political, economic, and
social rights. It is usually the quantitative aspect of the latter that
is studied in a comparative perspective by relating it to the power
resources of major social actors (Esping-Andersen 1990). However,
the qualitative aspect of state–citizen relations has not been suf-
ficiently studied, and the researcher cannot rely on the existing
conceptual framework to illustrate differences between countries.
In order to combat this and to shed light on the area, I will employ
the categories I introduced above, namely remoteness/proximity and
preferential/impartial treatment (Table 4.1).
Having defined the major dimensions along which the Swedish
and Greek cases differ, I now turn to the social landscape of these
90 Civilizing the Public Sphere

Table 4.1 Boundary relations between state and society

Boundary Greece Sweden

relations between:

1. State and Toward interlocking and Toward separation and

political parties conflation differentiation
2. State and upper Many institutional Few institutional devices,
classes devices, social social insulation
penetration
3. State and lower Incorporation through Integration through
classes controlled associations autonomous associations
and vertical networks and horizontal
representation
4. State and Bureaucratic indifference, Popular proximity, but
citizens but relational access bureaucratic impartiality

countries, examining the temporalities that may account for any dif-
ferences and provide some tentative answers to the questions raised
at the beginning of the chapter.

Disparate sequences of political and social development

The expansion of the state and the extension of the franchise:

First and fourth boundary relations
Generally speaking, Greece belongs to the group of countries that
introduced modern institutions in a primary, pre-capitalist social for-
mation after the end of the Napoleonic Wars and throughout the
19th century. These institutions can be conceived as taking two
forms: the modern institutions of political representation and the
modern state. The electoral reforms were inspired by ideas associ-
ated with the French Revolution and therefore largely commonplace
in many countries in the post-Napoleonic era.7 In contrast to what
happened in other, similar countries, modern institutions of politi-
cal representation easily acquired a strong foothold in Greek society.
Universal male suffrage was introduced in 1844, a modern constitu-
tion guaranteeing liberal freedoms was implemented at around the
same time and parliamentarism was introduced in the 1870s.
Creating a modern state based on the Western European proto-
type proved more difficult. Contrary to what happened, for example,
in Italy, the process of administrative unification lasted for about
 What States Do People Trust and How Do They Emerge? 91

100 years. On the whole, the process was rather uneven: actual-
izing the military and police forces and, to a lesser degree, the
judiciary was relatively easy, but establishing a school system for
primary education and a uniform tax system took time. In this
respect, the non-uniformity of the school system is quite strik-
ing. Until recently, primary education excluded a relatively large
proportion of the population, while, proportionally, Greek universi-
ties produced more students than economically advanced countries.
About 40 per cent of those students were students of law. As the
labor market could not absorb them, they usually turned to politics.
Borrowing blueprints from Western Europe, they provided the state
with an extremely legal-formalistic character and cultivated the now
widespread idea that social and political problems are legal problems
that can be resolved by the law. Many of the roots of the bureaucratic
indifference of the Greek administration can be found here.
The Western European state is historically based on taxation (Tilly
1990a). The need for financial resources to pay for war forced kings to
establish structures to register and collect taxes. This laid the ground
for the infrastructural power of the state (Mann 1993). Structures
built in periods of war were later used to penetrate social life and
logistically implement decisions. At the same time, direct relations
between the state and its inhabitants were established, but not with-
out protests, revolts, and negotiations that defined the content of
citizenship. For reasons I will not discuss here,8 the Greek state was
slow and weak in vertically penetrating civil life, leaving a space
between itself and its inhabitants.9
In contrast, political institutions spread throughout the country at
a rapid pace and gained a strong foothold in Greek society. In a ref-
erendum in 1863, six out of ten men aged 20–65 voted, a percentage
attained only 50 years later in Sweden. Politics thoroughly pene-
trated Greek society. The English historian William Miller begins the
chapter on politics in his treatise on Greece by noting: “It is impos-
sible to write about Greek life, whether in town or country, without
saying something on the subject of politics; for they affect every pro-
fession, every trade and almost every family to a degree unknown in
other lands” (Miller 1905: 21). Historically, political parties based on
universal male suffrage developed before the bureaucracy in Greece
and occupied the space between the state and society As a conse-
quence, people’s concerns were defined as political matters, making
92 Civilizing the Public Sphere

it impossible to depersonalize them and define them as bureau-

cratic cases. Political parties became intertwined with kinship and
local interests, thus failing to aggregate and define interests in class
or occupational terms, instead representing them in their disaggre-
gated form. In this way, interests and even citizens’ concerns were
multiplied – each citizen or family developed its own interests and
concerns – making it almost impossible to treat them with bureau-
cratic rules based on an average individual (compare Chapter 3).
Having established themselves as mediators between social interests
and the state authorities, political parties occupied a pivotal role in
both the social and political realms.
The formation of the Swedish state followed a different path.
Sweden belongs to the group of countries where the formation of the
state predated the creation of modern democratic institutions. While
administrative unification was accomplished in the early modern era,
the democratic transformation of the state took place after a period
of rapid and thorough industrialization. Problems like the unifica-
tion of the judicial system, the incorporation of the church under the
state, and the homogenization of the population were resolved before
the cultural and the industrial revolutions – and the social cleavages
they created – could affect their outcome. A system for registering the
population and its resources was established early on, utilizing the
church, which facilitated the collection of taxes and simultaneously
created direct relations between the state and its subjects (Nilsson
1990: 56–104). The church was also used to administer the school
system, which, by the middle of the 19th century, provided nearly
all children of school age with access to primary school education.
A generation later, it had raised the literacy level of the popula-
tion to 90 per cent, enhancing its overall organizational capacity.10
If early political representation is the outstanding feature of the Greek
state-building process, mass education, uniform taxation, and the
regulation of social life are the notable features of the Swedish pro-
cess. These differing features gave the citizenship in each country a
distinct tinge. Citizenship rights in Greece were the result of an iso-
morphic process that embodied citizenship with a legal-formalistic
undertone. In Sweden, they were the result of tax negotiations, which
gave citizenship substantial content, mainly based on taxation and
social welfare programs. Thus in Sweden, the expansion of the state
and the extension of the franchise to the lower classes followed the
reverse sequence for Greece.
 What States Do People Trust and How Do They Emerge? 93

In this respect, the early modern Swedish state was unique; it reg-
ulated and in many instances actually changed social relations to a
degree that states established later never managed to achieve. It could
intervene in social life and implement its decisions because early
expansion had equipped it with the capacity to collect information
and control transactions (Nilsson 1990). It also established direct rela-
tions between itself and its subjects at a time when there were no
other social formations that could occupy the interstices between the
state and the people. The political parties and social movements that
developed with the extension of suffrage and the industrialization
of the country could aggregate social interests but could not find a
foothold from which to mediate the relation between the state and
the citizen.
The realms of the state and of mass political parties remained
differentiated and separated, thereby at least in principle avoiding
altogether the problem of the political domination of the state. The
major task of mass parties and social movements became the def-
inition and aggregation of citizens’ interests. As the state did not
intervene in the social question, the labor movement – and to a
lesser degree other social movements – tried to resolve the every-
day problems of the working class by creating a multitude of social
insurance organizations located very near the everyday experience
of the people. Later on, when these social organizations became
part of the welfare administration, they transmitted the popular
proximity they had already acquired to the welfare state, ensuring
that the bureaucracy was sensitive to popular feelings while still
implementing welfare policies impartially.
In stark contrast with the early process of state building, polit-
ical representation remained rather exclusive up until the end of
industrialization. In 1890, a year that falls in the middle of the
period of rapid industrialization between 1870 and 1910, only one
in four adult males had the right to vote and just one in ten actu-
ally voted (Carlsson 1953: 14, 23–25). Political parties at that time
were exclusively self-organized class-based parties. Their social base
was restricted to the rich quarters of the cities and the landown-
ing peasants. These political parties were known in Swedish as
Riksdagspartier – parliamentary parties – by and large showing that
they typically functioned inside the parliament and excluded the
vast majority of proletarianized peasants and industrial workers.
Outside parliament, in the social spaces that were left between
94 Civilizing the Public Sphere

the class-exclusive parties, the organization-tolerant non-intervening

state, and the nuclear family, a whole world of independent political
and social movements found fertile ground in which to develop by
using the high organizational capacity of the excluded social strata
(Papakostas 1995). These movements defined and aggregated citi-
zens’ interests in categorical terms, largely according to class and
occupation. They expressed the social demands and needs of spe-
cific social groups to the bureaucracy in terms of social categories,
making it easier to construct bureaucratic rules based on averages
within these categories. Citizens’ multiple and in many ways excep-
tional demands and needs could thus be transformed into routine
cases with few exceptions. Mass parties and bureaucracies appeared
to function together.

The location of the upper and lower classes in public and social
life: Second and third boundary relations
In both Greece and Sweden, the process of state formation occurred
before economic development. Meanwhile, the mechanisms through
which capital was accumulated and the ruling classes entrenched
their power were quite different in the two cases. As Constantin
Tsoucalas (1978) noted, a distinctive characteristic of Greek soci-
ety after liberation was the absence of a ruling class that could
use exploitative mechanisms outside the state to accumulate capi-
tal. In the absence of such mechanisms, old nobles turned en masse
to the state, the most important device for the collection and dis-
tribution of economic surplus at that time (Tsoucalas 1978). Thus,
in Greece, state and economic activities became intertwined from
the beginning, with the latter transmitting their exchange codes and
morals to the former. This explains why it later became so important
to introduce institutional devices to ensure some degree of separation
between public office and private interest.
In Sweden, the aristocracy initially had exclusive rights to higher
state positions: being a civil servant almost automatically implied
being of aristocratic origins. The intertwining of state and class was
pervasive, making the Swedish state synonymous with a particular
class in a way that the Greek state never was. In a study of the social
origins of civil servants in three central state bureaucracies between
1810 and 1870, it is reported that 70–84 per cent of civil servants were
sons of civil servants, the majority of which had aristocratic origins
 What States Do People Trust and How Do They Emerge? 95

(Nilsson 1997: 21). The Swedish state was built on one side of a deep
social cleavage, which created social insulation between the incum-
bents of state positions and the rest of the population. Initially, this
did not imply a bureaucratic distinction between private interest and
public office. As Göran Therborn (1989) points out, such a separation
of roles became possible only later in a developed capitalist economy
when the owners of state positions became state employees (compare
Rothstein 1998).
From the second half of the 19th century, when the Swedish bour-
geoisie began to develop its own economic base and did not depend
on the state for its markets (Tilton 1974: 68), the close intertwin-
ing of class and state began to loosen. While the upper classes in
Greece turned en masse from economic activities to the state, in
Sweden a weaker movement was observed in the opposite direction.
Torbjörn Nilsson reports in a study that, as the Swedish economy
expanded during the second half of the 19th century, many civil ser-
vants became industrialists and tradesmen (Nilsson 1999). So, while
in Sweden the early entwining of state and class left traces of bureau-
cratic distance, in Greece the apparently looser intertwining of state
and pre-capitalist economic activities proved to be more pervasive,
keeping alive the mentality that public goods are exchangeable and
the attitude that rules are negotiable.
Apart from being intertwined with the state, the upper classes
in Greece developed links to the masses through politics that the
Swedish aristocracy and later the bourgeoisie never succeeded in
developing. In Greece, electoral reforms changed the power relations
between the upper classes and the rest of the citizenry early on. While
the power of the aristocracy in Sweden was based on ascription, tra-
dition, and corporate privilege, the traditional power of the Greek
nobility had to be transformed into political power based on the
votes of the electorate.
In a society whose population had low organizational capacities at
a time when knowledge of mass organization was in its embryonic
state internationally, the only available way to organize people was
through the family – a social organization that, despite local vari-
ations in its structure, has always played an important role in the
social life of modern Greece. As Nikiforos Diamandouros (1984: 59)
noted, in Greece the family has been the major social actor, operat-
ing on multiple levels and fulfilling many economic, social, military,
96 Civilizing the Public Sphere

and political functions. When liberation weakened the position of

the noblemen, with many of them losing large parts of their for-
tune during the war, they turned inwards toward the family, the main
“capital” at their disposal at that time. With politics as an imperative
for survival and kinship as the only existing organizational device,
extensive family coalitions were built using the quite widespread
institutions of adoption, marriage, fraternization, and godfatherhood
(Petropulos 1985: 69–73).
Initially these family coalitions were horizontal. The extension of
suffrage enabled their expansion at a time when a weak state did
not have the organizational capacity to enlarge its scope and estab-
lish direct relations with its citizens. At the interstices between state
and local communities, the system of family coalitions found fertile
ground in which to develop vertically, creating hierarchies of fami-
lies with quite unequal power resources, but also relations of mutual
dependence. Families at the top of the hierarchy drew their power
through their intertwining with the state and access to its goods,
while those at the bottom did so through their capacity to aggre-
gate and deliver the votes of their members. Just as the families at
the bottom were dependent upon the families at the top for access
to state goods, the families at the top could not secure their position
without the political support of those at the bottom.
Alongside families, villages became units for interest aggregation
in Greece. Local cultures were not damaged by agricultural reforms
as they were in Sweden; rather they were strengthened. At the same
time, class divisions within the peasantry were weakened by the
distribution of cultivated land to all peasants, thereby creating a
relatively homogenous village population with strong local identi-
ties. This population was one of illiterates with low organizational
capacities and without the means to create independent peasant
organizations. Hence, in many parts of Greece, citizenship became
relational and derivative, materializing through family networks and
political parties and not as the outcome of the direct integration of
the people into the state.
Family played an important role in Sweden too, but in a different
way. For instance, it was not unusual for positions in state author-
ities to be passed from one generation in a family to the next.11
Meanwhile, the delayed electoral reforms in Sweden did not create
the need to establish bonds with civil life outside the state. It would
 What States Do People Trust and How Do They Emerge? 97

certainly have been difficult to do so through kinship relations given

the weakness of the social institution of the extended family in
Sweden.12 Thus there was neither the imperative nor the possibility
to create links between the leading classes and the entire population
through kinship ties.
Furthermore, agrarian reforms in Sweden eliminated the possibil-
ity of creating bonds between the entire population and the elites on
the basis of strong local identities. While agrarian reforms in Greece
redistributed the arable land but did not change the social structure
of the villages, Swedish agrarian reforms concentrated on the land,
and the reform of lagaskifte changed the village structure dramat-
ically by moving farms out to the estates (Hemfrid 1961). In this
way, Swedish local cultures were seriously undermined; geograph-
ical distances became social distances (Thörnberg 1912: 77). Later,
as migration patterns became a mixture of “coerced” migration and
“career” migration,13 the inhabitants of cities became rather anony-
mous in the sociological sense of the term as described by Georg
Simmel ([1902–03] 1950) and Louis Wirth (1938). The Swedish state
could thus recruit civil servants from the ranks of the non-nobles
without becoming interwoven in social networks. An already dis-
tanced bureaucracy now faced atomized individuals aggregated in
categorical terms. It could therefore easily transform people’s con-
cerns into bureaucratic cases and, since the vast majority of the
population was able to read and write and could understand the
use of general principles to handle their cases, the need for political
mediation was eliminated.
In Greece, both the kinship and the social structure of the villages
remained intact. As a consequence, urbanization became a mixture of
“chain” migration and “circular” migration, which affected the social
structure of the cities preventing the atomization of their inhabitants.
In this respect, Greek cities could be described as “cities of peasants”
and their inhabitants as “urban villagers” with a high level of social
cohesion in the cities based on interwoven networks and the high fre-
quency of primary contacts with familiar faces (compare Gans [1962]
1982, Pahl 1968). As the state bureaucracy was built with people com-
ing from these extensive social networks, it became deeply embedded
in social relations based on kinship and local identities. It was there-
fore difficult to transform the matters of the citizens into impersonal
administrative cases. In an attempt to solve these problems, a number
98 Civilizing the Public Sphere

of institutional devices were used, but most of them were ineffective.

Instead, their main but unintended consequence was to reinforce
the bureaucratic indifference with which the legal-formalistic Greek
state treated the unconnected citizen, giving political entrepreneurs
the opportunity to mediate between the citizen and the indifferent
bureaucracy and thus exact a clientelist fee.14

Theoretical implications

Although the question posed in the title of this chapter is formu-

lated in a counterfactual manner, I have sought to answer a question
stated in factual terms: under what conditions will a predominantly
universalistic state emerge rather than become embedded in social
relations or intertwined with political formations?
One way to approach this issue from a historical–comparative per-
spective is to direct attention to the suppressed alternatives and under-
stand the actualization of some historical alternatives by placing
them at the intersection of trajectories with different temporalities
(Aminzade 1992: 466). As Charles Tilly elegantly notes, “when things
happen within a sequence affects how they happen” (Tilly 1984: 14,
emphasis in the original). In this chapter I have devoted attention
to the suppressed alternatives by pointing to the particularistic ele-
ments in the early Swedish state and the universalistic ambitions
that were present at the beginning of the process of Greek state for-
mation. Using the idea of the social landscape (Ahrne 1990, 1994),
I have tried to understand the historical outcomes by placing them
at the intersection of the trajectories of states, families, enterprises,
and voluntary associations.
Martin Shefter, in his Political Parties and the State (1994), followed
a similar logic of comparison. He tried to understand the emergence
of patronage parties in the United States by comparing the different
sequences of development of state bureaucracies and political par-
ties in the United States and in some European countries. Shefter
criticized earlier sociological interpretations of political patronage in
the United States that overemphasized the “demand side” of the
phenomenon. The strategy political parties adopt is not totally con-
strained by the characteristics of the voters, he argued (Shefter 1994:
25, 59). Instead, he turned his attention to the “supply side” of
patronage at the time political parties were being formed. If the
 What States Do People Trust and How Do They Emerge? 99

parties had mobilized a broad electorate before bureaucratic auton-

omy was established, they had the option of using the resources
of the state in clientelist exchanges. Parties that were founded after
bureaucratic autonomy and had been created or developed outside
the political system did not have this option available to them in
their formative years, and hence were bound to become ideological
parties.
By turning the conventional arguments upside-down, Shefter’s
approach sheds light on the relationship between organizational
fields in social life, established through the different sequences of
development in different countries. The approach is a healthy cor-
rective to the old sociological approaches of studying patronage in
the United States and also to its social anthropological equivalents in
the study of clientelism in Europe. The parts of this chapter dealing
with the relationship between the realm of the state and the realm
of politics are in line with Shefter’s argument. However, this study
includes more complicated sequences of development. The analysis
here seeks to answer the same questions as Shefter’s but by examining
the development of a wider range of state–society relations besides
those that are mediated through the development of political parties
and are analyzed by Shefter.
By placing the supply side of clientelism at the intersection
between state and political parties, Shefter gives the impression
that state–society relations are shaped only by state–party relations,
thereby constructing an overpoliticized conception of these relations.
Relations between the state and political parties matter, but under
what conditions do they matter? As the Swedish case illustrates, a
state with direct relations to citizens limits the space available for
political parties to mediate between state and society. In the Greek
case, the delayed expansion of the state left considerable space for
political parties to develop strong ties with society and mediate the
relationship to the distant state. State–party relations become cru-
cially important when state–society relations are weak and loose.
Without available space between state and society, the historical
sequence of bureaucratization and mass mobilization affects only the
boundary relation between the state and political parties, yet this
sequence alone is not sufficient to yield clientelism.
Shefter’s argument even seems to imply that institutional barri-
ers between the state and political parties are sufficient to prevent
100 Civilizing the Public Sphere

