Читать книгу Social Movements - Donatella della Porta - Страница 30

Several of the changes we have mentioned point at two common elements. First, there is a marked increase of activities linked to the production of knowledge and to symbolic manipulation, and the identification in the control of those activities as a major stake of conflict. The development of the administrative/service sector in fact reflects the growing relevance in the economic sphere of information‐processing, compared with the transformation of natural resources. The same expansion of areas of state intervention, which leads to the multiplication of identities and of politically based interests, has made ever more essential the role of decision makers and communicators able to develop efficient syntheses between heterogeneous concerns and values.

Second, many recent transformations have produced the potential for conflicts that cut across conventional distinctions between the private and public spheres. Evidence of this includes the influence that certain styles of scientific knowledge and certain ways of organizing it have on the psychophysical well‐being of the individual (for example, in the field of therapies and the health services). Alternatively, one may think of the public and collective relevance of individual consumer behavior and ways of life, which previously would have been relegated to the private sphere. Or, again, one might consider the importance of ascribed traits such as ethnicity or gender in conflicts concerning the extension and full realization of citizens’ rights.

These processes point at a specific area of nonmaterial conflicts. Their stake is represented by the control of resources that produce meaning and allow actors to intervene not only on their own environment but also on the personal sphere, and above all on the link between these two levels. Rather than with economic or political power, contemporary social conflict has, according to this view, more to do with the production and circulation of information; social conditions for production and the use of scientific knowledge; and the creation of symbols and cultural models concerned with the definition of individual and collective identities. This thesis has been formulated in a number of ways and with various levels of theoretical generalization (Touraine 1981; Lash and Urry 1987; Melucci 1989, 1996; Eder 1993), although somewhat diverse conclusions have been drawn as far as the relationship between structure, conflict, and movement is concerned.

In order to try to make sense of what is undoubtedly a highly diversified debate we must first of all keep in mind that those who investigate the relationship between structure, class, and collective action sometimes move from rather different points of departure, and use the same terms in quite different ways. To begin with, we must note the difference between a “historical” and a “structural” (Eder 1995) or “analytical” (Melucci 1995) concept of class. In the first meaning, class is a historical product of capitalist society (referring in other words to the working and the capitalist class, and to the specific structural processes that produced and reinforced their identity). In the second, a class is a group of people with similar “relationships within which social resources are produced and appropriated” (Melucci 1995, p. 117). The inequalities in power and status, peculiar to postindustrial society, might well not be conducive to the reproduction of industrial class conflict, but still provide the structural roots for the emergence of new collective actors. The tension between these two different approaches has affected recent debates on the persistence of class as a factor shaping conventional political behavior, and in particular, electoral participation (e.g. Dalton et al. 1984; Dalton 1988; 2015).

A second issue among those who still recognize the relevance of structural interpretations regards the existence of a hierarchical structure of different types of conflicts, and the possibility of identifying core conflicts comparable to those which according to dominant interpretations shaped the industrial society. The most coherent attempt to identify the core conflicts of postindustrial (or “programmed”) society is to be found in the work of Alain Touraine who has played an important role in the development of social movement studies. According to his path‐breaking work in the 1980s, the category of social movement fulfills a fundamental task, in both defining the rules by which society functions and in determining the specific goal of sociology: “The sociology of social movements,” wrote Touraine (1981, p. 30), “cannot be separated from a representation of society as a system of social forces competing for control of a cultural field.” That is, the way in which each society functions reflects the struggle between two antagonistic actors who fight for control of cultural concerns that, in turn, determine the type of transforming action which a society performs upon itself (Touraine 1977, pp. 95–96). It is in relation to the concept of historicity – defined by the interweaving of a system of knowledge, a type of accumulation, and a cultural model – that different types of society can be identified, along with the social classes which accompany them.

Touraine identified four types of society, each featuring a distinctive pair of central antagonistic actors: agrarian, mercantile, industrial, and “programmed” (a term that he prefers to “postindustrial” society). A particular trait of the programmed society is the “production of symbolic goods which model or transform our representation of human nature and the external world” (Touraine 1987, p. 127; 1985). It is the control of information that constitutes the principal source of social power.

In consequence, conflicts tend to shift from the workplace to areas such as research and development, the elaboration of information, biomedical and technical sciences, and the mass media. In his view, the central actors in social conflict are no longer classes linked to industrial production but groups with opposing visions concerning the use and allocation of cognitive and symbolic resources. In contrast with Marxism, classes are not defined only in relation to the system of production (see, for example, Miliband 1989), and class action is, in fact, the “behavior of an actor guided by cultural orientations and set within social relations defined by an unequal connection with the social control of these orientations” (Touraine 1981, p. 61). As for Pierre Bourdieu, the cultural sphere is considered as the main place for the exercise of social domination. However, Touraine differed from the deterministic approach of his French colleague in that he conceives social movements as struggling to influence the cultural sphere (Girling 2004).

Mobilizations by social movements addressed, therefore, the defense of the autonomy of civil society from the attempts of public and private technocratic groups to extend their control over ever‐widening areas of social life.¹¹ If Touraine’s formulation places the analysis of conflicts and movements in the center of his general theoretical model, other scholars have still paid attention to the structural dimension, but without attempting to identify new dominant cleavages. Originally influenced by Touraine, Alberto Melucci held, however, improbable the emergence of new conflicts with a centrality comparable to that of the capital–labor conflict of the industrial society.¹² Melucci never denied the persistent importance of traditional conflicts based on inequalities of power and wealth, and of the political actors, protagonists of these conflicts. However, he identified the peculiarity of contemporary conflicts in processes of individualization which still have their roots in structural dynamics, yet of a different kind – for example, the pervasive influence of caring institutions over the self, the globalization of communications and life experiences, the growth of media systems. And he denied the possibility of reducing responses to these differentiated structural tensions to any sort of unified paradigm of collective action. The latter – itself in a variety of forms – is, rather, just one of innumerable options open to individuals struggling for an autonomous definition of their self.