Page 102 - Cultural Theory

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••• Giddens and Cultural Analysis •••

Giddens says little to elaborate on this point of view at the general level. The way
of life, it may be surmised, comprises the communal relations of intimacy, family,
and neighbourhood and the normative rules – the customs and ‘folkways’ – through
which they are organized. It is a codified and crystallized culture embodied in the
social institutions that constrain their actions. It does, however, co-exist with eco-
nomic and political systems produced through similar rule-following actions. He
explores this through the idea of the transformative capacity.
The transformative capacity of human agency operates through processes of power
and domination to establish interpersonal power and constraint and to build, at
the system level, the economic and political institutions through which allocation
and coordination can take place (Giddens, 1981: 28). This capacity depends on the
resources that are available to actors, but Giddens has focused most of his attention
on the rules that govern access to and control over these resources. It is these rules that
define the transformative capacity. Through rules of possession and mobilization –
which may be codified as property and authority – resources can be made available
as means or facilities for action and can be built into forms of domination. It is here
that is found the true significance of ‘resources’ in Giddens’ work. Contrary to what
he actually says, resources are not an aspect of structure as he uses that term.
Structure consists of the rule-bound capacities through which resources play their
part in social life. The material objects that function as resources, however, do exist
separately and independently of the rules that constitute and regulate them and that
allow them to play a part in the exercise of power and domination. Resources exist
as what Lockwood (1956) referred to as the ‘substratum’ of the cultural and norma-
tive patterns of a society, and Giddens seems to assume a similar point of view. They
comprise the political economy in a form of social life and, as such, establish patterns
of inequality and, therefore, of autonomy and dependence among actors (1981: 50).
Having said this, it must be recognized that the linkage between rules and resources
is remarkably untheorized in Giddens’ work and that he does not, therefore, set out
a fully satisfactory account of the non-cultural aspects of social life.
Giddens uses these ideas to produce a classification of social institutions, summa-
rized in Figure 5.1. Signification through semantic mechanisms is of primary impor-
tance in the formation of the symbolic orders and modes of discourse that form the
world-views of societies and collectivities. Signification cannot, however, operate
alone. Secondary processes of domination and legitimation are always involved in
the reproduction of these social institutions. A world-view must also involve a pat-
tern of domination and moral sanctioning if an effective pattern of social control is
to be established over the actors who are socialized into it (1981: 47). It is in this way
that patterns of signification may come to have an ideological function: ‘ideology
consists of structures of signification which are harnessed to the legitimation of the
sectional interests of dominant groups’ (ibid.: 61). All signification involves some
degree of domination, but ideological forms exist when structures of signification
serve the interests of dominant classes or other dominant social groups. Thus, the
conjunction of signification, domination, and legitimacy in a context of class divi-
sion establishes an effective class hegemony.

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