the development of patronage, but, as the Greek development illus-

trates, this is not the case. Given that interests were defined in local
or kinship terms – the “demand side” in Shefter’s terminology –
institutional safeguards to insulate the bureaucracy had the effect of
creating more distance between the citizen and the state, thereby giv-
ing more space to political entrepreneurs to mediate between them.
In Sweden, on the other hand, very few institutional devices could
work effectively because the state was insulated initially through the
incorporation of social distinctions and later through the modern-
ization of society. Indeed, it was the early expansion of the state
that atomized and “modernized” its subjects through institutional
reforms and high rates of literacy, thereby minimizing the need for
clientelism. This suggests that the working of institutional safeguards
against clientelism in particular, and of political institutions in gen-
eral, cannot be taken for granted a priori because it is contingent upon
broad social processes, even upon the “demand side” of clientelism.
Although the history of states does not necessarily correspond per-
fectly to the history of their societies, the intended and unintended
consequences of state organizations cannot be understood without
reference to the contingencies of state–society boundary relations.
Shefter makes some very important points by investigating the
“supply side” of political patronage. From the sociology of markets,
we learn that demand and supply are like hands shaking each other.15
Not only do we need to study both sides, we also need to under-
stand how they meet each other. It would appear, for instance, that
the persistence of clientelist practices in Greece has to do with the
strong institutional and social bonds that constitute the fabric of
social life, connect the supply and demand of clientelism, and con-
stantly reinforce each other. In contrast, in Sweden, it is not the
absence of the supply of patronage that explains the absence of
clientelism in modern times, but the fact that supply – patronage in
the early Swedish state – and demand could never become connected
with each other because of the different sequences of development.
Thus, the practice of patronage remained limited to a restricted class,
without expanding to broader society.
I return to these links by using concepts from relational sociology
as developed by Charles Tilly (1998). Tilly starts with five elementary
social configurations – chain, hierarchy, triad, organization, and cat-
egorical pair – and considers how different combinations produce,
 What States Do People Trust and How Do They Emerge? 101

cement, and change durable inequality (Tilly 1998: 48). For the sake
of simplicity I conflate chain, hierarchy, and triad into one con-
figuration: a complex network. I then add another configuration,
atomized and anonymous individuals, in the sociological sense of the
term. This provides us with four elementary configurations: atomized
individuals, complex networks, organizations, and categorical pairs.
These elementary configurations can be combined in two general
ways: combinations of the same sort and combinations of a different
sort. Most organizations, including states, are like mosaics that inter-
weave with these configurations connecting organizational life and
social life in multiple ways. At different times the combinations that
are available are rather limited because of sequential phenomena.
The Swedish and Greek states became interwoven with different
configurations. The Swedish state was initially built on complex
networks located on one side of the categorical pairs. The incum-
bents of state positions were connected by strong links with class,
but not with society. Thus a social distinction became an organiza-
tional distinction, and the state could establish direct relations to
society without running the risk of being exposed to network con-
tagion. An internally particularistic state could simultaneously be
universalistic in its relations to society, cynically reminding us that a
universalistic state is not necessarily democratic (Levy 1996a, 1996b).
Over the course of time, the categorical pairs, which were essentially
the aristocratic distinctions upon which the Swedish state was built,
lost their meaning, but the bureaucratic distance created by them
remained and was not undermined by social pressures. It is possible
to make arguments about historical legacies, pointing to the iner-
tial tendencies that characterize social institutions, noting that, once
created, institutions tend to sustain themselves. However from the
analysis presented here, it seems reasonable to argue that the perpet-
uation of universalistic traits was contingent upon two other social
processes: the creation of organizations promoting categorical inter-
ests in society, and the modernization of individuals. As such, the
embryo of patronage could not find a glade in the Swedish social
landscape in which to develop into mass clientelism.
It did in Greece, although particularism was never institutional-
ized as it had been in Sweden prior to 1809, or in practice at work,
as for most of the 19th century. One part of the answer to this para-
dox can be found in Shefter’s argument: the opposite sequence of
102 Civilizing the Public Sphere

development in Greece to that in Sweden suggests that politics and

the state became intertwined in Greece, placing politics in a dom-
inant position vis-à-vis the state. This coincided with the slow and
uneven expansion of the state and the limited modernization of
social life. In the interstices between state and social life, two sets
of analytically distinct – but in reality mutually interchangeable and
in many cases overlapping – complex networks developed: social net-
works connecting families and the distant state through kinship, and
political networks that made the same connection, but in a politi-
cal fashion. In contrast to Sweden, where these networks connected
the state and a slowly disappearing leading class, in Greece these net-
works connected the state not only with the leading class but also
with the entire social life. Whereas in Sweden the realms of state,
politics, and social life became differentiated with relatively clear-
cut organizational boundaries, in Greece these realms became partly
overlapping and even intertwined with strong social ties. These same
ties prevented the atomization of individuals and the full develop-
ment of categorical interests. They constituted the social grounds for
clientelism and rendered the universalistic tendencies in the Greek
state, visible for long periods of time, islands in a sea of particularis-
tic networks. As such, the contemporary Greek state never managed
to obtain the historical trust of ordinary citizens, in sharp contrast to
its Swedish counterpart.
5
The Organizational Bases
of Corruption

Corruption paradoxes

Something unusual has happened in Sweden in recent years. In a

country where the general public trusts state authorities, the mass
media publishes daily reports that something is rotten in the “state
of Sweden”. Corruption scandals erupt one after another, and the
stories in newspaper op-ed and financial pages on such matters are
often intriguing. A random selection of recent “affairs” reveals public
officials and their wives attending expensive conventions paid for by
subcontractors, heads of state-run companies taking bribes from sup-
pliers, a cabinet minister responsible for business matters accepting
a job in a large conglomerate and then arranging an informal meet-
ing with the prime minister. The newspaper articles typically play up
the sensational elements in the cases, often those dealing with crim-
inal aspects. Other articles, however, are more interested in issues of
private morality. Ethics committees seem to be springing up right
and left.
What appears even more paradoxical is the fact that this is hap-
pening in a country with an excellent international reputation on
corruption matters. In the international academic literature, Sweden
is never mentioned in connection with corruption; on the contrary,
Sweden and the other Nordic countries stand out as the world’s least
corrupt countries. An entire industry of consulting firms and organi-
zations has emerged, which supplies the public and other actors with
information about corruption levels in different countries as a result
of requirements by multinational companies and lending institutions

103
104 Civilizing the Public Sphere

Table 5.1 Subjectively perceived corruption in

some selected countries

Rank Country Score

1 New Zealand 9.5

2 Denmark 9.4
2 Finland 9.4
4 Sweden 9.3
5 Singapore 9.2
6 Norway 9.0
14 Germany 8.0
14 Japan 8.0
22 Chile 7.2
22 Qatar 7.2
24 United States 7.1
25 France 7.0
30 Cyprus 6.3
31 Spain 6.2
80 Colombia 3.4
80 El Salvador 3.4
80 Greece 3.4

Source: Transparency International, Corruption

Perceptions Index 2011. A total of 183 countries
were ranked; a high corruption index indicates a low
perception of corruption.

for such information. The organization Transparency International,

with its global corruption barometers, is among the most well-known
of them, in which Sweden and its Nordic neighbors feature as exam-
ples of countries with very little corruption. Table 5.1 illustrates
perceived corruption in selected countries.
In Sweden, reactions to recent claims of corruption range from
denial and indignation to resignation and sarcasm (see Jacobsson &
Sandstedt 2005, Wästerfors 2005). Underpinning these different reac-
tions are fairly grounded assumptions about the actual state of affairs.
For example, it is possible to deny the existence of corruption in
Sweden by referring to the international index cited above and to
view the scandals as part of a media “spectacle”. Some become upset
at the possibility that corruption has increased in Sweden, while
others conclude that corruption has always existed in Sweden, like
elsewhere, and are therefore apathetic or even cynical about social
life. Corruption then is a very difficult phenomenon to pin down,
 The Organizational Bases of Corruption 105

and there may be some truth in all these assertions. The question is:
to what extent?
One reason for cynicism and sarcasm could relate to the fact
that corruption is an omnipotent phenomenon (see Bardhan 1997,
Lipset & Lenz 2000). We know that it has existed in every society –
from ancient Egypt, classical Greece, and Rome to feudal, capitalist,
socialist, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu societies. Consequently, it is
hardly a cultural phenomenon, even if at first glance a certain varia-
tion is often attributed to culture. Corruption is not just an omnipo-
tent phenomenon; it is also a multi-faceted one. In a list of examples
of corruption from around the world, one can find the following:

Politicians make policy decisions to ensure their own re-election,

rather than policy decisions in the public interest.
Police take bribes rather than write tickets.
Businesses that want public contracts must stop at the headquar-
ters of the political party and “make a donation” before signing
papers.
Government officials give contracts to themselves, their family
members, their party members, or persons who pay large bribes.
Health care workers ignore dying patients unless the patients or
their families pay bribes.
Educators charge bribes to enroll children in school or to release
transcripts or diplomas.
Safety officials overlook dangerous conditions in return for bribes.
Judges render decisions based on the party that paid the most, or
based on instructions from a high-ranked government or political
party official.
Customs officials accept bribes to classify goods at a lower tariff.
(Thomas & Meagher 2004)

Corruption is a social relationship

It seems relevant at an early point to differentiate between corrup-

tion and cheating; corruption as a phenomenon is different from
cheating. Like love, at least two parties must be involved in order for
corruption to take place. Speaking metaphorically, the cheater is to
106 Civilizing the Public Sphere

corruption what a “lonely lover” is to love, namely a single individual

who procures advantages by looking for loopholes in public life;
there are people who display great talent in such endeavors (Arvidson
2007). Unrequited love can still be love but “unrequited” corruption,
on the other hand, is not corruption, even if attempts at bribery
can lead to punishable consequences. Corruption is a phenomenon
that, like love, arises in a social relationship and must be viewed as
such. According to sociologists, this phenomenon has emergent char-
acteristics, which do not belong to or cannot be deduced from the
individual characteristics of human beings. Even people with a strict
private morality can find themselves in corrupt relationships, and
corrupt relationships can occur across a broad spectrum of (relatively
innocent) social relationships. A short reference guide to corruption,
published by the Institutet mot Mutor [The Swedish Anti-Corruption
Institute], contains the following:

When you want to be hospitable –

It could be interpreted as corruption!
When you want to be generous –
It could be interpreted as corruption!
When you want to be nice –
It could be interpreted as corruption!
Or:
When you let someone pay for you –
It could be interpreted as a bribe!
When you accept a gift –
It could be interpreted as a bribe!
(Farliga förmåner [Dangerous Benefits]
2002: Institutet mot Mutor)

This short reference guide captures the subtle difference between

an innocent relationship and a corrupt relationship in an inter-
esting way. However, corruption possesses some other sociological
characteristics. Let us examine a few.
It has already been stated that corruption is a social relationship
and not an individual characteristic. Therefore, a lecture on stricter
morality or higher ethical standards inadequately addresses the prob-
lem of corruption. Abstinence can work to a certain degree, but when
the relationships in which corruption thrives expand to include more
 The Organizational Bases of Corruption 107

and more people, it becomes increasingly difficult to uphold a private

morality. “[I]t is impossible not to taste the honey (or the poison) that
finds itself at the tip of the tongue”, declares an ancient Indian doc-
ument on corruption in administration dating from 400 BC (cited
in Bardhan 1997). If anything, the question of corruption should be
posed in this way: “Which social relationships nourish corruption?”
In other words, we should not ask ourselves “Which individuals are
more corrupt than others?”.
Corruption and love share other characteristics: both are consum-
mated in isolation, and as phenomena are close to being what Georg
Simmel called “a secret society” (Simmel 1964); both are also filled
with tension. In fact, while it may sound strange, corruption is a
relationship based on trust, a trust where the risk of being betrayed
or revealed adds tension to the relationship. Like love, corruption
is built on trust between individuals. Corruption then is essentially
a relationship built on trust; given their similarities over the course
of history, love and corruption have been closely associated in rela-
tionships in which love has served as a means of consummating
corruption or in which the purpose of corruption was to succeed in
love. Equally fascinating are the means used through the ages to dis-
tinguish them from one another – everything from keeping eunuchs
as harem guards to churches issuing religious directives on celibacy
(see Ertman 1997, Levy 1996a).
Another common denominator is that corruption can also take
place within formal frameworks, like love in a marriage; however,
the accomplishment itself is isolated from outside observation. There-
fore, it is difficult to gauge the extent of corruption in public life. The
covert nature of corruption masks the true extent of it. Statistics on
corruption always leave room for speculation, and cultures differ in
the way they talk about these statistics, even in situations where the
level of corruption itself does not differ markedly from one culture to
another.
Furthermore, a process of transformation takes place between what
happens in ordinary life and what happens in seclusion. A sub-
dued person can be transformed into a passionate lover in a love
relationship, just as a reserved person can be transformed into a hedo-
nist. Likewise, a person who is to all appearances honorable may
be completely corrupt, and it is impossible to determine this simply
through visual observation. The exposure of corruption then includes
108 Civilizing the Public Sphere

a moment of astonishment, both for those who are involved and for
the public, and this is precisely why the newspaper reporting of such
episodes captivates the public. The public is thrilled by this duplicity
in human nature.
In Sweden, there have been changes in recent decades: people are
beginning to talk more openly about their private lives, thus making
it more acceptable to candidly discuss the issues of love and corrup-
tion. What was private has become public, and secrets have been
exposed, which is why people now believe that everyone can cheat.
Such revelations set in motion at least two social mechanisms, which
can work in isolation from each other or against each other. On the
one hand, more people may begin to cheat, since they believe others
now also engage in the practice. On the other hand, many may stop
cheating as the act itself becomes less tantalizing. My general impres-
sion of Swedish public life is that the first mechanism is currently
visible in Sweden, while the second is not.

Corruption at the periphery of organizations

Even though corruption is a secretive social relationship, acts of

corruption may be more or less observable. For example, the corrup-
tion that can take place in plain view is conspicuous and frequently
observed or experienced. This type of corruption is usually located at
the periphery of organizations and is associated with one person in
the relationship acting as an organizational gatekeeper. Here, corrup-
tion, considered as an organizational action, constitutes what Erving
Goffman (1959) termed “expressions given off”, actions that have a
private purpose, in contrast to “expressions given”, which are actions
taken in the interest of an organization. The customs official who
accepts bribes to not check merchandise, the civil servant who makes
changes in the order of lines at the borders of organizations, and the
police officer who accepts bribes rather than levying fines are typical
examples of this type of corruption. For the non-organizational party
in this relationship, the benefit is in the favorable handling of a mat-
ter within the organization, such as avoiding the regular line. This
procedure is typically located at the periphery of organizations, with
the organizational gatekeeper using his or her discretionary powers to
make favorable decisions or avoid taking note of a matter that may
have relevance for the organization.
 The Organizational Bases of Corruption 109

Viewed as a social relationship, corruption is a closed one. In order

for corruption to take place, some people must be excluded, which
implies that some people must stay where they are in an organiza-
tional line, some people are not given preferential treatment, and
some people’s actions are recorded by organizations. Without such
exclusions, corruption loses the supporting reasons for its existence.
If all the gatekeepers and all matters can be traded, then we can speak
of an extremely uneven, barter-based society but not of corruption.
Corruption presupposes that a relatively large number of matters will
not be transformed into corruption relationships. In this sense, it
would be fair to conclude that no society can be totally corrupt.

Corruption in the interface between organizations

There is another, more sophisticated type of corruption that shares

some of the sociological attributes of the corruption described above
but also differs markedly from it. This type of corruption consists
primarily of what the international literature refers to as “grand
corruption” or “high-level corruption”. It takes place in the finest
drawing rooms and, when observed, is transformed into something
else; it is not perceived to be corruption. The same types of action
can be interpreted differently depending on where they take place in
the social hierarchy. Actions are framed in different “motive talks”
and particular “vocabularies for motive” (occasionally even with the
help of social scientists), in which case they acquire a different mean-
ing through this framework (for terminology see Mills 1940). When
the poor and powerless exchange goods and services with each other,
they may end up in prison, whereas when the rich and powerful do
the same thing, it is typically termed social capital, relational market-
ing, social networking, or something else equally harmless. Through
this framing, the narrow interests of corruption are translated into
broader social interests, and, in order to comprehend corruption,
one has to discredit reality as it appears and try to go behind this
discursive veil.
Conspicuous corruption takes place in the interface between orga-
nizations and the public realm, while sophisticated corruption takes
place in the interfaces between organizations. This suggests that
the greater the interfaces among organizations, the more relation-
ships there are between people and the more relationships can
110 Civilizing the Public Sphere

be transformed into corrupt relationships in turn. Given that this

sophisticated form of corruption takes place among organizations
means that it is difficult to both observe and manage. Its source is
not poverty but greed, the desire for power, personal interests, or a
bad companion. It is impossible to eliminate this through income
redistributions, and most organizational controls are constructed
to manage routine transactions far down the organizational hierar-
chy, not the “soft” aspects associated with horizontal relationships
between organizations. Other organizational aspects in this con-
nection concern organizational control, the scope for autonomous
action, and organizational hierarchies. Placed in organizational hier-
archies, control and scope for action (discretionary power) follow
diametrically opposed social patterns. The higher up one moves in
a hierarchy, the greater the scope for action and the fewer the con-
trols; the reverse is true as one moves down the hierarchical scale
(see Ahrne 1994: 28–45). The scope for autonomous action is associ-
ated with discretion and raises the problem of transparency (compare
Johansson 1992). With an increase in the scope for autonomous
action, the opportunity to frame actions in various discourses and
translate them into something else also increases (we will return to
scope for action later).
To define something as corruption is also a question of power. The
axis conspicuous/observable corruption–sophisticated/unobservable
corruption follows social patterns, which in principle go in the oppo-
site direction from conspicuous consumption; it is easier to see the
corruption of the poor and the consumption of the rich. In every
country, this axis coincides with the axis poor/rich or newcom-
ers/established and, on the world level, with the axis pure/rich
countries. Conspicuous/observable corruption can be easily managed
through discipline, different forms of organizational control or social
engineering measures, which decrease this form of corruption by
eliminating the grounds for its genesis: poverty. Presumably, because
eliminating poverty has been so pivotal in Scandinavian welfare
politics (combined with direct and subtle control mechanisms), con-
spicuous corruption is low. Additionally, control and discipline have
been pivotal in a number of other countries with relatively high levels
of income inequality, making it impossible to openly offer bribes.
In general, people come into contact with conspicuous/observable
corruption but not with the sophisticated type. When surveyed about
 The Organizational Bases of Corruption 111

corruption in public life, they probably project their own experience

of conspicuous corruption onto all of public life. Low and high lev-
els of conspicuous corruption are transformed into low and high
levels of sophisticated corruption. However, there is nothing such
automatic in public life. Sophisticated corruption can exist with-
out conspicuous corruption, and conspicuous corruption can exist
without sophisticated corruption. When it comes to sophisticated
corruption, there is also a discursive conjuncture: when the economy
corresponds to people’s expectations, they tend to believe that every-
thing is going well. The opposite is also true: when the economy does
not correspond to people’s expectations, they tend to believe that
things are not done in the proper way. While the corruption index
says a good deal about conspicuous corruption and the economies of
countries, it says less about sophisticated corruption. As a result of its
sophisticated character and the problems of interpretation and trans-
lation linked to the wide social distance between people’s everyday
lives and this type of corruption, no survey in the world can capture
it completely.
To reiterate, corruption relationships are relationships of trust; this
trust must be mutual if it is to be consummated. In the same rela-
tionship, one person’s bribe can be perceived as another person’s
gift. In the social science literature, mutual trust and the habit of
giving gifts are considered phenomena that are part of the “soft
side” of societies, which are associated with culture, and corruption
is viewed as a cultural phenomenon (see, among others, Lipset &
Lenz 2000 and the literature linking gifts with corruption). However,
the omnipotence of corruption contradicts such an interpretation.
Within different cultures, independently of how these cultures are
defined, there is extensive variation in different periods, and one
must employ a very flexible definition of the concept of culture to
interpret this variation. However, in doing so, the concept of cul-
ture loses its explanatory power. More fundamentally, the appearance
of corruption in Sweden contradicts the culturalist understanding of
the phenomenon. Another approach that appears in the literature
extends the concept of culture to include all aspects of social life.
Such an approach misses what in social analyses is a basic distinc-
tion between culture and social structure (or social organization);
social science analyses of the corruption phenomenon accordingly
lose analytical clarity. There are cultural elements in corruption, but
112 Civilizing the Public Sphere

they generally deal with how different types of social relationships

are defined and classified in different cultures. In different countries,
there are variations as to how and to what extent one interprets and
classifies different (hidden) social relationships as corruption rela-
tionships. However, if anything, this is more likely to reflect the
power, dependency relations, and intertwinement of core institu-
tions and players in public life. The cultural aspect appears to be
only epiphenomenal and marginal in this context. This chapter will
now analyze corruption in relation to the organizational structures
of public life, with the primary focus on sophisticated corruption.
In general, sophisticated corruption takes place in relationships
between representatives of organizations, especially those from sep-
arate organizational sectors, and it is this type of corruption scandal
that is frequently reported in newspapers. If one case could be called
a typical example of this type of corruption, it is probably the scan-
dal that erupted around Systembolaget, Sweden’s state-run alcoholic
beverage monopoly (see Castillo 2009), and there is reason to believe
that this type of corruption is on the rise in Sweden. The remainder
of the chapter is devoted to explaining the reasons for this current
state of affairs.

