Showing papers in "Theory, Culture & Society in 1990"

Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy

Abstract: Most often, the homogenization argument subspeciates into either an argument about Americanization, or an argument about 'commoditization', and very often the two arguments are closely linked. What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or other way: this is true of music and housing styles as much as it is true of science and terrorism, spectacles and constitutions. The dynamics of such indigenization have just begun to be explored in a sophisticated manner

The Idea of Revolution

Abstract: Alain Touraine’s theory of revolution is so-called theory of the “end of revolution”. According to the author, while revolution was “the common trunk of the modern world”, universalism of reason (inherited from Enlightenment philosophy) and the understanding of modernity as a change are displaced with the particularism of identity-searching and the understanding of modernity as conflict, as a sustainable equilibrium transforming revolution into “anti-revolution”. The singularity of A. Touraine’s approach consists of the fact that he refuses to define revolution and social movements reciprocally, one through another, or to consider them as closely related, as does European tradition. “Sociology of action” offers the opposite vision. Where social movements do not appear (or in the absence of an “anti-movement”, as Touraine calls it), revolution is possible; conversely, where there are social movements, revolution cannot occur (although “anti-revolution” could take place). Revolution opposed social movements in the same way as the universalism of evolution opposed the particularism of history. Touraine defends the view of modernity as something in between these two oppositions. Modernity as a complex and conflict-filled “alloy” of the universalism of reason and technologies, and the particularism of cultural, national and class identities. The “end of the revolution” does not imply the end of history, the end of social change, the end of the politics, or the end of the non-institutional power struggle. Anti-revolution, of course, has revolutionary aspects, but the struggle of social movements with the pervasive influence of the large centralized State machinery is primarily defensive, not offensive in character, as it is in the case of the revolution Anti-revolution is not a struggle “for” power, or for reducing the distance between rulers and the ruled; it is “against” universalizing “programming”, and a struggle for “happiness” as an individualized (and often “populist”) vision of a society that corresponds to the group identity.

Social Stratification and Informalization in Global Perspective

Abstract: In the industrialized West, processes of differentiation and integration contain a long-term trend towards decreasing differences in power, status and wealth between the social classes, sexes and generations. Toward the end of the last century, this trend became dominant. Succeeding waves of democratization and the redistribution of economic surpluses according to welfare state principles, resulted in the depletion or disappearance of the groups at either end of the social ladder of Western countries, with a sharp increase of the jostling in the middle. Inequalities, together with the social and psychological distance between people, have diminished without losing importance. These processes of democratization and social equalization have run in tandem with collective emotional changes and informalization: more and more people have pressured each other towards more differentiated and flexible patterns of self-regulation and mutually expected self-restraints, allowing for an increase of socially permitted behavioural and emotional alternatives. In informalization processes, more and more of the dominant modes of social conduct, symbolizing institutionalized power relationships, have come to be both ignored and attacked. Behavioural extremes, expressing large differences in power and respect, came to provoke moral indignation and were banned - a diminishing of contrasts, a trend towards convergence or homogenization -, while for the rest the codes of social conduct have become more lenient, more differentiated and varied - a trend towards divergence or heterogenization.