Page 104 - Cultural Theory

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••• Giddens and Cultural Analysis •••

agencies, for example, is sustained through the communicative understanding of
their commands and decisions and through the legitimation of these by a framework
of validity and obligation. Similarly, systems of property and market exchange rest
on the legal frameworks and symbolic codes that Durkheim (1893) described as the
‘non-contractual element’ in contractual relations of negotiation and exchange.
Social systems in their most general sense, then, are seen by Giddens as comprising
clusters of social institutions that are organized around the structural dimensions asso-
ciated with the various structured dispositions that constitute human agency. The eco-
nomic and political institutions of domination are fundamental features of all societies,
but they co-exist with the symbolic and regulatory institutions that form their socio-
cultural lifeworlds. Social systems differ according to the extent to which these institu-
tions are distinguished from each other and are differentiated into specialized and
identifiable clusters. A central feature of modernity, Giddens argues, is the high level of
institutional differentiation that it brought into being, and he uses his institutional
concepts to explore the emergence and development of this modernity.

Culture and Modernity

Giddens has consistently argued that sociology has to be seen as a product of moder-
nity and that it must take modernity as its specific object of investigation. The major
substantive task of his work, then, is to use his general theoretical concepts to con-
struct a model of the key elements in modernity. It is important to explore modern
culture, in both senses identified, and to see how culture is involved in the repro-
duction of specifically modern systems of action. This task cannot, however, be
undertaken in isolation, and Giddens sees it as necessary to explore the pre-modern
forms of society from which modernity emerged and that still survive in many parts
of the modern world. Equally, it is important to speculate about the future forms of
society that might follow modernity. While eschewing the evolutionary concerns
of many of the nineteenth-century sociologists, Giddens constructs a classification of
societal types and of the patterns of development from one to another.
This typology begins with the simplest tribal societies, such as wandering bands of
hunters and gatherers and more settled agricultural communities (Giddens, 1981:
92–4). Giddens traces the ways in which many such societies have been incorporated
into various types of historical empire. These empires are large-scale agrarian societies
in which there are marked class divisions and a differentiation of political and eco-
nomic institutions from the socio-cultural lifeworld (Giddens, 1981: 105–8; 1985:
Ch. 2). Political and economic institutions – states and markets – are focused in the
cities, which become the ‘power containers’ from which central control is exercised
by a dominant social class. In imperial world systems, such as the Roman Empire,
states developed as political forms that were institutionally quite separate from their
environing cities and were the principal means through which resources could be
authoritatively used to control their extensive territories.
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