Why in Sweden and why now? Intertwinements,

networks, and informality

Some people are able to illustrate complicated courses of events with

disarming simplicity in a very striking way. At a small seminar that
took place a few years ago, Rolf Torstendahl, Professor of History at
Uppsala, drew a simple picture on the whiteboard to illustrate how
public life is organized in Sweden. He drew three circles, titled the
state (bureaucracy), the economy (business), and politics (interest
representation) (compare Nybom & Torstendahl 1989). He drew the
circles next to each other, with very small overlapping areas where
they meet, something that would surprise many serious observers of
social life around the world. Despite its simplicity, this picture is a
rather good illustration of almost a century of Swedish social life,
from 1870 to about 1980 (Figure 5.1).
The figure is also a good illustration of what can be termed a
modernized social formation. A fundamental feature of a modern-
ized formation is that the social landscape is differentiated (see Levy
 The Organizational Bases of Corruption 113

Figure 5.1 A symbolic representation of organizational differentiation in

Sweden from about 1870 to about 1980

1996a, 1996b), which implies that social realms and roles are sep-
arated. Put simply, those who work for the state have this as their
main occupation and those who work with the economy also have
this as their main occupation; the roles never mix. In an ideal world
of a perfectly differentiated social life, these three circles would be
completely separate from one another. However, in real life, this
is impossible, and the circles almost always overlap, occupying a
common area.
One should not in haste dismiss Torstendahl’s drawing as naïve.
Some time before the seminar, one of his doctoral students, Niklas
Stenlås (1998), completed his dissertation, which demonstrated that
informal contacts had long existed between business and the Con-
servative Party, contacts that were unknown to the general public.
Presumably, during the century concerned, there were many contacts
between the spheres, contacts the general public was unaware of and
may always remain unaware of. Far from it, all these relationships
should not be considered corrupt. However, social relationships that
take place in secret can easily be transformed into corruption rela-
tionships. Therefore, sophisticated corruption in Sweden must always
have been more widespread than is generally known or accepted.
As noted earlier, discussions on corruption have their phases, and
the Swedish economy had been doing well for almost 100 years.
People tend to be naïve when the economy is doing well. They
believe that everything is done the right way. With reference to
114 Civilizing the Public Sphere

the corruption phenomenon, social scientists in Sweden, particularly

sociologists, have fallen into a deep sleep. To some extent,
this is understandable; social scientists further afield have largely
chosen to consider the problems of economic stagnation and
underdevelopment. In efforts to explain the absence of economic
development, they have encountered the corruption phenomenon,
which they often consider to be part of the problem. As such, they
are often better trained (and inclined perhaps) to observe this phe-
nomenon. Furthermore, Swedish social scientists in particular have
not been forced by circumstances to consider the problem of cor-
ruption. In other words, they have been equipped with a built-in
incapacity to analyze the phenomenon. Studying the consequences
associated with economic growth and modernization processes has
largely occupied their working time and interests, and, in real terms,
these processes have had greater societal and social scientific rele-
vance than the relatively episodic and limited instances of corrup-
tion. On the other hand, by force of circumstances, training a social
scientist to see corruption is not without risks; this is primarily visible
in the practice of interpreting all non-observable social relationships
as corruption relationships. En route to an international conference
several years ago, I overheard two social scientists from southern
Europe sneering at the title of my presentation, “Why is there no
clientelism in Scandinavia?”. Clearly, they had been conditioned to
interpret many relationships as corruption and were predisposed to
assume that clientelism (which one could call a form of political
corruption) exists in all societies, which is not the case.
It is not easy to explain why a few countries have this type of
social structure. It relates to a process that took about 300 years to
accomplish in Sweden. Well in the 19th century, Sweden was also a
relatively corrupt country, even if this terminology was not always
used to describe the phenomenon. Initially, the state, economy, and
politics were intertwined and were embedded in social relationships
and the particularities of social life. Over the course of history, the
spheres separated and independence from such particularities devel-
oped through various disembedding processes (Therborn 1989, see
also Chapter 4).
This organizational differentiation has several social repercussions.
To further clarify, in this organizational arrangement two types of
control are infused in the social structure. To begin with, as noted
 The Organizational Bases of Corruption 115

earlier, the scope for autonomous action in organizations increases,

but that control decreases as we move up the hierarchical scale.
In organizational arrangements without differentiation, the scope
for autonomous action at the top of organizations offers opportu-
nities for intertwining disparate interests and roles. Organizational
differentiation breaks this intertwinement by decreasing the social
relationships between organizations and elucidating the transactions
between them. The creation of clear boundaries between organiza-
tions is one way of introducing a preventive countermeasure against
corruption and other closely related social phenomena in social life.
The result of differentiation is the introduction into the social struc-
ture of subtle control that is taken for granted and not viewed as
control. As a result, people who do not have the analytical tools
to observe these controls interpret the relative absence of corrup-
tion as a cultural phenomenon. This is a big mistake of theoretical
categorization – and one that can have serious consequences.
One type of control has to do with relationships between the state,
business enterprises, and politics, and the other with relationships
between people’s private spheres and their public lives. When the
spheres were separated from one another organizationally, the social
relationships between the spheres were limited. During the 100-year
period cited above, beginning around 1870, it is difficult to find rela-
tional phenomena such as patrimonialism, patronage, clientelism,
nepotism, and political capitalism in Sweden, even after taking into
account that people’s inability to see their presence in certain sec-
tors and social strata could be a sign of short-sightedness or naivety.
The organizational differentiation between spheres and the result-
ing, relative autonomization led to decisions and actions that to a
great extent followed the codes and premises inherent in each sphere.
The domains of rule, interest representation, and economic exchange
were separated from one another, overlapping minimally after this
separation. Further differentiations within each sphere separated the
decision-making, implementing, and controlling authorities from
one another.
However, the figure that Rolf Torstendahl drew on the whiteboard
barely applies to the Sweden of today. It was somewhat obsolete when
it was drawn and is no longer pertinent today. If one were to try to
draw the same figure in 2012, the task would be much more diffi-
cult in light of the restructuring of public life in Sweden, which in
116 Civilizing the Public Sphere

turn has made the picture much more complex. For the most part,
restructuring affects the state and the space it shares with the busi-
ness community; however, other areas are affected as well. The figure
represents the image that was central to the idea of the moderniza-
tion of public life, in which core, public organizations are specialized,
delimited from one another and distanced from the particularities of
everyday life. Such arrangements of organizations function primar-
ily in an impartial way given that they are infused with controls to
address the problems that are created by the large scope for action at
the upper echelons of all organizations.

The state and business: Differentiation and

organizational intertwinement

Once the differentiation processes are set into motion, writes Marion
J. Levy in his book on the modernization of social life, they are diffi-
cult to stop; they have a tendency to advance. Here, one can object
to the proposition’s demands on universality, but the Swedish state’s
recent development is a good illustration of the validity of the propo-
sition in specific cases. Current research reports and analyses from
disparate fields describe the development of the state using the con-
cepts of specialization and autonomization, among others. However,
the terms are not applied in the broader sense employed up to now;
rather they describe the development of individual state authorities
and state-run organizations (Lindqvist & Borell 1998, Premfors 1998).
In contrast to other European countries, the Swedish state has its own
distinctive, historical nature. It has always been organized through
relatively small departments, and considerable autonomy has been
given to somewhat independent authorities and to municipalities,
which in the latter case can also levy taxes. In recent years, we have
noted the further specialization of public authorities. Their spheres of
activity have shrunk and authorities have become more specialized,
while at the same time their numbers have increased. The same type
of restructuring is taking place within the organization of the state
in general; there are more organizations and each one is becoming
more “organizationally autonomous” so that their fairly hierarchi-
cal structures are transformed into delimited organizational entities
with their own leadership and a degree of independence (Brunsson &
Sahlin-Andersson 2000).
 The Organizational Bases of Corruption 117

Organizations of a certain size are self-supporting and self-

sustaining in that they are able to take charge of the support
functions that every organization requires in order to operate. The
smaller or more specialized an organization is, the more difficulty it
has in sustaining the routines it requires. As a consequence, it must
rely on other organizations. This causes the number of relationships
between organizations to increase, and an activity that was previ-
ously taken care of within the administrative apparatus and thus
subject to organizational control is now transformed into a relation-
ship between organizations. A number of observers have reported a
veritable explosion of relationships between organizations in recent
years. These relationships are managed primarily by individuals who
have acquired greater scope for autonomous action and have more
relationships to manage as a result of restructuring.
In a sense, this was a process of democratic decentralization. But in
many instances it was intertwined with a reform of the state appara-
tus, a major aim of which is to bring together state operations and the
business community. This has been carried out in a variety of ways.
Parts of the state have initially been transformed into state-owned
companies that operate in a market economy. In a second phase, a
number of state agencies have been turned into companies and func-
tion as private or semi-private entities, with models for management
and decision-making transferred to the public sector from the busi-
ness community (Forssell & Jansson 2000). The exchange logic of the
market is intertwined organizationally with the implementation of
rules, and, in a growing sector of the public sphere, it is no longer
possible to determine whether it is the state’s regulatory principles or
the market’s exchange principles that apply. From historical experi-
ence, when these two logics are intertwined, the result can lead to
wheeling and dealing and corruption.
A parallel process of differentiation and autonomization is
observed in the domain of business. According to the economic his-
torian Jan Glete, one characteristic of Swedish business development
until the 1950s was the direct control of companies by large owner
families. These families were the unifying, driving force behind differ-
ent governing institutions, such as holding companies, investment
companies, and foundations. According to Glete, the institutions
were tools of the owners, not independent players. To the degree that
ownership was institutional – as in the case of bankers during the
118 Civilizing the Public Sphere

interwar period – the banks were led by a generation of directors who

exercised owner-responsibility and owner-power in a manner akin
to individual owners (Glete 1987: 93–94). Even though a number
of families still control some large corporations, institutional own-
ership has increased in recent decades, and there is a good deal of
evidence indicating that ownership and management are separated.
In the power vacuum that was created here, company managers have
acquired greater scope for autonomous action (see Ahrne et al. 2003:
225–230).
An additional differentiation process within big corporations and
companies has enabled more people to acquire greater scope for
autonomous action. Here, some components of big corporations
have been transformed into relatively independent companies
through the cultivation of operations, “back to basics” strategies,
spin-offs, and outsourcing (for a comprehensive argument, see Knoke
2001). Like the state, activities that were previously subject to
internal organizational control are now transformed into inter-
organizational relations in which opportunities for control appear
more problematic.
And as the state and the economy become more interwoven,
elites from the different domains with discretionary powers at their
disposal are becoming connected as well.

Interpersonal networks and informality

In addition to the intertwined organizational networks described

above, the state and business are also increasingly linked by inter-
personal networks. Life-long employment in the public sector, the
irremovability principle, and adequate salaries for state employees
have long functioned as guarantees for impartiality in the decision-
making process. At the same time, they have decreased interpersonal
relationships between state employees and the business sector, and
regulations governing bias and other institutional solutions have
worked to the same end. Decisions in the public sphere are expected
to be impartial; in Sweden, this is a constitutional provision. The irre-
movability principle was abolished in Sweden in the 1960s, and since
then employees have generally been encouraged to move across sec-
tors in their working lives. However, this demonstrates that, even
when organizations are not intertwined via organizational networks,
 The Organizational Bases of Corruption 119

they can still be tied together through the social networks of individ-
uals moving between the realms. These individuals can be described
as either occupying different positions simultaneously or as peo-
ple who have changed sectors through their own mobility. Using
terminology borrowed from network research, these individuals are
“brokers” between two social networks.
Another social network form that appears to be on the rise is “min-
gling” between organizations. This often also comprises representa-
tives from civil society and is constituted somewhat differently than
the concatenated organizational network. Individuals do not move
between organizations or meet in the common spaces of intertwined
organizations; rather they gather in “between-organization” arenas
for getting acquainted with people from other domains. A number
of trade papers often fill their “seen with” columns with interesting
photos of such gatherings. Some years ago, a large electronics firm
bought 450 tickets for an ice hockey game in Stockholm’s Globen
arena. In addition to watching the game, the invited guests gath-
ered informally, enjoying food, drinks, and entertainment. From the
photo captions, it is possible to determine the organizational affilia-
tions of some of the mingling participants. Individuals with leading
positions in sports, politics, administration, and business appeared to
be enjoying their time together. The photographs from another min-
gling that followed a large gala to honor expertise, held in Stockholm,
featured individuals from major consulting firms, state-run compa-
nies, temp agencies, and other suppliers, all of whom were spending
time together at one of the city’s most fashionable nightclubs. Simi-
lar mingling gatherings take place across the country at conferences,
exclusive clubs, study centers, lectures, concerts, theatres, and artistic
performances, and I do not think that it is a coincidence that new
sport arenas in Stockholm have reintroduced private boxes for spec-
tators where elite groups can gather in discreet forms (compare the
architecture of opera houses in Chapter 3). However, newspaper arti-
cles do not necessarily disclose the extent to which emotional ties are
established, information is gathered, or resources are exchanged at
these informal networking sessions, nor do they necessarily reveal the
extensive penetration of organizational boundaries that such social
networks create.
Thus far, we have illustrated that there is ongoing and multiple
organizational intertwinement and concatenation and that social
120 Civilizing the Public Sphere

ties between individuals from different organizational sectors are

increasing. The circles increasingly overlap. Another phenomenon
that affects the public’s relationship with organizational life is also
relevant here. For a relatively long period, a disembedding process
has been taking place, one that creates relatively clear boundaries
between people’s lives and their public commitments. It began with
the separation of the king’s fortune from that of the state and evolved
into a clear distinction between the holder of a position and the
position itself. This played a significant role in shaping the pro-
cess through which organizational life and relationships became
impersonal and universalistic, for example, the state/citizen, com-
pany/customer, and association/member. In recent decades, however,
informality has reentered the public sphere (Misztal 2000). In one
way, this can be seen as an outcome of the humanization of orga-
nizational life. However, as I will later show, this has to do with an
extremely selective reembedding process, which results in what one
American social scientist has called “the fall of public man”: the ero-
sion of the boundaries between private and public spheres (Sennett
1978).

Disembedment and reembedment of the public realm

Let us now summarize the argument. Over a 100-year period,

between approximately 1870 and 1980, the public realm in Sweden
was organized into three relatively delimited spaces, with clear bor-
ders between business, the state, and interest representation. This
did not prevent interaction between the spheres. In all differentiated
social formations there is interaction, mutual dependence, and a flow
of resources between spheres. In Sweden, these interactions have fea-
tured as corporatism, politics, blockades, strikes, corporate taxation,
industry politics, and industry support, among others. However, the
social differentiation and the clear organizational boundaries func-
tioned as a control mechanism that was integrated into the social
structure. It was a mechanism that managed the discretionary pow-
ers of elites that are associated with the broad scope of autonomous
action situated at the highest echelons of every organization. The dis-
tance between organizations also became a social distance between
elites without extensive contacts. With few exceptions, organizations
were also disembedded from social life. In Sweden, there was a
fairly clear distinction between private and public life. Reforms in
 The Organizational Bases of Corruption 121

the organization of the state have resulted in a more amorphous

boundary between the state and business, with public life character-
ized by organizational intertwinements and extensive social networks
between spheres. In these intertwinements and social networks, top
positions from different organizational realms with broad scope for
autonomous action are concatenated. Perhaps trust, social capital,
and other social characteristics, which in recent times have acquired
positive connotations in social science discussions, are created in
these relationships. Nevertheless, I know of no culture, morality, or
ethic that can manage the corruption problem in such a context, and
it is highly likely that this is where we locate the social foundation
for recent corruption scandals in Sweden.
Corruption scandals are often a media spectacle; they capture the
public’s interest, create moral panic or indignation, and stimulate
public debate about what is wrong or immoral. However, they also
have a declining marginal utility. The more revelations the press
offers, the more corruption is normalized; it becomes part of everyday
life. Once such spectacles, with their revelations, TV debates, ser-
monizing, and ethics committees, stop pandering to the public, the
corruption debate will probably wane. Spectacles have boom times
too. The ability of scandals to elucidate what is happening has an
inverse relation to their intensity. Since they capture the public’s
interest while at the same time directing it toward the surface of social
life, they can distort the discussion about the organization of public
life. The remainder of the chapter will briefly outline some of the
underlying aspects of the elements that corruption revelations and
their related spectacles do not elucidate.
From a bird’s eye view and using the theoretical tools of mod-
ernization theory, the last 150 years of the organization of Swedish
public life appear to have been characterized by two long processes.
The first is differentiation, and the illustration I borrowed from Rolf
Torstendahl is a simple but telling expression of it. The second one,
which is often taken for granted, is the more protracted disembed-
ding process, which highlights how state organizations in Sweden
shield themselves from the particularities of public life. As a con-
sequence, organizations could function according to the premises
inherent in their organizational logic, even if conflicts regarding their
operations were always present.
Prolonged historical processes are never unambiguous; some can
be more or less continuous, others can have more obvious cyclical
122 Civilizing the Public Sphere

courses. In the long run, the first process, differentiation, seems

to be more or less continuous in Sweden, even though its pace
fluctuates. However, in the second process of disembedding, it is pos-
sible to observe obvious pendulum swings in which the processes
of the disembedment of the organization domain are followed by
a reembedment in social life. I believe Sweden is in the midst of a
reembedment process. In order to understand its nature, I will briefly
compare and contrast it with two other reembedment processes that
previously took place in Sweden.
The first reembedment of organizational life in social life which
I discuss can be traced back to the decades leading up to and follow-
ing the democratic breakthrough in Sweden in the first few decades
of the 20th century. Through an expansion of fairly autonomous
organizations, such as new political parties and people’s move-
ments, the domain of organizations, cut off from broader social
groups until that time, acquired popular support. It was primarily
an expansion of scale, and significant numbers of individuals were
integrated into political processes via new organizations such as polit-
ical parties and social movement organizations. As a consequence
of this reembedment process, the political landscape in Sweden
became more differentiated. The varying interests of a greater number
of people acquired organizational, autonomous, and non-mediated
expression and were articulated in the public sphere.
The second, fairly extensive reembedment process I highlight dates
back to the decades following World War II, and in a way is related
to the process discussed in the preceding paragraph. It was character-
ized by the primacy of politics, and in this process more and more
areas of social life became the objects of organizational and political
intervention. This period, which was also marked by mass participa-
tion, was the golden age of membership organizations and popular
movements in Sweden. The domain of organizations expanded prin-
cipally through the expansion of the welfare state. The state acquired
a more popular hold, not through its restructuring but by building
new (welfare) state institutions alongside the old ones, which were
kept intact. By touching the lives and spheres of many people, the
state became more differentiated.
The significance of these two reembedment processes is that they
resulted in more differentiation – the differentiation of politics in the
first case and the internal differentiation of the state in the second
 The Organizational Bases of Corruption 123

case. Both are characterized by organizational expansion, which

causes the domain of organizations to swell in order to manage the
problems, interests, and inconsistencies of social life. As such, both
processes signify that private concerns (such as illness, childbirth,
unemployment) are transformed into collective problems. Organiza-
tional expansion also has another effect; it strengthens the bonds of
affiliation with society for many people. In these periods, people in
Sweden became members of political parties and social movements,
citizenship was strengthened and acquired greater substantial con-
tent, and employment was regulated and more permanent, despite
the repeal of the irremovability principle.
There is much to suggest that we are now entering a new
reembedment period, one that is different from the two earlier ones.
An organizational condensation is occurring without organizational
expansion. Reembedment does not occur through organizational
expansion so that it can increase organizational differentiation.
Instead, organizational condensation is transformed into a differen-
tiated reembedment of the domain of organizations in social life. The
domain of organization is not linked more closely to society in its
entirety, but rather only to parts of it; at the same time, the link to
other parts of social life is weakened. If one looks at organizational life
as a whole, a significant disembedment process takes place because
the bonds of affiliation between people and organizations are weak-
ened rather than strengthened (Ahrne & Papakostas 2002, Papakostas
2004). Three fundamental types of affiliation – citizenship, member-
ship in voluntary organizations, and employment in state-run and
private companies – tend to lose substance. Many of the issues that
were previously managed through direct contacts between people
and organizations are now managed through relationships between
organizational representatives whose discretionary powers and scope
for action have increased. The elimination of control opportunities
previously built into the social structure means that disparate roles
can now be linked to the same individual or to the same circle of indi-
viduals. Furthermore, the erosion of the clear dividing line between
private and public lives makes it possible for these public roles to
coincide with private interests. Instead of transforming the private
concerns of a large social group into collective problems, this new
situation is rather synonymous with the elite groups’ privatization of
the public sphere. In addition, there are signs that this largely concerns
124 Civilizing the Public Sphere

elite groups, which have created structural opportunities through the

reform of the organization of public life to shield themselves from
social life and hence become more intertwined and coherent. I am
certain that this creates more social capital and confidence among
the elites. However, I do not doubt that it will make a lasting imprint
on public confidence in the public sphere. I would also suggest that
what we have seen in recent years is only what the scandal spectacle
has been able to trap in its wide-mesh net. If the picture I have drawn
here is correct, then the corruption scandals involve more than just
people’s private morality, media reporting, moral entrepreneurs, and
ethics committees. They are problems that concern fundamental
aspects of the social organization of society that affect the trust-
worthiness of the public sphere in general. We will now turn our
attention to organizations in the realm of interest representation, the
organizations of civil society.
6
More Organization with
Fewer People

Membership and trust

In Chapter 3, we saw that the public’s very witnessing of the

decision-making process in modern democracies played an important
role in the establishment of trust. We also saw how social and orga-
nizational boundaries simultaneously solve trust problems within a
delimited boundary and create a transparency problem for those out-
side. The mechanisms that elucidate the course of events within a
delimited area also constituted a theme in Chapter 3. For example,
the fact that the estates were forced to keep minutes that became
public represents one such mechanism. The mechanisms work to
shed light on the decision-making processes of a fairly shielded elite
group while maintaining a line of demarcation between the group
and that part of society the group believes it represents. Mass partic-
ipation through formal membership is the functional equivalent of
this. Despite the oligarchic tendencies so inherent to it, mass partic-
ipation based on membership abolishes the boundary between elite
groups and the social base. It thus transforms the question of trans-
parency into one of internal organizational processes and controls
written in rules that often stipulate routines, role differentiations,
the control of power, and power abuses, similar to those prescribed
in constitutions. Usually, the charters of mass organizations in civil
societies are similar to the constitutions of countries they emanated
in (compare Skocpol et al. 2000). As such, one of democracy’s fun-
damental ways of producing trust is through mass participation in
political and social organizations with membership as a fundamental
form of affiliation. In this chapter, I will show how such organizations

125
126 Civilizing the Public Sphere

were created and how, in recent decades, they have moved in a direc-
tion that has led to a new line of demarcation between elite groups
and social life. This line of demarcation actualizes the problem of
transparency and trust in a new way.
We also saw that organizations in civil society played an important
role by capturing the problems and solutions of social life and aggre-
gating interests into categories, thereby supporting and vitalizing the
organization and mode of operation of the universalistic state. A pre-
requisite for this is that the organizations have deep roots in social
life. In this chapter, I will demonstrate how civil society organizations
lost, at least in part, this proximity to their grassroots, a characteris-
tic of what was popularly known as the Swedish social movement
tradition.
In Sweden, the elimination of the boundary between “elite” and
“social base” and “the proximity to grassroots” was made possible
by the extensive dissemination of an associational model built on
membership. Large political mass organizations have been created
in numerous countries. However, mass organizations based on for-
mal membership are a fairly unusual phenomenon on the whole –
one that has historically occurred in some countries in northwestern
Europe (with the Scandinavian countries being typical illustrations)
and more sporadically in the rest of the world. Furthermore, I do
not consider it a mere coincidence that it is in these countries, from
a historical perspective, that political corruption has been kept to a
minimum and the level of trust in the public realm has been high.
The mechanisms of structured skepticism were transmitted from
the constitutions to the organizations of civil society, imprinted in
the statuses of organizations and mainly practiced through the insti-
tution of strong membership in civil society organizations. As the
institution of strong membership weakens as a form for affiliation,
professional elites in civil society assume more discretionary pow-
ers while the power of members to evaluate its leadership weakens.
As the institution of membership weakens, the functioning of the
mechanisms of structured skepticism inside civil society becomes
problematic. I believe that the misuses of resources that we have
witnessed in civil society organizations and the corruption scan-
dals in political parties are the result of the processes described in
this chapter. Without its civilizing mechanisms civil society tends to
become uncivic.
 More Organization with Fewer People 127

Citizens turn their backs

As in many other countries in recent years, debates have raged about

the future of political parties in Sweden and the other Nordic coun-
tries, with many pages in the editorial, op-ed, and cultural sections of
a number of major daily newspapers devoted to the topic.1 For exam-
ple, in a report co-authored by the renowned Scandinavian scholars
Olof Petersson, Sören Holmberg and Lena Wägnerund of Sweden,
Lise Togeby of Denmark, and Gudmund Hernes of Norway issued
in the spring of 2000, the Swedish Council of Democracy stated that
political parties would disappear some time after 2013. The report
noted several trends that, with minor exceptions, can be observed
in all Western countries. Class voting and party loyalty are decreas-
ing, political parties no longer enjoy the same legitimacy as before,
young people prefer other forms of political activity than that offered
by political parties, and the number of members of political parties
is diminishing. With the help of this last extrapolated trend and
other trends used to support the argument, the report suggests that
we are moving toward a democracy without parties. It is not that
political activity is in decline. Rather, it is changing shape (Petersson
et al. 2000) and is expressing itself through individualized actions in
sub-political spaces located closer to people’s everyday lives.
What has been described above regarding the political sphere bears
a strong resemblance to what post-modern thinkers have elucidated
in discussions about new social movements. Here, the idea is that
from a qualitative standpoint the new social movements developing,
for example, in Western Europe and which developed in the disinte-
grated Eastern Europe belong to a new post-modern era. In contrast
to the old movements, they are formless: they build on informal
ties among people and on networks among groups; they build on
the creation of meaning and identity (preferably new post-modern
identities), and for the most part can be considered a contemporary
victory over Michels’ famous law on the indispensability of oligarchy
(Castells 1997, Melucci 1996, Touraine 1981, Touraine et al. 1983).
Central to the aforementioned assumptions about the develop-
ments in the political and civic spheres is the idea of formlessness
and individualization, two phenomena that are simultaneously the
expression of a new era and the driving force behind social change.
These ideas have now gained such a hegemonic position in large
128 Civilizing the Public Sphere

segments of the social sciences that few individuals question their

validity. In this chapter, I will employ organization-realistic points
of departure to argue that the idea of formlessness is based on weak
theoretical and empirical grounds and that individualization is a con-
sequence rather than the driving force. This leads me to another
interpretation of the current social processes occurring in voluntary
organizations in what is usually referred to as civil society. It compels
me to reassess the shape, scope, and location of the social change
taking place in our time. The study of social movements and polit-
ical parties is one way of studying social change. However, the type
of change that social movements and political parties effect through
their goals or ideologies takes a back seat here in an attempt to trace
a more hidden, often lengthy, and unusual change in the basic forms
of social action. Behind the domains of goals, ideologies, and talk is
a world marked by inertia, hidden by the superficial changes in the
part of social life we perceive directly.
A somewhat erroneous conclusion is often reached in the studies
of social movements: a historical parenthesis, such as the develop-
ment of protests in the decomposing Soviet Union (for example, see
Touraine et al. 1983) and a less well-known but older sociological
category, the formlessness of a number of social movements, is trans-
formed into a new historical category through post-modern social
action. Researchers have been inundated by change because they
have paid far too much attention to everything that is considered
new. In order to put what is new into perspective and possibly cap-
ture its direction, I start, as Fernand Braudel (1988) advocated, from
the historical and permanent category: that which is relatively con-
stant and relatively unchanging. I do this in order to avoid another
mistake inherent in analyses in the field: a simplification of the past
as simple, monotonous, predictable or stagnant, and a labeling of our
own age as more complex, multi-faceted, unpredictable, and accel-
erating – erroneous conclusions that moreover are shared by many
other spheres of the social sciences. Therefore, in this chapter, I will
describe the past repertoires of collective action because much of
what is now considered new is actually old and what is really new
has escaped observation. All things considered, what is new does not
seem to me to be more formlessness with more people but the exact
opposite: more organization with fewer people and more organizations
with fewer issues. This is an argument that goes against the ideas of
 More Organization with Fewer People 129

Touraine (1981), Castells (1997), Melucci (1996), and many others,

who maintained that new movements resemble networks rather than
organizations, and the organizational form of new social movements
has a tendency to be more informal or exhibit the characteristics of
primary groups.
One central argument in this chapter is that movements routinize
their charisma and acquire permanent structures much more quickly
than before and that the adjectives used to describe them are based
more on external symbols, articulated discourses, and movements’
own perceptions than on organizational realities. For example, new
organizations appear to be flexible not because they are human
but rather for quite the opposite reason. They appear to be flexible
because they build their activity on non-human resources that have
a high degree of convertibility and because they have a more sta-
ble organizational structure that allows a higher degree of member
exchangeability. As members become more exchangeable and social
movement organizations rely on resources with a high degree of con-
vertibility, the mechanism of institutionalized voice, which has been
central to movements with membership as a basic form of affiliation,
weakens. The option that is left is exit, but using the exit mecha-
nism without the formal mechanism of voice is rather ineffective.2
Besides, the organization can easily substitute the resources that are
lost when, for instance, the volunteer and the donor (some of the
new organizational resources in contemporary civil society organiza-
tions) use the exit option. In this way organizations become more
independent of the preferences, choices, and actions of individuals,
and it becomes more important to understand the organizational
processes described in this chapter in order to interpret the nature of
the driving forces of change in our times. This type of organization is
probably more flexible in relation to the wishes of the leadership but
more apathetic to the wishes of ordinary people.
This chapter is the result of a new reading, comparison, and sum-
mary of material and secondary literature I had the opportunity to
collect during the course of two different studies in which I par-
ticipated. The first study considered the social prerequisites for the
organization of labor movements in Sweden and Greece (Papakostas
1995, 1996), while the second, carried out by Göran Ahrne and me,
examined the preconditions for new voluntary and social movement
organizations in 1980s Sweden. Among other things, we examined
130 Civilizing the Public Sphere

the conditions for the genesis of a new party (the Green Party), a new
church (the Word of Life), and a new sport (floorball) (see Ahrne &
Papakostas 2002). I also had the opportunity to be involved in several
excellent and detailed studies of new voluntary organizations, car-
ried out at the Department of Sociology and the Stockholm Centre
for Organizational Research (both at Stockholm University) and at
the Department of Sociology at Södertörn University in recent years;
some of the illustrations used here are taken from these studies.3
Here, I comparatively consider old and new voluntary organizations
as well as different types of voluntary organizations. I apply one of
the more difficult variants of the comparative method used to find
uniform processes and mechanisms behind discrete and highly vari-
able forms of expression. The reader should be forewarned that this
type of comparison always has variable expressions that are directly
observed against it and that one can always find examples that do not
fit the mold. The fact that some cases deviate does not imply that the
premise or overall results are wrong; uniform processes can lie latent
without always generating observable expressions and when they do
give rise to expressions, they are not always uniform. By exploring the
variable expressions in different contexts, I gain an understanding of
the existence, strength, and direction of processes.

The institutionalization of movements

By applying a classic dichotomy in sociology – between movement

and institution – Gunnar Olofsson (1988) notes that these “new”
movements distinguish themselves from “old” ones by virtue of
their newness and by being therefore in a nascent stage. Implicit
in this mode of thinking is the idea that, sooner or later, move-
ments are transformed into institutions through processes similar
to those described by Max Weber as the routinization of charisma.
In studies of social movements, this is usually referred to as the
Weber–Michels tradition, although such diverse thinkers as Francesco
Alberoni (1984) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1976) can also be conceived as
belonging to the same tradition. In essence, this is a sound argu-
ment; however, it must be qualified. It is true with reference to
old movements; they are transformed into institutions, for example
the labor movement in northwestern Europe and especially Britain.
This occurred via a painful process often lasting for decades. Its
 More Organization with Fewer People 131

duration was comparatively longer in Britain than in the rest of

Europe, since the labor movement could first model its activities on
the British experience and later on that of Germany and/or France.
With time, this process became shorter, both through the increased
organizational capacity of the population and the standardization
of organizational knowledge. In other words, a process of historical
learning shortens the period in a movement’s history usually known
as “the nascent stage”. Another aspect deals with opportunity struc-
tures in movements that have changed over time as a result of the
extensive concentration of resources that occurred across Western
Europe and the United States. Access to a concentration of resources
affects new movements or parties to such an extent that, in princi-
ple, they can skip the entire nascent period and moreover acquire a
structure significantly different from that of old mass organizations.
At first glance, these processes of rationalization and bureaucrati-
zation observed not only in states or capitalist companies but also
in voluntary organizations seem to confirm Max Weber’s misgivings
about a future iron cage. But behind and primarily among these
worlds of rationalizing inertia, interstitial space in which citizens can
develop new interpretations of reality and articulate new interests
is continually opening up. If one uses this terminology, then it is
safe to say that the social location of these spaces does not lie out-
side the structured power fields of the social system but rather at
the heart of politics and social life. By considering social life as a
system that either adapts itself too well and absorbs change or is
too coherent to allow change, thinkers with a post-modern orien-
tation have resigned themselves to placing opportunities for change
outside this system, in the domains of life-world and interpersonal
relationships. By considering social life as a social landscape, with-
out defining it as an entity or system in advance, it is rather easy
to see that it is not as adaptable as structure-functionalist explana-
tions make it out to be, nor is it so well put together as to constitute
a system. In social life, in the discontinuities that arise between
obviously sluggish changes and those that exist because of the incom-
plete intertwinement of the social fabric, there lies a whole world of
often overlooked opportunities. I use the metaphor of open spaces to
describe such power-unstructured fields.
In one way, it is correct to maintain that new social movement
organizations are not characterized by the distance between leaders
132 Civilizing the Public Sphere

and followers, which was observed in old social movements. How-

ever, this position can be supported on other grounds than those
often imagined. Membership organizations and political parties can
be depicted by three circles: leaders, members, and sympathizers
(compare Duverger 1964). Characteristic of membership-based orga-
nizations is an organizational dividing line between members and
sympathizers as well as distance between leaders and members, which
is the essence of the iron law of oligarchy (Michels 1983). It is main-
tained in discussions about new social movements that they have
solved the distance problem between leaders and members. In actual
fact, they transform the distance into a new organizational bound-
ary, lying between leaders and members, and transform members
into sympathizers or, if you will, consumers of politics. I believe
that the theoretical shift from studying a movement’s organization
(which was widespread in studies of old movements) to studying the
movement’s meaning-creating processes, such as those described in
the movement’s own terms (which is widespread in these studies of
new social movements; see, for example, Castells 1997: 69–704 ), has
prevented many people from seeing the new, narrower organizational
boundary. The fact that many people also confuse a theoretical shift
with a shift in reality has not made the matter any easier.
Other arguments, especially within political sociology or sociology-
inspired political science, build on an image of a society with at least
two speeds.5 On the one hand, we have a social life that is chang-
ing at an ever-increasing rate, where change is expressed primarily as
changes in human mentality. New attitudes, often post-material in
character, are reported from almost every corner of the world, partic-
ularly among young people. At the same time, new problems arise or
are defined, and new questions continuously crop up. On the other
hand, the established parties and old social movements remain rigid.
They were established and grew during what can be viewed as the
age of the industrial society, and from the point of view of social
phenomena they were rational responses to society’s problems and
adopted the prevailing basic organizational logic. This intertwine-
ment with the logic of industrial society makes them sluggish. They
have not adapted quickly to new conditions and no longer corre-
spond to the expectations of citizens, who are increasingly turning
their backs on parties and the old-style movements. People’s disloy-
alty translates into declining membership numbers, a trend that is
 More Organization with Fewer People 133

more striking among the younger generations, which have no emo-

tional or ideological ties to the old parties or movements and are
quicker to adopt the new mentalities of the times. Therefore, young
people choose new forms of political activity.6
In its totality, this is such an elegant argument that its structure
has been used by innovators or prophets through the ages in order to
underrate the past, mark the juncture for a new era, and define reality
in a new way (compare Berger & Luckmann 1966). It has also been
repeated so many times by prominent political scientists who appear
in the media and write in the op-ed and arts sections of major news-
papers that it is accepted as reality. Often the argument is mentioned
in connection with a crisis of legitimacy in core political institu-
tions. This has led to a situation in which risky scientific statements
about reality tend to become true because of their consequences and
through the measures taken to remedy the alleged crises. Statements
on the crisis of democracy and the measures taken to neutralize it cre-
ate this crisis via the social mechanism described many years ago by
Robert Merton, namely “the self-fulfilling prophecy” (Merton 1968).
From a scientific standpoint, the argument places the preferences
and choices of human beings at the center; they are assumed to be
more variable than institutional structures. In the interstitial space
that arises in a social life that travels at two speeds – variable mental-
ities and sluggish institutions – niches are created that make possible
the definition of reality in new terms by political entrepreneurs.
In this way, social life experiences renewal; however, it can also
translate into regression. For example, Jens Rydgren applies this
framework in his analysis of French social life and essentially uses
it to explain the origins of right-wing populism in France (Rydgren
2002). In the discussion about two speeds, the analyses early on
reveal a gap between a sluggish organizational life and altered atti-
tudes (compare also Sörbom 2002 on sub-political spaces). I maintain
that, in light of the pleasure of this new discovery, researchers have
not gone further in their analyses in order to see how far this inter-
stitial space extends. The revitalization of an honorable tradition in
political sociology from the 1950s to 1960s, in which political form
and content were considered to be a projection that could be deduced
from the composition and characteristics of the electorate, has also
contributed to the placement of the mechanisms that create this
space in the domains of mentalities, attitudes, and altered habits.
134 Civilizing the Public Sphere

A well-known contemporary representative of this tradition is

Robert Putnam with his studies on the disappearance of civic spirit in
the United States (see, for example, Putnam 1996). Putnam observes
a decrease in participation in voluntary organizations over the last
30–40 years. As a social Sherlock Holmes with a feel for suspense, he
systematically investigates citizens’ social characteristics, dismissing
them one by one until finally deciding on the likely “primary sus-
pect”: the enormous amount of TV viewing in the United States.7
What Putnam observes is citizen apathy to social life, and in order
to explain this phenomenon he uses another indicator of apathy,
prolonged TV viewing. Civic characteristics are explained by other
civic characteristics, and consequently political and social apathy is
regarded as the consequence of another type of apathy. While similar
analyses provide information about the altered habits and attitudes
of humans and generations, important areas of politics and social
life as well as the consequences of their actions remain unexplored.
To use sociological terminology, Putnam fails to demonstrate how
this multi-faceted atomization process fits together and how it is the
consequence of developments in important social and political fig-
urations. “It is ironic,” writes Theda Skocpol, “that a scientist who
researches social ties in social analyses works with atomistic concepts
and data” (Skocpol 1996). Putnam’s research, which is well known in
Sweden, has led to a good deal of discussion in social science circles.8
To a great extent, the research resulting from this attention is based
on the same methodological premises. However, in Sweden, one dis-
cerns a more obvious shift to individuals’ cognitive processes and
to the phenomenological interpretations of individuals’ creation of
meaning (see, for example, Möller 2000). Nevertheless, when a socio-
logical Sherlock Holmes hangs, like Odysseus, onto the mast of either
phenomenological or rational individualism, he or she is looking in
the wrong direction (compare Tilly 2000: 27–36).

Organizations turn their backs on members

From the relation-realistic traditions of the idea of the social

landscape,9 I see this atomization process and the closely related pro-
cess of turning away from society as a consequence and not as a
driving force. Far from wishing to replace a naïve transfer of a market-
ing metaphor to political life with simple supply-side determinism or
 More Organization with Fewer People 135

institutional Pavlovism, I turn the entire argument around and place

the domain of mechanisms among core political and social insti-
tutions. The interstitial space one discovers in the above argument
extends far into organizational life, which is where the mechanisms
that create it can be found. Humans do not turn their backs on parties
and movements – quite the contrary. Parties and (other) voluntary
organizations turn their backs on citizens by creating new, narrower
boundaries among social movement organizations and members.
A relatively extensive but inert and often unnoticed rationalization
process is underway in what is usually referred to as civil society. Fur-
thermore, in my opinion, one of the core mechanisms that make
this and the new designation of boundaries possible is the shift in
the methods used to mobilize resources from other organizations
rather than from members.10 The loss of civic spirit, the rejection
of society, TV viewing, participation in collective, ecstasy-inducing
rituals, a post-modern focus on egocentrism or ego development,
narcissistic corporeal centering, and other expressions of contempo-
rary alienation are the consequences of the processes whereby the
fabric of social life becomes more organizational and assumes nar-
rower boundaries. Moreover, the individual interpretations of reality
expressed in the interviews or surveys that one finds in most studies
are interpretations by people who sense they are not needed without
knowing why. However, as I noted earlier, the picture is not as bleak
as it seems at first glance. Behind this rationalization process, oppor-
tunities for new forms of voluntary activities and opportunities for
the regeneration of our social landscape are created.

Membership and cadres

The social scientists of the future will agree that the previous
century – short or long – was undeniably the century of membership
organizations. Never before have so many millions of people partici-
pated in political parties, union activities, or charitable groups as they
did during the period that is slowly coming to an end.
As is the case with all complex organizations, there are several dif-
ferent ways to describe a membership organization. Although it usually
has many members, size is not the most important attribute of a
membership organization. Generally, membership organizations are
also based primarily on non-material incentives; however, one of the
136 Civilizing the Public Sphere

most essential characteristics has been the specific, palpable connec-

tion and reciprocal dependency relationship that develops between
the organization and its members. The organization was necessary in
order to sustain, coordinate, and multiply the efforts of like-minded
individuals. At the same time, it was dependent on people’s efforts
and resources. Since the purpose of the membership organization
was to mobilize many people and their limited resources, it was a
labor-intensive organization. Therefore, it is not surprising that agi-
tation, scrupulous membership records, membership meetings, and
membership fees constituted core organizational phenomena in the
membership organization, and the agitator, association secretary, and
association treasurer were the organization’s most prominent figures.
One can find embryonic membership organizations earlier in his-
tory, but as an organizational form they belong to the social innova-
tions associated with the growth of European socialism immediately
prior to the expansion of the right to vote in a number of European
countries. This became a model for the organization of both volun-
tary associations and the sports movement. The decades immediately
following World War II embodied the golden age of mass politics;
most membership parties in Europe recorded their highest member-
ship levels, and many people regarded the membership organization
as the obvious way of aggregating citizen interest in a democracy and
as a symbol for modern democracy (Duverger 1964).
The trend was somewhat different for the parties on the right of
the political spectrum. With a tight little core of personalities and
hangers-on instead of members, the cadre organization was originally
an archaic way of organizing political activity in countries with lim-
ited political rights. In more recent times, this has been viewed as
the normal political expression of the middle class. The cadre orga-
nization has no members. It is a coalition of prominent personalities
who are intent on winning elections with the support of the names,
prestige, and contacts of influential people. These individuals work
with experts who know how they should handle and appear in front
of voters and how to organize campaigns. The cadre organizations
acquire their power to act by coordinating the considerable resources
of a handful of people.
During the golden era of membership organizations, the cadre
organizations adapted, at least in part, to the new conditions by
opening their doors to the masses, and sometimes they even based
 More Organization with Fewer People 137

their operations on membership. This is the gist of Duverger’s famous

“contagion from the left” thesis. However, this adaptation was never
complete. Through its location in the social structure, the cadre orga-
nization had access to concentrated resources. Therefore, it needed
the electorate’s votes but not the members’ resources. With the excep-
tion of countries in which the cadre organization was combined with
clientelist networks, it did not succeed in establishing lasting ties
with the electorate, and its foothold in social life has therefore been
a fragile one. This may explain why socialist membership organi-
zations succeeded in having a greater impact in many countries in
northwestern Europe than in the United States or countries on the
European side of the Mediterranean Sea, and why voter support for
the non-socialist bloc in Sweden has shifted between different parties.

More organization with fewer people

For most social movement organizations, the membership organiza-

tion has served as the prototype for the organizational form even
if, in reality, the existing voluntary organizations were a combina-
tion of membership and cadre forms in different configurations.
Over the last 50 years, both the membership organization and the
cadre organization have undergone processes of inert rationalization,
which affected real organizations differently depending on how the
membership and cadre forms were previously combined. This can be
observed most clearly in parties on the right and less clearly in par-
ties on the left: in the new social democratic parties established after
the fall of dictatorships in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, which did
not become membership organizations of the older social democratic
type and in new voluntary organizations in general.
The first expression of rationalization is that human labor is no
longer required to convey the party’s message since the technology
for mass communication and propaganda has been developed and
systematized, and has become the realm of professional activities in
modern mass media, primarily television (see Tarrow 1994: 143–5).
The most striking consequence of this trend is the personification of
politics: the acquisition of votes due to the charismatic personalities
of leaders as exposed in the media. Another organizational conse-
quence is the fact that the agitator and the message intermediary
are no longer needed for the organization’s operations. While the
138 Civilizing the Public Sphere

chain of people within the party who convey messages between the
party heads and members is disappearing, a staff of election strate-
gists and media experts is appearing on the scene (see Della Porta &
Diani 1999: 152–3).
It is possible to date the genesis of a research approach in the study
of social movements known as “the resource mobilization school”
to the mid-1970s (McCarthy & Zald 1987). Originally seeking a way
to solve a theoretical problem dealing with the genesis of collective
action, the school directed its attention to the manner in which social
movement organizations mobilize their resources. This observation
revealed that the mobilization of resources was more important than,
and a prerequisite for, the mobilization of members. Some of the
researchers in this field believe that this applies to both old and
new social movement organizations, but my reading of the extensive
research on social movements dates the phenomenon to about 1960.
In general, new social movement organizations founded after 1960
seem to be more resource-intensive then those founded before. For
example, it could take several decades for one of the old-style organi-
zations to hire someone, whereas nowadays it often takes only a few
weeks for new movements to hire personnel and create a relatively
permanent organizational structure.
In fact, resource intensity is a type of change that could just as
well have strengthened the bond between members and the organi-
zation. However, resource intensity has been coupled with a shift in
the location of resources, a move that has far-reaching consequences.
Previously, I mentioned that, according to the logic of the member-
ship organization, it was important to concentrate on many people’s
limited and scattered resources. Thus, membership fees bound the
membership organization and its members together in the same way
that taxes bound citizens to their respective states in Western Europe
(Tilly 1990a).
However, the bulk of an organization’s resources no longer comes
from its members. Since the mid-1960s, membership dues in polit-
ical parties in Sweden have accounted for less than 20 per cent
of party revenues, and in the 1990s this figure dropped to below
10 per cent (Pierre & Widfeldt 1995: 43). A similar trend has been
observed in the political parties of a number of Western European
countries (Katz & Mair 1994) and in the rest of the world (for an
overview, see Austin & Tjernström 2003). However, this trend is not
 More Organization with Fewer People 139

limited to political parties. A Swedish government report that stud-

ied 200 randomly selected athletic associations estimates that in 1993
member dues constituted about 10 per cent of their total revenues
(Idrott åt alla? Kartläggning och analys av idrottsstödet [Sports for Every-
one? A Survey and Analysis of Support to Sports], 1993). In an analysis
of the resource environment in athletics, a group of researchers (Berg
et al. 1993: 52–74) found that membership fees in the sports move-
ment amounted to 500 million kronor a year, while resource assets
totaled 11.5 billion kronor. If we take into account the work that
people who are active in the sport movement do for free as member
contributions, then in the early 1990s these contributions accounted
for about half of the total resource capital.
In the Nordic context, most resources come from the state; how-
ever, there is tremendous variation in this area. Non-socialist parties
have traditionally sought support from companies, and companies
have also sponsored the sports movement. In recent years, funds,
foundations, and organizations, together with insurance companies
and other institutional forms for the concentration of resources, have
played the same role for social movement organizations as banks
and investment firms play for companies and countries all over the
world.11 Spectators have also paid fees to watch soccer, and indi-
viduals have made contributions to charitable organizations without
being members.
The location of resources outside the organizations or in other
organizations has consequences for social movement organizations
since resource capital is usually associated with a relationship of
dependence or services in return. Some impacts are quite evident,
for example, company logos on athletic uniforms or athletic clubs
named after companies, such as Kinder-Bologna, MoDo or Elverket
in Vallentuna, Sweden.
Among the most obvious losers are the sports amateurs who turn
professional, after which they lose their importance in the same
way that conscripts are no longer needed in professional armies.
By placing the changing patterns of resource mobilization identified
above alongside studies of the professionalization of political par-
ties or sports movements, the connection between resource capital
and professionalization becomes apparent. The professionalization of
political parties described by Angelo Panebianco (1988), for exam-
ple, occurs somewhat later than the shift in the way resources
140 Civilizing the Public Sphere

are mobilized; this also applies to the sports movement, although

this movement sometimes seems to have morphed initially into a
donation-collection organization12 and then into a foundation from
its original membership organization. Organization figures linked to
membership such as agitators, association secretaries, and treasurers
or organizational phenomena such as membership rolls and dues, to
the extent that they exist, are more reminiscent of relics of times
past than of substantial organizational activities. Instead, in their
place one finds professional activists, campaign experts, sponsor con-
sultants, project managers, and directors. In research on new social
movements, one now comes across such descriptive terms as “pro-
fessional movements”, “the movement industry”, and “movement
entrepreneur” (McCarthy & Zald 1987).
Today’s voluntary organizations seem to lack the popular prox-
imity that, for example, G. Hilding Nordström described during
the labor movement’s infancy (Nordström 1938: 590). Social move-
ment organizations are becoming more successful at acquiring vital
resources for their operations, but at the same time they are losing
some of their ability to manage people. On the whole, it seems that
relations among organizations are intensifying, whereas membership
and functions aimed at members are growing weaker. Organizations
draw closer to each other through resources and other interactions,
while they simultaneously retreat from their members.
The resource-intensive way of running a collective activity is most
obvious in new voluntary organizations where the course of events
proceeds at a faster pace. They are created at a time when resources
are concentrated and the technology for organizing collective behav-
ior is systematized and professionalized. With few exceptions, they
resemble foundations more than membership organizations. To the
extent that they aim to mobilize resources that are not concentrated,
they become donation-collecting organizations that appeal to the
public for voluntary contributions instead. But, like foundations,
they have more clearly defined boundaries vis-à-vis the public than
membership organizations.
Many adjectives have been used to describe the new social move-
ments: non-bureaucratic, non-hierarchical, democratic and flexible,
to name just a few. Their members are put on a par with mod-
ern nomads linked by flexible post-modern networks, and there are
those who believe that the dream of a life without organizations is
 More Organization with Fewer People 141

on the way to being realized. One cannot deny that, in their ini-
tial stages, the new social movements share many of these traits
to varying degrees. For example, the Green Party’s profile as anti-
oligarchic and anti-bureaucratic is common knowledge. At least in
the beginning, “Back to the People” was considered a motto for new
organizations; however, this was a phenomenon of very short dura-
tion. Many people initially considered floorball a fun game that could
be played without rules and where men and women could play in
the same teams. In no time at all, floorball has become a game with
strict rules, and gender distinctions have been introduced in every
league.
On the whole, new movements routinize their charisma and
acquire permanent structures much more quickly than before. In a
study of three new social movement organizations in Sweden –
Noah’s Ark (Noaks Ark, a voluntary organization that works with
HIV/AIDS), the 5–12 Movement (5i12-rörelsen, an anti-racist volun-
tary organization), and Fathers and Mothers in the City (Farsor och
morsor på stan, a voluntary association that works with young peo-
ple in the city), Lars-Erik Olsson (1999) found that the organizations
had a short “nascent period” and differed tangibly from the model
of the old popular movement based on membership. None of these
organizations has had to depend on membership fees, and access to
concentrated resources makes it possible for them to hire person-
nel at an early stage. Other studies of new social movements, for
example, ecological, peace, solidarity, and gay movements in Europe
(Kriesi 1996), the rural movement in Sweden (Herlitz 1998), or
women’s shelters (Johansson 2001), report the extensive mobilization
of resources from other organizations at an early stage.
Three other detailed case studies of new social movement orga-
nizations in Sweden show the same patterns (see Boström 1999).
Greenpeace was founded in Sweden in 1983 on the model of
Greenpeace International. This organizational form is a cross between
a donation-collecting organization and a foundation with an empha-
sis on collecting donations and is primarily a professional organiza-
tion. Such hybrid organizations use volunteers, often young students,
for certain tasks, usually simple, routine duties. After a short time,
these individuals may be allowed to take part in actions. Eight years
after its founding, Sweden’s Greenpeace had 44 employees (but only
20 some years later). Its income is derived from donations and
142 Civilizing the Public Sphere

supporting members who do not exercise any formal influence in

the organization.
Another example is the Swedish World Wildlife Fund (WWF),
founded in 1971 on the model of the WWF, which in turn was
founded in 1961. The organization drew on famous members of
other voluntary organizations, business and industry, and govern-
ment agencies, which were also represented in the organization’s
different organs. The organization, also a hybrid between a founda-
tion and a donation-collecting organization, is managed by a paid
staff. It does not have members as such, but rather 150,000 support-
ers who do not exert any formal influence over it. About half of its
revenues come from the general public in the form of financial sup-
port, gifts, wills, Bingo, Lotto, and other money-raising enterprises.
The remainder of its revenues comes from sales, contributions from
and collaboration with insurance companies, private companies, and
(even) indirect financial support from the government.
Magnus Boström (1999) also notes that neither Greenpeace nor the
WWF desires members in the real sense of the word. During an inter-
view, an ex-CEO of Sweden’s Greenpeace acknowledged that when
she held the position, young people often called her about joining
Greenpeace and taking part in its actions. Frequently, her negative
reply came in the form of a suggestion that they turn to their local
Swedish Society for Nature Conservation or the Swedish Associa-
tion of Field Biologists, which are old popular movements (Boström
1999: 150). When the Swedish WWF’s administrative head was inter-
viewed, he noted that the organization received calls on a daily basis
from people who wanted to do charitable work, but the WWF turned
down their offers (Boström 1999: 84–5).
The youngest organization studied by Boström, The Natural Step
[Det Naturliga Steget], has gone all the way. An entirely professional
organization, it has no members in the normal sense of the word.
Formally, it is a foundation established by other organizations and
also mobilizes its resources from other organizations.
Perhaps the alert reader has made note of the titles “CEO” or
“administrative head”. Boström gives occupational titles to his 30
or so interviewees. On the list, one finds such titles as “infor-
mation manager”, “employee” and “board member”, “information
officer”, “self-employed consultant”, “manager”, “campaign head”,
“administrative head”, “consultant”, “administrative official”, and
 More Organization with Fewer People 143

“campaigner”, for example. My own review of the websites of many

other Swedish voluntary organizations confirms this image, and
words such as “association secretary”, “association treasurer”, “elec-
tion committee”, and “membership fees” are conspicuously absent.
The new organizations are far from being alone in adopting the
new organizational technology. Even the old organizations have been
affected, albeit at a somewhat slower and more variable rate. The his-
torical course, whose beginning in Western Europe can generally be
dated to the 1960s, is the same from the left-hand to right-hand side
of Figure 6.1 and primarily toward the lower part of the right-hand
side. The opportunity for mobilizing resources from other organiza-
tions determines the beginning of the course at specific places, while
the strength of the social ties between members and old organizations
determines its speed. These changes began earlier and proceeded
more rapidly in cadre organizations, whereas in membership organi-
zations, the changes began later and proceeded at a slower rate. Leon

SOURCES OF RESOURCES
Inside the organization Outside the organization
Membership Donation collection
DENSITY OF RESOURCES

Dispersed Old social movements in Cancer and Allergy Fund

Sweden
Externally created parties Greenpeace∗
in Northern and Western WWF∗
Europe
Cadre Foundation
Concentrated Political parties in Fathers and Mothers in
Sweden before 1900 the City∗
Internally created political Noah’ s Ark∗
parties in Europe New political parties
& new movement
organizations
The Natural Step

Figure 6.1 The organizational space of civil society

An asterisk (∗ ) denotes hybrid forms between donation collection and foundation. The
best approximations in real life appear in italics. I use the term foundation here not in
its legal form but in order to capture a resource-intensive organization with few mem-
bers that can be professionals or other organizations and with a narrow organizational
boundary vis-à-vis its social base.
144 Civilizing the Public Sphere

Epstein (1967) observes these tendencies in his monumental work

on political parties. The early start of the processes and the inten-
sity within the right bloc lured him into thinking that this might be
about a “contagion from the right”, which expressed itself in counter-
organizational tendencies. But in reality, this seemed to be like the
wind – it was more noticeable in the glades and sparse stretches of
woodland than in the dense forests. More fundamentally, this is not
a wind that opposes more organization but rather the exact oppo-
site of what Epstein thought. If organizations are, as Göran Ahrne
(1990) puts it, “part human being, part organization”, then it is the
organization part that expands. There is not less organization with
more people but rather more organization with fewer people. What
Leon Epstein was unable to see in the 1960s became more obvious to
Angelo Panebianco in the 1980s.
One of the best illustrations of the arguments I present here comes
from a reading of three classic works on political parties. When
Maurice Duverger wrote his book in the early 1950s, he saw the
dominance of membership organizations (Duverger 1964). Although
unaware of the rationalization process, Leon Epstein describes in his
book from the mid-1960s how this process began in American polit-
ical parties and the conservative parties of Europe, which have not
been classic membership parties (Epstein 1967). In his book written
in the mid-1980s and translated into English in the late 1980s, Angelo
Panebianco identifies a clear-cut rationalization trend (Panebianco
1988). With the addition of a 1990s book about political parties (Katz
& Mair 1994), one sees clearly how the weakening of membership
and the connection to government resources have allowed the par-
ties to be transformed into “catch all” entities without obvious ties to
specific social strata.
One can find similar historical trends in other studies of voluntary
organizations. In his study of the interaction between Gothenburg
Municipality and voluntary organizations, Staffan Johansson notes
that in the 1950s public funds accounted for less than one-fifth
of the budgets of the Gothenburg Religious City Mission [Göteborgs
Kyrkliga Stadsmission], founded in 1952, and the Länken Service Club
[Kamratföreningen Länken], founded in 1948. In the 1990s, public
funds had increased to about two-thirds of the two budgets. Here, the
transformation occurs slowly, and it takes about 50 years. The con-
trast with a new voluntary organization, the Ada Women’s Shelter
 More Organization with Fewer People 145

[Kvinnojouren Ada] in Gothenburg, founded in the late 1970s, is

striking and represents yet another example of the rapidly growing
routinization of charisma in new voluntary organizations. As early
as 1987, about 10 years after the shelter was founded, public funds
constituted 95 per cent of its total assets (Johansson 2001).
Another case can also be used to illustrate the sluggish rationaliza-
tion of an old popular movement. The Swedish Society for Nature
Conservation [Svenska Naturskyddsföreningen], founded in 1909, was
and to a great extent still is a membership organization, similar to
the popular movements established in Sweden during this period.
However, in recent decades, it is possible to clearly discern how the
increased interaction with and resource capital from other organiza-
tions have contributed to a situation in which the membership fees
only accounts for one-third of the association’s total receipts. The
influx of resource capital was not followed immediately by a weaken-
ing of the membership or a decline in membership numbers. On the
contrary, membership numbers rose until 1991. As I interpret it, the
association’s nature as a member-based popular movement and the
general attention given to environmental issues temporarily slowed
down and then reversed the trend, thus delaying the rationalization
processes that were manifest up to 1990. Boström also feels that a
sizable number of the new members should only be viewed as more
or less subscribers to the association’s magazine rather than actual
members. However, the decline began after 1991. Between 1991 and
1997 the association lost about 40,000 of its some 200,000 mem-
bers. Even those who join the association now do not seem to be
as motivated to remain in it for as long as previous members did.
The tie between the association and the members becomes more and
more fragile. Currently, 20 per cent of the members do not renew
their annual memberships, and the average membership length has
decreased from 8 years at the end of the 1980s to 2.3 years (Boström
1999).
The most powerful and detailed single-case illustration of the argu-
ments put forward in this chapter from the literature on social
movements in a more general sense comes from Frances Fox Piven’s
and Richard Cloward’s study of the National Welfare Rights Orga-
nization (NWRO) in the United States (Piven & Cloward 1979,
especially 316–31). The NWRO was established in the mid-1960s,
with its leadership and organizers deeply committed to the goal
146 Civilizing the Public Sphere

of building mass-based permanent organizations among the black

urban poor. But as the NWRO became more successful in establishing
interactions with government agencies and other organizations and
securing resources from other organizations, the ties binding existing
members with the organization were weakened, making membership
superfluous. As Piven and Cloward state: “This enlarging of resources
did not lead to enlarged organizing, it undermined organizing . . . it
produced a leadership deeply involved in negotiating and lobbying,
but on behalf of a constituency that was organized in name only”
and to a degree that “external resources became a substitute for a
mass base” (Piven & Cloward 1979: 317, 331, respectively).
New evidence from other countries shows very similar patterns.
From the United States, a country with strong Tocquevillean tradi-
tions, Theda Skocpol (2003) reports a process of rationalization in
her historical exposé of the development of American civil society.
According to Skocpol, a restructuring of civil society has occurred
in the United States, in which civil society is not reproducing the
old membership values that were once the virtue of American civic
life. Instead, the new civil society, operated by professional and mem-
berless organizations, is becoming remarkably oligarchic. Behind this
civic remake, Skocpol notes patterns for resource mobilization that
are similar to those discussed in this chapter (Skocpol 2003: 219–223).
In her detailed study of outsourcing practices in social movement
organizations in the same country, Dana Fisher notes that a young
generation of members is left excluded, exploited, and uninterested
in politics by processes such as the rationalization of social move-
ments, the narrowing of the organizational base of the movements,
and the creation of professional organizations (Fisher 2006).
From Norway, with its Scandinavian traditions of membership-
based popular movements, two researchers from a huge Norwegian
research program, The Power and Democracy Project, report that
a similar process is underway in Norway. According to Tommy
Tranvik and Per Selle (Tranvik & Selle 2006, 2007), there seems to
be increased professionalization in contemporary Norwegian social
movement organizations, which are becoming more dependent on
public and private sponsors. Furthermore, participation is becoming
more random and short-term. In addition, volunteering takes place
outside the membership institution, thus weakening the ties between
the volunteer and the organization. Finally, new social movement
 More Organization with Fewer People 147

organizations do not reproduce the Scandinavian patterns of mem-

bership. Instead, Tranvik and Selle report the development of what
they call “real-time organizations”, organizations that in their form
and function strongly resemble what in this chapter have been
termed foundations.
In the same way and to an even greater extent, the same processes
have been reported from the Baltic and Eastern European countries.
In a detailed study of the link between political and social life in
Estonia, Peter Bötker found that this link is very fragile and not
mediated by membership-based parties and other social movement
organizations (Bötker 2007). Furthermore, a new generation of polit-
ical scientists studying the links between political parties and society
in many Eastern European countries reveals that political parties in
these countries are not deeply embedded in society, primarily because
the parties are mobilizing resources from the state and other finan-
cial sources at a very early stage of their development (see Kopecký
2006, van Biezen 2003). As seen from the perspective of this chapter,
Eastern Europe represents a highly visible, advanced level in the long
historical process of inert rationalization in civil society.

Many organizations with few questions

In the wake of this process of inert rationalization, several inter-

esting phenomena are apparent. If joking in traditional societies
and political satire in totalitarian regimes symbolize the distance
between human beings and an established organizational structure,
then their functional equivalents in modern democracies seem to
be an increase in voter mobility and parties that ride a rollercoaster
between successive elections.
In countries like Sweden, where politics is traditionally based on
category-based class standing, these signs manifest themselves as
increased mobility among parties in the same bloc. Further, since
the parties in the bloc on the right have not been classic mem-
ber parties, these signs appear sooner and more clearly, and chance
circumstances such as political conjunctures, unusual events, the per-
sonal characteristics of leaders, and campaign skills, determine the
direction of that mobility. On the whole, the process in Sweden has
also been delayed historically compared to other European coun-
tries. This is because, from a historical standpoint, political parties
148 Civilizing the Public Sphere

and organizational life in Sweden have generally been closer to the

ideal type of membership organization to the extent that even the
right-wing parties resembled membership organizations.
In countries like Greece, Spain, and Portugal, which do not have
class traditions in voter behavior, new parties were created or old
ones recreated following the fall of dictators without their being
classic membership organizations. The rollercoaster phenomenon
thus permeates the entire political field, with great political swings,
which would have been bigger had they not been counterbalanced
by more personal, lasting clientelist relationships. Comparatively
speaking, the rationalization processes are stronger in the left-wing
bloc. Clientelist relationships and networks, which traditionally have
been stronger in the right-wing bloc, have made the rationaliza-
tion processes more difficult within conservative parties. Meanwhile,
the social democratic and other leftist parties, which have been less
client-oriented and lack a history as membership organizations, have
become professional cadre organizations much more quickly than
have other left-oriented parties in Europe (Bosco 2001).
These signs are even weaker in the leftist bloc in Sweden because
social democracy has had two substantial footholds in social life,
partly through strong labor union membership ties in the workplace
and partly through the daily proximity of the working class to a series
of membership organizations, from tenants’ associations to insurance
associations and educational activities. Membership ties are char-
acterized by loyalty, and even though the organizational changes
discussed here have permeated the entire political spectrum, the
symptoms in social democracy have been mitigated by this loyalty.
As noted earlier, this process of sluggish rationalization in Swedish
social democracy has been weaker than in other countries, which
is related to the fact that Swedish social democracy has been orga-
nized as a number of membership organizations in political, union,
social, and cultural associations to a greater extent. This represents
an ideal example of what Gerassimos Moschonas calls organization-
ally over-mobilized socialism13 and has been characterized by, among
other things, a relatively high degree of association in all activities,
clear social ties to the working class, and an autonomous financial
base for the movement as a whole. In countries such as Austria,
Denmark, and Norway, where social democracy belongs to the same
group as the ideal Swedish model (although not as fully organized),
 More Organization with Fewer People 149

these tendencies are somewhat more apparent. The more a coun-

try’s social democracy previously combined membership with a cadre
organization, the more noticeable the tendencies become and the
earlier they begin. The later a country’s social democracy was consol-
idated (which is the case with Spanish, Greek, and Portuguese social
democracy), the earlier these processes begin. The pattern is an obvi-
ous one: membership as a historical phenomenon has also weakened
in northern European social democracies, while at the same time the
social democratic movement in Europe is converging from separate
starting positions toward an organizationally under-mobilized socialism
with weak links to its traditional social base.
However, the fact that the pattern is obvious does not mean that
the process has taken place without friction, protests, opposition, and
conflicts. But up to now, experience has shown that the opposition
of the membership has only succeeded in postponing the process
temporarily. By the same token, neither have friction, protests, oppo-
sition, and conflicts been the typical outcome of this process. The
transfer of power from the members to the organization occurred
in a relatively protracted, often unnoticed process, and, as is the
case in such transfers of power, the losers’ voice was transformed
into a presence without a voice and later to silent departure. The mem-
ber is transformed into a voter and becomes more independent and
autonomous, less controlled by Michelian oligarchies but, at the same
time, more isolated and confused (compare Panebianco 1988: 273).
When membership decreases, the organizational activities associ-
ated with managing it tend to disappear. The organization loses its
ability to manage its members, and a number of the people who
constituted the membership organization’s critical mass can now
constitute a potential core group for new organizations. Old organiza-
tions also found themselves in a structural position of power relative
to newcomers. Since they had strong social ties to social life, they did
not actually have to take any action to meet challenges. New types of
movements were organizationally outflanked (Mann 1986) or, to use an
analogy from sport sociology, “crowded out” (Markovits & Hellerman
2001) by the old organizations and forced to confront insurmount-
able obstacles. Given the weakening of their membership, the old
organizations lost this structural “bonus” that actors who hold estab-
lished positions always have. They must act when new movements
gain a foothold in social life, moreover with a capacity to act that has
150 Civilizing the Public Sphere

been circumscribed to a great extent. Since activities that were tied

to membership management disappeared, the organizations have to
use new methods to handle challengers. New technological methods
make mass communication easier, but they are no substitute for the
tangible ties of membership organizations.
A widespread perception in contemporary social science is that the
vitality and density of civil society or “the spirit of civicness” has
deterred the development of extremist and neo-Nazi movements.
However, based on the perspective been developed here, it seems that
the most important factors are the membership organizations’ strong
ties to their social bases. Now, when the bonds have become weaker
and the people who would make personal contacts are no longer in
the parties, extreme and asocial movements are not outflanked and
are able to gain access to enclaves in social life, where they can build
an activity base without interference from other organizations in the
initial phase of their development.
To an ever-growing extent, the changes I have described also
apply to other types of voluntary organizations, in this context with
marginal modifications. A comparison with developments in athlet-
ics is extremely telling. The share of resources derived from members
has decreased significantly. The resources that athletics mobilize are
concentrated outside athletics. The amateur has gone professional,
and one finds such important figures as consultants and board direc-
tors. In a study of the development of athletics in the United States,
Markovits & Hellerman (2001: 31) find that the intertwinement with
other organizations, such as multi-national companies and TV chan-
nels, for example, has undermined (but not entirely eliminated) the
working-class roots of some sports. Even in the individual sports
themselves, one finds extensive variety and a high degree of variabil-
ity in the speed in the process, but the driving force is pulling them all
in the same direction. Voluntary organizations are becoming “more
organization with fewer members”. Within athletics, however, the
process is more obvious in new league systems and at the upper ech-
elons of the league systems of older sports, but it is spreading to lower
leagues as well. The process also seems to be extending to younger age
groups, where clubs invest early on in the most promising talent to
the exclusion of the rest (compare Billing et al. 1999).
The weakening of the membership, the loss of the structural
bonus of old membership organizations, and the reduced ability to
 More Organization with Fewer People 151

manage challenges, combined with the fact that the old organiza-
tions no longer need their critical mass, open social space – fertile
ground – in which new social (and asocial) innovations can flourish.
Further, there is room for numerous organizations since new orga-
nizational forms do not require the coordination of many people’s
activities. Now, pluralistic democracy appears to be a possibility as an
organizational, not an individual, democracy since membership in
organizations has weakened. The weakening of membership as a form
for participation in political and social life and the strengthening of
the non-human characteristics of organizations now constitute the
basis for politics and allow contemporary phenomena, such as the
festivalization of politics and civil society or a spectacle-like character
and to some extent a fixation on personal characteristics in poli-
tics, to grow further. The more the organization expands, the more
it needs to over-emphasize its human characteristics and conceal its
organizational ones.
However, the “more organization” old social movements become,
the greater the spaces left open. These are framed as empty space in
the collective identity of individuals and as open space among orga-
nizations. It is perhaps more difficult to see them if one is captivated
by the exciting rhythms of the festival, the spectacle, and fixation on
politicians’ personalities or has completely turned away from politi-
cal and social life through atomized actions. Nonetheless, for those
who set foot in such social spaces, life is full of surprises. The size of
the space can turn big projects into fiascos, and seemingly hopeless
efforts can meet with unexpected success. The pace of the diffusion
processes can be accelerated or suspended. Organizations can expand,
agitators can create movements, and apostles can establish churches;
fashion designers can create trends, innovators can realize new inno-
vations, and entrepreneurs can establish new companies. For better
or worse, open social spaces are the fertile plains of the social land-
scape, but they can also stand empty and unnoticed for long periods
of time; they are not like black holes that swallow everything but
more like hotels waiting for visitors.14
It was just such a space that new sports such as floorball, new par-
ties such as the Green Party, new churches such as Word of Life [Livets
Ord], and especially other new political parties and voluntary organi-
zations found in the Swedish social landscape of the 1980s and 1990s.
In these spaces, social innovators could create many new voluntary
152 Civilizing the Public Sphere

organizations and partially regenerate Sweden’s social landscape by

combining ideas and inspiration that were often but not exclusively
drawn from global contexts with available resources on the local
level. Since the old voluntary organizations have not disappeared,
the result has been a dense and richer but also more fragmented social
life. However, in the same space, asocial movements have also found
opportunities to gain a foothold.
The open spaces, with undeveloped resources and the popula-
tion’s high organizational ability, create conditions for new social as
well as asocial movements. Nonetheless, we cannot expect big new
social movements or a “new society”. New structures for resource
gathering and the subsequent rationalization tendencies in old orga-
nizations have changed the conditions for their constancy. They
can exist without members. However, because of this constancy, the
old organizations fragment the space they leave between them. This
does not become a homogeneous space for a new society or huge
new movements but instead many small, relatively heterogeneous
spaces, which makes it difficult to force the old, durable borders of
organizations and create big, homogeneous social movements.15 The
historical and spatial blend of old and new in the social landscape
and the fragmentation of women’s and environmental movements
are telling illustrations of this phenomenon. Therefore, the constancy
of the old organizations impedes a total renewal of social life. Yet
at the same time, it is a guarantee against the spread of big, aso-
cial innovations. Despite their limited success in Europe, right-wing
populist parties and parties hostile to immigrant are examples of the
latter.

Unstructured collective action

Up to now, I have described a special type of collective action, one

that occurs through permanent organization. However, this course
of action is only one of its sociological forms since collective action
has also occurred without organization in the form of sporadic, spon-
taneous actions or information ties among people who take part in
the actions. I now distinguish between two main types.
The first type comprises situations in which the space for creat-
ing social movement organizations has been limited since it was
guarded by other organizations either through legal prohibitions
 More Organization with Fewer People 153

or the threat of reprisals. With limited ability to create permanent

structures, voluntary, collective action has expressed itself through
well-organized, albeit sporadic, short, mass manifestations. Another
frequent practice, operating under the same conditions, has been
to conceal collective action in the space that lies in the shadows
of already established organizations. Here, the movement itself has
no organization; it borrows one. Large segments of the French labor
movement (compare Tilly et al. 1975), student protests, and the
intellectual movements that take advantage of the protective envi-
ronment and resources of the university are good examples of this
practice, as are Easter holidays in Catholic churches in the former
Soviet Union or people who hide refugees at home or in churches.
Movements that grow in such spaces do not need their own organi-
zation because they borrow one. This creates the illusion that the
movement is without form, and the movement’s human charac-
teristics step into the foreground. It is just such movements that
post-modern thinkers have analyzed, and, since they have more of
a feel for meaning-creating processes but no analytic equipment to
see the organizational conditions for this, they have transformed this
practice into a new historical category for collective action.16
The second type of non-organizational, collective action distin-
guished here takes place in situations where the scope for organizing
collective action on a permanent basis remains open but where the
ability to do this is lacking because of the population’s low organi-
zational capacity – for example, limited reading and writing skills, a
paucity of ideas on how to organize, or limited resources. This type
of action is as formless as the first type but relates more to incom-
petence than limited opportunities. When they occur, these forms of
expression have often been marked by impulsiveness and an excess of
recklessness, and it is probably this type that Gustave Le Bon (1960)
was thinking of when he wrote so dejectedly about collective action
in his book on the limited rationality of the masses.
However, the conditions that previously shaped these two types
of collective action have disappeared. On the one hand, most of the
restrictions on creating organizations, at least in Europe, have been
removed,17 while on the other hand, the ability of the population
to organize has improved through the expansion of the educational
system and through training in different kinds of voluntary organi-
zations. Without obstacles but with a high capacity for organization,
154 Civilizing the Public Sphere

newly formed movements tend to be transformed into organizations

and routinize their charisma at a considerably faster pace.

The inverted relationship between proximity

and distance

Many descriptive terms – some secondary, some fundamental –

capture the essence of the Swedish and, to some extent, the Nordic
popular movement. The basic ones include a collective that is orga-
nized from within/from below and is fixed, a large amalgamation that
strives to realize interests (compare Thörnberg 1943: 5–19, Therborn
1988: 39). This has also been a collective of strong, independent,
self-financed organizations founded on the basis of the association
model. What is characteristic of all of these associations was orga-
nizational proximity to broad groups in social life. The solution of
practical problems in proximity to people’s daily lives belonged to
the routine activities of organizations, independent of whether they
were a religious movement or a union, a political party or a regional
social insurance association, a temperance movement or a health
insurance association. In this way, ideological, political, and social
interests were substantiated in reality and created the basis for broad
recruitment within the base of distinct social groups. By working in
political, social, and cultural surroundings that, because of fortuitous
circumstances, became exceptionally tolerant of organizations at the
core level, almost all political and social movements could be active
in one way or another as central actors in social life.
This dual foothold, expressed through activities at the local and
national level, was not entirely without problems. The broad social
extension of movements between the neighborhood or workplace
and the national level, combined with their numerical strength, cre-
ated social distances between the leaders and followers similar to
those described by Robert Michels almost a century ago. In almost all
classic social movements and political parties, it is possible to observe
the ways in which popular proximity was combined with distance to
the leaders. However, the distance could not be transformed into a
screening off of the elite because of the mutual dependency of lead-
ers and followers in society and of leaders and the numerically strong
member corps in particular. This mutual dependence was institution-
alized in fairly compact organizations, which functioned as social
 More Organization with Fewer People 155

bridges between the local and national levels and constantly renewed
politics by recruiting individuals and capturing social demands from
broad social groups.
In this chapter, I have shown how mutual dependence was succes-
sively undermined through changes in the mobilization of resources
for activities, developments in mass communication, and the growth
of organizational expertise. The primary consequence of this is the
weakening of membership as a historical form of participation in vol-
untary organizations and political parties. Through weakened mem-
bership, the social basis for political parties and social movements
narrows. Instead of an intertwinement of class and association, one
between the profession (or elite) and foundation is created, with nar-
rowly defined borders relative to large population categories.18 The
oligarchic distance is transformed into oligarchies shielded behind
clear-cut organizational boundaries, and many signs indicate that the
intertwinement of the elite and the foundation tends to be repro-
duced by such things as the narrowing of the recruitment base for
new politicians. Even in a country like Sweden and in a movement
such as the Social Democratic Party, new cabinet ministers are for the
first time the children of ministers. This phenomenon was unusual in
the Swedish popular movement tradition. As recently as World War
II, the well-informed E.H. Thörnberg was somewhat surprised that
there was no “hereditary aristocracy” in Swedish popular movements,
and he writes about Hjalmar Branting’s son, who was a lawyer by pro-
fession and served as a Social Democrat in the Lower House: “He is
practically a species apart, a son following in his father’s footsteps”
(Thörnberg 1943: 241–46).
As the elite increasingly shield themselves behind organizational
boundaries, they come closer to the public than previously, but in a
more technicalized and in part more personal way. Communication
among leaders and followers has been technicalized and has become
more one-sided. It takes place via surveys and other systematic meth-
ods for information gathering; questions and structures are drawn
up by professional staff and other experts without being considered
in democratic assemblies that build on membership. What is polit-
ically relevant and what questions will appear on the agenda are
determined to a greater extent than before by groups that are vir-
tually shielded from public life. This also occurs through the artful
exposition of their personal characteristics in campaigns, which are
156 Civilizing the Public Sphere

prepared by professional politicians and campaign experts, or in per-

sonal accounts in newspapers and popular entertainment programs
on television. Organizational proximity via associations and mem-
bership organizations and great social distance between leaders and
followers have been transformed into organizational shielding and a
personal but fictitious proximity between the leader and the follower.
Furthermore, it is not political programs and ideologies that are
conveyed in this visual communication. We live in an age of images
through which the personal and concrete can be conveyed more eas-
ily than through the use of written texts and abstract ideas. All of
this has coincided with another long-term historical process, which
Richard Sennett describes as the “the fall of public man”, a trend
of informality that goes hand-in-hand with the eroding of borders
between private life and the public sphere (Sennett 1978). This is a
process that has escalated the private expectations and psychological
categories and elites to such a degree that they are capable of defin-
ing public life. This is the same trend that has made us believe that
questions of power and resource allocation can be managed through
trust and human warmth or other virtues drawn from the private
sphere. Overexposure of the private and informal in today’s public
life has prevented many people from seeing the real social processes
that occur behind the virtual veil.
The inverted relationship between proximity and distance changes
the conditions of democracy.19 Instead of the horizontal integration
that took place via relatively autonomous political parties and social
movements in most of the Nordic democracies, integration now takes
place vertically and directly between the leading elite and a broad
segment of the population without the mediation of intermediary
organizations based on membership as a form of affiliation. As a
form, this type of integration is closely related to the populist inte-
gration methods found historically in a number of countries on the
periphery of the world system (Mouzelis 1985). However, this is not a
question of a simple anachronism, a historical retrogression, or semi-
peripheralization of the center, to use the terms of Samir Amin and
Immanuel Wallerstein. Communication between leaders and follow-
ers now takes place through a modern, sophisticated yet one-sided
means of communication, and the political spectacle is more ficti-
tious and illusory in nature. Nor is the message directed to people,
classes, or groups but rather to “you”, and “you” are the one who is
 More Organization with Fewer People 157

going to put trust in your leaders. They are as human as “you” are.
To be sure, populism has become post-modern.
The point of departure of this chapter has been to call into ques-
tion two prevailing and, in my opinion, related notions in the social
sciences. According to the first notion, membership numbers in
political parties and social movements have decreased as a result of
widespread individualization in different forms. The orders of pref-
erence of individuals and the political parties are not in harmony
with each other so citizens turn their backs on other forms of polit-
ical activity. According to the second notion, people now become
involved in new social movements whose activities are more human
compared to voluntarily organizing in conventional organizations,
which is construed as old-fashioned and rigid. A decrease in mem-
bership rolls is also used as an indicator of the disappearance of the
old organizations. In strongly worded formulations, one usually talks
about a historical epoch, which has more flexible and network-based
forms for collective action (see also Ahrne & Papakostas 2003).
I have attempted to show that the decrease in membership rolls
is an expression of a long-term rationalization process, one that
proceeds at different speeds in different social movement organiza-
tions. It is not the old voluntary organizations that are disappearing,
but rather the historical phenomenon of membership that is dis-
appearing from both old and new organizations. This historical
process proceeds more slowly in old voluntary organizations, for
instance, ordinary old popular movements and more quickly in new
ones. New social movement organizations do not resemble what in
everyday parlance are known as old popular movements, with asso-
ciation rules and regulations, members, membership fees, annual
meetings, association chairs, secretaries, and treasurers. Today, in
their place, one finds administrators, directors, consultants, fund-
raising, contributions, project applications, sponsoring, sustaining
members, and professionals. Collective action has been transformed
into paid work, amateurs have become professionals, and move-
ments have been transformed into institutions at an ever-increasing
rate. The oligarchic distance between the leaders and followers has
been transformed into an organizational boundary, one that sepa-
rates them. Furthermore, interaction processes related to membership
in organizations have been transformed into relationships among
organizations without the involvement of members. The isolated
158 Civilizing the Public Sphere

and somewhat confused voter whom Angelo Panebianco (1998: 273)

observes in his study of political parties is not a phenomenon unique
to politics; rather, it constitutes a part of a broader pattern, which is
the result of rationalization processes in both new and old voluntary
organizations.

Epilogue

This is a short and, in terms of evidence, impressionistic analysis of

the social structures that set the outer limits for the extent to which
the social landscape can be rejuvenated. Other available descriptions
often maintain that these opportunities are restricted to unstructured
open space in the vicinity of everyday life, outside of the sludge-
filled canals of politics and social life. Actually, I do not object to
people making something of the opportunities that are available
in these open spaces, and they are welcome to continue sorting
waste, acting responsibly when it comes to the environment, and
helping refugees. However, I would also like to point out that this
world of opportunities extends far into and between the core political
and social organizations of social life or, to continue with the same
metaphor, a good deal of fertile ground exists among the sludge-filled
canals. If this chapter succeeds in raising doubts about prevailing
perceptions or motivates others to show that I am wrong, then it has
accomplished its task. However, if I am right, then two opportunities
present themselves. This analysis demonstrates that there is room, to
a certain extent, for individuals to make the present possible through
new social innovations. But it is also appalling for a social scientist to
discover that the structural conditions for renewal are almost identi-
cal to those that would lead to retrogression. Instead of the new era as
a permanent element in the social landscape, we could see the dark-
est anachronisms from our historical past occupying a place in our
lives; sadly, we have too many examples of this in Europe today.
Social structures similar to those analyzed here cannot determine
the direction of the opportunities open to us. This is your task and
that of many others, and I hope that you make the right choice.
Even if we cannot change everything, we can at least see to it that
the social landscape in which we live has our era as a constant.
If my syllogisms are correct, then this is about opportunities for a
partial renewal. However, dear reader, preventing dark or updated
 More Organization with Fewer People 159

anachronisms from asserting themselves and dispatching them to

history would signify, in spite of everything, a huge social change.
If you do not want to take advantage of these opportunities, you run
the risk that others will do so in a way you do not like. If you also
happen to be individual-centered, as many people say you are, you
must be aware that, if you do not want to be part of creating your
own history, others will do it for you and in a way that may be unsat-
isfactory to you. Driving forces located in central political and social
organizations structure the options that are available, but they can-
not determine what actions we decide to take. In this way, the course
of future events is contingent on our present actions.
7
Social or Public Capital?

The books cited in the first chapter as representative of the

“neo-culturalist turn” in studies of trust have led to many publica-
tions in the social sciences. Numerous scholarly articles and books
have been published, and it is difficult to coordinate an overview
of the field’s many nuances. As an illustration, a search carried out
in October 2008 on the database Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
for the three terms considered key in Chapter 1, “network”, “social
capital”, and “trust”, yielded the names of 787 researchers whose
brief descriptions of their work on their own websites included the
three terms. In the Sociological Abstracts database there have been 485
entries containing all three terms since 1990, and the trend is grow-
ing, with few entries at the beginning of the period and 61 in 2010,
and these numbers are probably grossly underestimated (search car-
ried out in March 2012). In some of the latest publications there are
overviews of ongoing research and discussions of the concepts used
in the field. In this summary chapter, I will refrain, as I have chosen
to do in previous chapters, from giving a detailed account of defi-
nitional matters or an extensive overview of this expanding field of
research.
However, a number of devices available in the academic world can
aid in the construction of this survey. When a research field expands
so vigorously, books and anthologies that aim to provide an overview
of research emerge. The Handbook of Social Capital, published by
Oxford University Press (Castiglione et al. 2008), is one such a book.

160
 Social or Public Capital? 161

Massive in size, it is 722 pages long and includes 29 contributions

and introductions by some of the central figures in the field.
There are many ways to read or summarize a book. For example,
one can read it from the perspective of the author, of a critical reader,
or of a reader with general knowledge. I will begin here from the
first perspective, that is, what the author actually wants to say. But,
instead of starting at the beginning of the book, I will start at the end:
the pages that constitute one of academic life’s most obscure institu-
tions, one that few readers pay attention to: the index. Recently, it has
become somewhat of an established practice in academia context to
provide an index at the back of a book after the list of references. As a
general rule, the index is the last thing the author or editor completes
before the book goes to print.
As mentioned, few people even notice that the index exists. How-
ever, even an ignored institution of academic life like this can reveal a
good deal. The index includes a list of the concepts that the author(s)
or editor(s) conceives as being important as well as referrals to the
pages where discussions about these concepts actually appear in the
book. The index in the book is long – 10 pages – and includes
some 200 concepts. However, not all of the concepts appear with
the same frequency. While some concepts are rarely mentioned, oth-
ers appear often. The incidence of the appearance of concepts speaks
volumes about their centrality in discussions, and it is the relation-
ships and connections between these scholarly concepts that research
and scientific theories address. Below is a list of the most frequently
occurring concepts in the book (Table 7.1).1

Table 7.1 Occurrence of the most frequently

used concepts in The Handbook of Social Capital

Concept Occurrence

Norms (different types) 105

Networks (different types) 91
Trust (different types) 84
Community 74
Social capital 63
Groups 63
Values 59
Relationships 58
Collective action 55
162 Civilizing the Public Sphere

Normally, these terms are used in the social sciences for the study
of “primary groups” while those aspects are known in public life
as “informal”. The terms themselves also constitute concepts and
important approaches in the social sciences, and I have used a num-
ber of them myself, even here. However, it is the specific combination
of these concepts that constructs the framework of this literature.
To me, it seems as though the theoretical mainstream of these dis-
cussions draws out the concepts in order to study the public realm
in its entirety and that it also believes at times that the public realm
should be organized with these concepts as structuring principles.
With regard to the latter aspect, researchers who are part of this tradi-
tion are not alone; rather, they are in the company of large segments
of contemporary popular social science.
There is an inherent power of attraction in this type of concept
that explains some of their popularity. In addition, these terms, taken
together, constitute an almost identical description of what sociolo-
gists call gemeinschaft, a community based on a system with weak
differentiations, strong social and personal ties based on loyalty and
uniformity with regard to values and morals, and relatively simple
institutions. At times, this literature is nostalgic and idealizes com-
munity by largely emphasizing its positive aspects. To use these terms
to describe all of modern life, or to attempt to structure it using these
principles as a foundation, appears to me to be historical regression
and part of a broader spectrum of anachronisms that, clothed in
different captivating linguistic costumes, have recently appeared.
Nevertheless, the anthology does include some interesting contri-
butions that stress aspects such as “systemic capital” or “institutional
capital”. But even in such discussions, systemic capital tends to be
interpreted in normative terms, such as the concept “system moral-
ity”, for example. As a whole, however, these aspects are relatively
unimportant in the context of this tradition. My reservations in
the present book have not dealt with these interesting openings for
discussions, rather with what I perceive as the mainstream in the
discussions, namely the relationships between the concepts listed
above.
Indexes provide a list of detailed information about the contents
of a book; however, they also reveal a good deal through what has
been excluded, that is, what does not appear in the list. Even though
the book contains a number of articles on the state that are worth
 Social or Public Capital? 163

reading, the concept of the state is conspicuous by its absence in

the list that the editors consider central to the discussion of social
capital. This same observation gave rise to the discussions on trust in
Chapter 1, whereby the phenomenon that Edward Banfield described
as “amoral familism” was considered to be the result of the absence
of the state and not of its presence; the state was not only absent
in Montegrano but it was also absent in the discussions about trust.
In the same chapter, we saw that the state plays an important role
in the production of trust. First of all, it creates trust in the public
sphere by pacifying the territory through the monopolization, regu-
lation, and control of the use of violent means. However, not all states
have this capability. I have argued that this capability is linked to the
state’s infrastructural power and its ability to, among other things,
regulate interpersonal relations and thereby undermine the founda-
tions of many minor conflicts between people. One cannot rely on
someone with whom one is constantly in conflict. By regulating the
relations that can give rise to conflicts, the Swedish state rendered the
concepts of “everyone’s war against everyone” or “neighbors’ wars
against neighbors” obsolete and created a breeding ground for trust
and cooperation. I maintain that this explains why so many people in
Sweden admit that they trust other people and would rather not have
disagreements with them. We also saw how the state’s expansion
and recording of incomes shed light on the resources and abilities of
individuals, create representations of them, and generalize trust from
people one knows to people one does not know. We also saw that the
welfare state, with its redistributive functions, serves as a mechanism
that generalizes trust from income-generating periods in the life of an
individual to that individual’s entire lifespan. Eva Svensson, whose
acquaintance we made in Chapter 1 and who can close contracts at
a distance and with strangers, is a product or a social construction of
the modern state; one trusts this fictitious Eva Svensson as long as
the state has the ability to maintain that trust. To the extent that the
economy requires “remote” contracts between strangers, the mech-
anisms that make this possible, in our case a well-functioning state,
represent fertile ground for economic development.
In discussing the relevance of the state in the production of trust,
we need to keep in mind that states are “sets of organizations”, but
not just loose sets of organizations. States are figurations of organiza-
tions with a high degree of complexity and with varying structures
164 Civilizing the Public Sphere

and uneven organizational capacities at different points of time

(Evans et al. 1985). Selecting what parts of the state are relevant to
a specific research question is not an easy task, and different aspects
of the state appear in several chapters of the book. In Chapter 1,
for instance, the establishment and consolidation of the education
system, the monopolization of taxation and the means of violence,
the infrastructural power of the state, and some of its redistributive
aspects have been used as mechanisms that solve the problems of dis-
trust, first creating trust and then expanding its scope. In Chapter 4,
a Weberian-style conditioned bureaucracy has been used to illustrate
the institutionalization of distrust in an organization, and is thus
as a mechanism that transforms distrust into trust. The issue of the
“insulation of the state” from particularistic interests in society was
discussed not only in Chapter 3 but also in Chapter 4, where the
contingencies and sequential dynamics involved in the development
of the universalistic state were illustrated with a comparison of the
development of the Swedish and Greek states. Trust takes time to
develop, and I believe there is a historical relation between the high
level of trust in Sweden and the universalistic Swedish state (com-
pare Rothstein 2005, Rothstein & Stolle 2008a, 2008b). The Greek
state was also used in Chapter 4 to illustrate a state that was, and
still is, concatenated and intertwined with social and political net-
works and economic interests. This issue has been discussed as a
question of the embeddedness and disembeddedness of the state and
the problems associated with this (compare Evans 1995). Corruption
is one such problem, and the conditions for the form of political
corruption known as clientelism are discussed in Chapter 4. The
issue of high-level corruption and its relation to the question of the
embeddedness/disembeddedness of the Swedish state is discussed in
Chapter 5. I believe that the differentiated embeddedness of the state
and its current concatenation and intertwinement with economic,
political, and social interests allow for the privatization of the public
sphere.
Visibility, objectifications, and representations have been common
themes throughout much of this book because they are relevant
for the production of trust in so many ways. The developed world
does not build trust but rather institutional mechanisms that trans-
form reasonable expressions of distrust into trust. Written language
 Social or Public Capital? 165

has been the primary mechanism, as it textualizes intentions and

motives, objectifies human desires, and transforms them into rep-
resentations on which one can rely. Visibility through textualization
builds on a distrust of people’s verbal promises. Much of the literature
about trust draws inspiration and concepts from non-literate soci-
eties, which do not have the ability to textualize. When researchers
apply these concepts to analyze contemporary social life, they miss,
for example, the relevance of the historical rupture that a popula-
tion’s knowledge of reading and writing and its derivatives signify
in this context. This applies not only to written language but also
to all social technologies derived from and built on the written lan-
guage and practiced by many people in many contexts. This has been
discussed in several sections of this book, where I criticize a ten-
dency in research to anthropologize the present, that is, to analyze
it with concepts from socio-anthropological studies of pre-modern,
simple, or non-literate societies or to analyze it with reference to
anthropological archetypes. The list of concepts that I generated from
current research on trust includes several such concepts.
The word “trust” has an opposite: distrust. The literature dealing
with trust attempts to understand trust, the first part of this pair
of opposites, without managing – and sometimes without even try-
ing – to understand the other, namely distrust. In the literature about
trust, distrust is generally viewed as a pathology that must be cured
with more trust, networks, and social capital. In Chapter 2, social dis-
trust was illustrated with a generally accepted routine, which includes
locking doors and associated phenomena such as keys, identity doc-
uments and substitutes for keys, and an exposé on the growth of
boundary technology and practices that divide social space and cre-
ate zones of conditional trust and trust hierarchies. Distrust gives rise
to boundaries. The drawing of boundaries has been another theme in
the book. The creation of boundaries to manage the trust problem is
probably the most common method for managing distrust in social
life, even if one has objections concerning the need for advanced
boundary technologies mentioned at the end of Chapter 2. However,
this form of trust works within a specific group and is conditioned
by the requirement that spatial and social boundaries function and
that groups of individuals are channeled into the right social space.
It is also a one-way, asymmetric form of trust. Trust functions within
166 Civilizing the Public Sphere

a group inside a boundary and with other groups within divided

social spaces only when we assume that the boundaries work. Still,
the drawing of boundaries does not always represent the problems
discussed in Chapter 2. Chapters 4 and 5 discussed how relatively
clear boundaries between differentiated spheres in Swedish social life
were important for the growth of a rule-based state organization and
for the production of trust. Nevertheless, at the same time that these
boundaries are erected, a trust problem also arises, and the question
becomes: how can one trust phenomena that take place within such
hidden social spaces? The answer from trust literature, literature on
social capital, and closely related statements on how the public realm
should be structured is to build relations among spheres and society,
relations that build on personal trust between social actors. Accord-
ing to the prevailing statements, trust is built by lifting the qualities
of personal networks and the “treasures” of interpersonal space into
the public realm. Building networks of trust is the generally accepted
recipe for structuring the public realm in both academic discourse
and public debate.
In Chapter 3, I presented several mechanisms that produce trust
and are present, in one way or another, in all the countries, according
to the international literature, where the public’s trust in the pub-
lic realm is considered to be very high. I called these mechanisms
structured skepticism and illustrated them with descriptions of well-
known contemporary institutions; post-hoc skepticism, illustrated by
the procedures surrounding public defenses of doctoral dissertations
and experiments; radical transparency, by contrasting the architecture
of an opera house and that of parliament, and rule-based transparency,
which formalizes decision-making processes in a conditional bureau-
cratic organization and proactive skepticism, characterized by a society
with institutionalized forms of skepticism.
All these mechanisms are based on written language and con-
tain organized forms for elucidating and objectifying motives and
interests as well as routines and structures for neutralizing or con-
trolling their influence in decision-making processes in the public
realm. In contrast to “social capital”, which is generally translated
as “the individual’s capital”, these routines, practices, and procedures
are “public” in the sense that they are not the exclusive property of an
individual or group; they are embedded in the public fabric of social
life and available to everyone. As social innovations, they are viewed
 Social or Public Capital? 167

as important path-breaking historical inventions in the development

of what we call the developed world.
Publicity is another common theme of the book, but in a different
way than that discussed above. All mechanisms comprise rigorous
conditions of time and space with routines in order for the public
to be present or have the opportunity to carry out an experiment of
thought to analyze what is plausible in the processes. One can also
describe these mechanisms for public visibility as rather formal in
nature. In general, social scientists appear to have relinquished the
idea that formal institutions can function; they advocate informality
and informal relations, an idea gaining ground among the general
public. But informality and informal relations in the public realm
give rise to the problem of trust, rather than solving it.
In another way, there is a noble ambition found in the literature
produced on trust, social capital, and networks in the neo-culturalist
tradition. In keeping with current trends in the social sciences, this
literature is more open to those who aim to study the hidden quali-
ties of everyday interaction and/or the treasures of the interpersonal
space, the world Piotr Sztompka calls a world of “intangibles” and
“imponderables”.2 Few individuals could deny that a daily life, in
which interpersonal relations are characterized by connections such
as friendship, love, informality, loyalty, emotions, feelings, mutual
assistance, norms, and group feelings, is anything but desirable.
In this context, the word “treasure” has a positive connotation
(something like an intangible treasure in the interpersonal space).
However, in Greek, the word stem has several meanings. Θησ αυρóς
also means a “hidden” treasure and even θ ησ αυρίζ ω, in the sense
of “enriching oneself”, the second use is more ambiguous and takes
its meaning from the context in which it is used. Chapters 4 and 5
included analyses of how these “social treasures” from the interper-
sonal space can transform “public treasures” into “private treasures”
when the organizational context allows the transformation and
makes it possible. In Chapter 5, we saw from a historical perspective
how love could be interlaced with corruption in the public realm;
indeed, the same could be said about other relatively closed inter-
personal phenomena, such as friendships or strong personal ties.
Treasures are often hidden, and when they are owned by groups or
networks with relatively closed structures and without institutional-
ized mechanisms for visibility, they tend to be “hidden” and closed.
168 Civilizing the Public Sphere

Chapter 4 analyzed how, because of historical circumstances, Greece

developed compact networks between the public activities of social
life and between the state and social life. It was thus not able to
free itself from many particularistic elements, and these tight net-
works made it possible for elite groups to privatize the public realm.
In Sweden, a more differentiated organizational constellation, which
had fairly clear boundaries between different activities in the pub-
lic realm and was more screened off from the particularities of social
life, became an important foundation for the development of a more
universalistic state structure, one that was relatively free from partic-
ularistic interests. However, in Chapter 5, we saw how changes in the
organization of the public realm once again made it possible for elite
groups to privatize the public realm in contemporary Sweden.
Universalistic structures is another theme of the book and an
important part of the public capital I mentioned earlier (compare
Rothstein & Stolle 2008a, 2008b). They are at everyone’s disposal
and do not like private relations, in the same way as one trusts that
the public realm is accessible to everyone and not just private indi-
viduals. Universalistic structures, along with the other mechanisms
associated with structured skepticism, build on clearly defined, trans-
parent rules, and a number of boundaries are required in order for
them to be implemented. In recent years, some of these boundaries
have become more porous or reconciled through interpersonal and
inter-organizational intertwinements (see Chapter 5). At the same
time, new and narrower boundaries between organizational life and
social life have been created (see Chapters 5 and 6). It seems to me
as if a more narrowly defined organizational realm creates many rela-
tions within and between organizations as it simultaneously creates
narrower boundaries to and also becomes alienated from social life.
In this constellation of organizations, social capital is created that
builds on interpersonal relations and relations among those groups
that occupy important positions. However, the capital in this constel-
lation of organizations tends to create the conditions for privatizing
the public realm instead of creating public capital accessible to all.
One can also view the public capital that I emphasize here as a large
part of what has been called public and political institutions in the lit-
erature: a set of rules, routines, and practices that are embedded in the
public realm and accessible to all. In the concluding part of the book,
I have named several of these institutions: institutions for visibility,
 Social or Public Capital? 169

institutions that produce reliable objectifications and representations,

and institutions for structured skepticism, publicity, and universalistic
structures. However, I added that sets of relatively differentiated and
relatively autonomous organizations with reasonable boundaries, which
support the institutions’ modes and/or operations, are required for
these institutions to function. Not all organizational set-ups do this.
Without a suitable constellation of organizations, institutions tend
to become unstable or only fulfill a decorative function without
substance.3 The world is filled with examples of such institutions;
however, we also have examples of institutions that receive the
support of organizational structures and are thereby transformed
into social life’s substantial public capital. When such constellations
of organizations function, they remain obscure, civilize the public
realm, and steer actions discreetly. In this book, I have attempted to
shed light on these organizations and discuss the conditions for their
growth and change.
Notes

1 Civilizing Trust
1. This example is not specific to the company in Borås. Indeed, it is rather
common in Sweden to order products (develop photos, purchase books,
and so on), have them delivered to your home, and pay later.
2. However, in recent years there has been literature generated that problema-
tizes the subject of trust; notable contributions in particular have been
published by the Russell Sage Foundation, see The Russell Sage Foundation
Series on Trust, http://www.russelsage.org/publications/Spec-Series/trust/.
3. “A contract is not sufficient in itself, but is possible only thanks to a
regulation of the contract which is originally social” (see Durkheim, Emil
1964: 215).
4. See for instance Sundbärg, Gustav (1911).
5. “The Swede is like a monkey, for he eats like an Englishman, drinks like a
German, builds like an Italian, smokes like a Dutchman, takes snuff like a
Spaniard and drinks like a Russian” (quoted from Thörnberg, E.H. 1943).
6. See Piattoni (1995) for an interesting discussion of Putman.
7. What is reported as crime in the former Soviet states appears to me to be a
result of the collapse of the state and its inability to guard all the weapons
it has produced.

2 Boundary Technologies and the Segmentation

of Trust
1. However, sociological analyses of the key phenomenon and its modern
equivalents (cards and security systems) are conspicuously absent. Of soci-
ologists, only Bruno Latour discusses a special type of key, believed to have
existed in regions around Berlin, in a few of his articles. It is believed that
Nordic history includes a discussion on the status of women who wore
keys during the Viking Age. There is nonetheless an abundance of two
very different types of books.
One type, intended primarily for educational purposes, is devoted to
technical descriptions of how different sorts of keys and locks are con-
structed. These books include such titles as The Complete Book of Locks and
Locksmithing (Phillips 2005) and Security, ID Systems and Locks (Konicek &
Little 1997). The second category refers to picture books featuring keys
from different eras. They also include some historical information aimed
at amateur enthusiasts, written by individuals who are interested in keys
as either a vocation or as a hobby (such as collectors of keys). One book
that mixes both the professional and collector aspects is Vincent J.M.

170
 Notes 171

Eras’s beautifully illustrated Locks and Keys throughout the Ages (Eras 1957).
Eras was the director of a large company that manufactured keys in the
Netherlands and also became an amateur historian of keys. In recent years,
collecting old keys has become quite popular, and books such as Keys:
Their History and Collection (Monk 1974) are aimed at collectors. The web-
sites of major key manufacturers often include a short history of keys and
locks, which is often written in technical language, and one can find short
descriptive texts on the Internet on different sorts of keys and locks and
their construction.
Brochures and handbooks on modern electronic security and surveil-
lance systems sold by electronics companies constitute another type of
reading material. These brochures describe the logical structure and range
of applications for different systems in detail. I have downloaded a num-
ber of handbooks published by the major key/security companies from the
Internet. Sometimes this information is technically advanced and difficult
to grasp unless one possesses the required technical knowledge. The anal-
ysis in this book is the author’s interpretation of this raw, unstructured
material.
2. However, the system of double locks is still used. In this case, the double
lock serves as an extra security measure.
3. The information is representative of a series of new surveillance sys-
tems and was taken from a production description for an “authentication
server,” sold by Iridian Technologies (see KnoWhoTM Authentication Server
Performance and Scalability).

3 Structured Skepticism and the Production of Trust

1. The empirical material for this section relates to a set of rules and regu-
lations for the defense of doctoral theses issued by the faculties of social
sciences at universities across Sweden as well as my own experience of
doctoral defenses as an audience member, supervisor, faculty opponent,
and member of evaluation committees.
2. This should not be interpreted as though all existing routines have a
built-in rationality. Indeed, that would imply an uncritical attitude and
an “extreme tribute to tradition.”
3. Even though I am describing procedures related to scientific experiments
here, it appears to me as though this practice is the natural science equiv-
alent of what Clifford Geertz calls “thick description” (see Geertz, Clifford
1993). In addition to the interpretation-specific advantages of a detailed
description, it provides readers with an opportunity to assess the reason-
ableness of the theoretical statements based on the given description of
reality.
4. See www.design4science.org.
5. The section on the architecture and history of the opera is based on
the literature referred to in the main body of the text, as well as
Garlington, Aubrey S. (2005). Society, Culture and Opera in Florence, 1814–
1830. London: Ashgate; Grout, Donald Jay, and Margaret Dunn Grout
172 Notes

(2003). A Short History of Opera. New York: Columbia University Press;

Hardin, Terri (1999). Theatres & Opera Houses. New York: Todtri Book
Publishers; Johnson, Victoria, Jane F. Fulcher and Thomas Ertman (Eds.)
(2007). Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi Bourdieu.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Kaldor, Andras (2002). Great
Opera Houses: Masterpieces of Architecture. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’
Club Limited. Some information has also been taken from the Internet
homepages of famous opera houses. In addition, I have attended guided
tours of opera houses in some cities.
6. Compare to Goffman’s dramaturgical metaphors “front stage,” “back
stage”, and “public.”
7. I am indebted here to Professor Cornelia Ilie, who has provided me with
illustrations of the architecture and placements of many parliaments
across the world.
8. For the architecture of the Riksdag, see Hedkvist, Hedvig, and Susanna
Blåvarg (2003). Möte med Sveriges riksdag. Arkitektur, konst och inredning.
Sweden: Sveriges Riksdag.
9. As far as Sweden is concerned, see Therborn, Göran (1989).
10. The literature discussing these circumstances is extensive. For some of
the more recent discussions, see Badie, Bertrand (2000). The Imported
State: The Westernization of the Political Order. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press; Badie, Bertrand, and Pierre Birnbaum (1983). The Soci-
ology of the State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Bendix, Reinhard
(1968). State and Society: A Reader in Comparative Political Sociology. Boston:
Little Brown; Bendix, Reinhard ([1964] I996). Nation-building and Citizen-
ship: Studies of our Changing Social Order. London: Transaction Publishers;
Evans, Peter B. (1995). Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Trans-
formation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Evans, Peter B.,
Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (1985). Bringing the State Back
in. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11. See for example Cleary, Matthew R., and Susan C. Stokes (2006). Democ-
racy and the Culture of Skepticism. New York: Russell Sage Foundation;
Dooley, Brandan (1999). The Social History of Skepticism. Experience and
Doubt in Early Modern Time. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press; Popkin, Richard H. and José Maia Neto (2007). Skepticism.
An Anthology. New York: Prometheus Books.
12. Here, I would like to express my gratitude to the participants of the “New
Voice, Old Roots. Populism in Enlarged Europe” conference organized by
my social scientist colleague Ann-Cathrine Jungar at Södertörn University
in December 2007.
13. In comparison to two individuals who have long been in the public eye,
“Mona Sahlin” and “Fredrik Reinfeldt,” “Sara Wägnert” received half as
many matches and one fourth as many matches, respectively. It should
also be noted that Lex Sarah is now a law of duty to report.
 Notes 173

4 What States do People Trust and How do

they Emerge?
1. For instance, recruitment to the Arbetsmarknadsstyrelsen (AMS),
Sweden’s Labor Market Board – the authority responsible for implement-
ing active labor market policy and a cornerstone of Social Democratic
policy and the post- World War II “Swedish Model” – did not follow
universalistic rules but was instead based on an ideological commitment
to Social Democracy. The motivation given was that of administrative
efficiency (Rothstein 1996: 116–30). When historians write about class
or family recruitment in earlier periods, they usually explain it by refer-
ring to social capital: individuals were “socialized” in the administrative
culture of these families (Frohnert 1993: 71).
2. Reviewing the literature on clientelism, Eisenstadt and Roniger (1980)
cite different kinds of clientelist practice in areas as culturally different
as Mediterranean Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, southeastern
Asia, Japan, the United States, the former USSR and parts of Africa; this
alone undermines the culturalist argument.
3. See Putnam et al. (1993) and Demertzis (1994) for this kind of explanation
of modern political culture in Italy and Greece, respectively.
4. Compare this idea with Barrington Moore’s notion of suppressed alterna-
tives (Moore 1978).
5. On the existence of patronage until the middle of 19th century in
Sweden, see von Platen (1988), Englund (1993) and Rothstein (1998).
6. As the PASOK experience in Greece has shown, clientelist practices do not
disappear when the organizational form of the governing party becomes
bureaucratic, although they change into what has been referred to as
“bureaucratic clientelism” (Sotiropoulos 1996: 60).
7. I use this expression to mean the countries occupied by Napoleonic
armies and in which many Napoleonic institutional reforms were
implemented.
8. But largely due to the availability of international loans in the 19th cen-
tury, slow economic development, the low extractive capacity of the
state, and political strategies of elite groups. For a historical account
of the development of the taxation system in Greece and the political
implications, see Dertilis (1993).
9. Tax collection was initially accomplished through tax-farming. Later,
when it was bureaucratized, it did not succeed in becoming effective.
10. For the relationship between literacy and organizational capacity, see
Stinchcombe (1965).
11. The historian Per Frohnert (1993) reports that, during the Gustavian
period (1773–1809), 75 per cent of kronofogdar (the leading state employ-
ees at the county level) were the sons of kronofogdar. He also reports
widespread kinship relations between civil servants. Torbjörn Nilsson
(1997) identifies many sons and fathers working together in central state
bureaucracies throughout the 19th century and many positions that
passed from father to son or to other relatives. In comparison, no social
174 Notes

group in Greece ever succeeded in establishing such exclusivity over state

positions.
12. A simple comparison of the household structures in villages in the two
countries is quite telling in this respect: in the village of Syrrako in Greece,
39 per cent of the households were extended families (Psychogios 1987:
106); in the parish of Dala in Sweden, only 7 per cent were extended
families and among the proletarianized peasants the extended family was
almost non-existent as a social institution (Winberg 1975: 193).
13. For definitions, see Tilly (1990b).
14. An instructive comparison can be found in the work of Robert Merton
(1968: 126–36).
15. I am indebted to Richard Swedberg for turning my attention to this old
Weberian argument.

6 More Organization with Fewer People

1. A first draft of this chapter was presented several years ago (1999) at
a Nordic research conference on social economy and civil society, held
at the Stockholm School of Economics. Subsequent versions of differ-
ing length have been published in various Swedish contexts. A shorter
version has been published in Current Sociology, 2011, 59 (1).
2. Compare here Albert O. Hirschman’s treatment of the relation between
exit and voice (1970, in particular Chapter 7).
3. These include studies on: Anonyma Alkoholister [Alcoholics Anonymous]
(Helmersson Bergmark 1995); three new social movements (Olsson 1999);
five environmental organizations (Boström 2001); the National Front
and right-wing populism (Rydgren 2002); New Age organizations (Brodin
2001); immigrant organizations (Emami 2003); work in four voluntary
welfare organizations (Chartrand 2004); political parties and welfare
associations (Grosse 2007); organizations of civil society in the urban
periphery (Kings 2011); and Adrienne Sörbom’s study of new forms of
political participation (Sörbom 2002). I owe many thanks to the authors
of these studies for their inspiration.
4. “First Social movements must be understood on their own terms: namely
they are what they say they are.” Such is the view, for example, of Manuel
Castells (1997: 69, italics in the original) in a programmatic statement
that echoes theoretical formulations in studies of new social movements.
The text includes references to, among others, Touraine and Melucci.
I find this to be a problematic formulation. If one applied this princi-
ple to old movements, there would be no oligarchy (no social democratic
movement has called itself oligarchic), and there would be no inequality
in modern, liberal democracies since they claim to be based on ideas of
equality, etc.
5. Melucci is an exception here. His picture of organizational life comprises
constant adaptation (see 1996: 251).
6. There is another variant of approximately the same problem. The argu-
ment is that political parties constitute a system that has increasingly
 Notes 175

focused on the political middle, thereby leaving open its margins on the
right or left. The same criticism developed against the logic of systems
thinkers can be directed at this argument; as such, I see no reason to
explore it separately or further.
7. See also the Swedish translation of Bowling Alone (Putnam 2001: 291–302)
for a slightly different variant in which TV viewing is combined with
generational effects.
8. See, for example, the introduction by Olof Petersson & Bo Rothstein
(2001) to the Swedish edition of Bowling Alone.
9. One of the major ideas of the social landscape sociologists is that what
is going on inside, outside, and between organizations is central to the
analysis of society (Ahrne 1994, Papakostas 1995, Ahrne & Papakostas
2002).
10. My purpose is not to study the asymmetries that exist in this form of
resource mobilization. I conjecture that they are obvious, primarily when
it comes to the opportunities for excluded individuals to gain access to
such resources. For example, in her study, Adrienne Sörbom finds that
the experience of exclusion in our age follows class lines (Sörbom 2002).
Therefore, I believe that this explains why many new voluntary organi-
zations bear a typical middle-class stamp. The middle class appears to
have more opportunities to mobilize resources from other organizations.
Further, it is better educated and hence possesses better organizational
skills.
11. The consequences for membership in the voluntary organizations,
I describe here, are identical to the consequences for citizenship, as
described by Charles Tilly with reference to the new states that have built
their operations through borrowing rather than through taxation (Tilly
1990a). Also, compare the argument in Badie on how states are built
up differently when they mobilize resources outside their own territory
(Badie 2000). Therefore, the relation between the method of mobilizing
resources and organizational forms seems to me to be of a more general
nature and not only specific to voluntary organizations.
12. In the sense that the spectator pays a fee without necessarily being a
member of the club.
13. The section on social democracy builds on Moschonas (2002).
14. See Ahrne & Papakostas (2002) for a theoretical discussion of the concept
of social space.
15. It is too early to say to what extent some organizations will succeed in
being transformed into an integrated force, an organization of organiza-
tions, one that unites the small fragments into a relatively multi-faceted
but organized movement.
16. It is possible that the existence of such protected space is increasing
in the world. More people own houses; there are more churches, more
universities, and so forth.
17. Obviously, there are exceptions here. For example, within the frameworks
of the nation-state, it is forbidden to organize permanent operations to
help “illegal” immigrants. Presumably, this is the reason that charity work
176 Notes

with illegal immigrants takes place formlessly in the protected space of

the home and church. The same applies to formless student and youth
movements and even to the intellectual movements that, out of tradition,
take place in or emanate from the protected spaces of the educational
system.
18. See Tilly (1998) for a theoretical discussion of how social categories and
organizations intertwine.
19. See also the volume edited by Risto Alapuro & Henrik Stenius (2010) for
other current changes in the Nordic associational model.

7 Social or Public Capital?

1. Occurrence refers to the number of times a term is mentioned in the text.
In some cases, terms may appear more than once on the same page.
2. For two different representatives of this tendency, see Sztompka (2008) and
Eriksson (2007).
3. Compare Douglass C. North’s conclusions in North (1998).
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Index
affiliation, 36, 38, 54, 119, 123,
125–9, 156
Ahrne, Göran, x, 36, 38, 69, 75, 86,
98, 110, 123, 129, 144
amoral familism, 4, 10, 11, 13, 48,
74, 77, 163
anachronism, xii, 51, 156, 158–9,
162
anthropologization, 6, 48, 165
architecture, vii, 34, 37, 43
Banfield, Edward, 3–12, 59, 66, 74,
76, 119, 166
boundary, 37, 39, 43, 47, 73, 86,
121, 126, 132, 157, 165–8
conditions, ix
relations, 88–90, 121
Boyle, Robert, 56–8
bureaucracy, 50, 68–77, 80–9, 112,
164
cadre, 135–49
charisma, 129–30, 141, 145, 154
citizenship, 89–92, 96, 123
civil society, 16, 71–3, 75, 78, 119,
124–9, 135, 143–51
contingency, 81
courage, civil, 78–9
culturalism, 3–8
culture, 2–13, 22, 74, 76, 84–6, 105,
111–12
democracy, 46–7, 71–3, 77, 126–7,
151, 156
De Soto, Hernando, 19
differentiation, 31, 53–4, 62, 72,
88–90, 113–23, 162
disembedding, 72, 114, 120–3,
164–5
Duverger, Maurice, 136, 137, 144
189
Elias, Norbert, viii, 10, 15
elite, ix, 49, 60–6, 72, 97, 118–24,
126, 154–66
embeddedness, 49, 72, 77, 89, 97–8,
114, 164, 166
experiment of thought, 57, 58, 70,
74, 167
formality, 70–1, 75
Frank, Andre Gunder, 8, 10
Gambetta, Diego, 8, 9
Goffman, Erwing, 34–6, 44, 54, 108
inertia, 69, 101, 128, 131
informality, 11, 112–20, 156, 167
institution, viii, xi, 6, 36, 49–50, 52,
77–8, 89–90, 97–101, 117–30,
157, 161–2, 166–7
interest, 117–30, 157, 161–2, 166–7
intertwining, ix, 9–10, 34, 40, 54, 75,
82, 86–8, 99–102, 112–24, 155,
164
key holders society, 27
Levy, Marion J., 86, 89, 101, 102,
107, 116
Mann, Michael, 15, 81, 86, 93,
149
membership, 38, 116, 122–5,
132–57
modernization, 64, 66, 83, 85–6,
100–2, 114, 116, 121
Mouzelis, Nicos, 15, 81, 82, 86, 93,
149
network, ix–xii, 3–4, 9, 48, 69, 72,
84, 90, 97, 101–2, 118, 127, 140,
160–4
190 Index
objectification, 55, 164, 169
observation, 17, 20, 39–40, 63, 73,
107–10
oligarchy, 125, 127, 146, 149, 155–7
organizational realism, 86, 128
ostracism, 79
particularism, 82–9, 101
Poggi, Gianfranco, 11, 80–1
populism, 77, 157
power, 46–7, 59–67, 78–9, 95, 125–6,
149
discretional, 110, 120, 123
infrastructural, 15, 89, 163–4
privatization, x, 49, 123, 164
professionalization, 126, 139–40,
146, 155–6
publicity, 167, 169
Putnam, Robert, 4, 13–14, 71, 134
rationalization, 44, 74, 131, 135–7,
144–58
resource mobilization, 138, 146
Rothstein, Bo, 5, 71, 83, 164, 168
rules, 2, 4–5, 52–9, 67–8, 82–3, 92–5,
168
sequence, 73, 84–7, 90, 92, 98–100
Shefter, Martin, 98, 101
Skocpol, Theda, 78, 125, 134, 146
social capital, 3–6, 9–10, 16–17,
48–50, 69, 109, 121, 124
social relations, 160–8
social space, 27, 33, 36, 44, 47, 87,
151, 165–6
state, ix, x, 4–23, 38, 69–76, 80–90,
98–102, 113–18, 162–4
Stinchcombe, Arthur, ix, xii, 11,
70–1
suppressed alternatives, 85, 98
Sztompka, Piotr, ix, xiii, 3, 47, 167
temporality, 81–2
textualization, 48, 165
Therborn, Göran, 60, 80–1, 95, 114,
154
Thörnberg, E. H, 9, 97, 154, 155
Tilly, Charles, vii, x, 19, 36, 88,
98–101, 138, 153
timing, 85–6
transparency, 44–5, 47, 50, 55, 77,
104, 110, 125, 166
radical, 59–68, 77, 166
rule based, 68–77, 160
trust, zones of, 27, 44–7
universalistic structures, xi, xii, 82–9,
98–102, 164, 168–9
visibility, 17–21, 48, 57–61, 66–8,
76–8, 164–8
Weber, Max, 5, 11, 36, 68, 72, 74,
130–1