Page 106 - Cultural Theory

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••• Giddens and Cultural Analysis •••

nation–states. These are the basis on which all the other institutional features of
modernity are organized. These other institutional features are those of the socio-
cultural lifeworld that result from the signifying and legitimating processes that
underpin capitalist and nation–state forms. Giddens particularly highlights the legal
institutions and modes of regulation that define citizenship, sovereignty, and prop-
erty and commercial law, together with the media of communication and forms of
community that are involved in the establishment of common languages and com-
mon symbols of collective identity within national societies. These various factors of
modernity are summarized in Figure 5.2.
The key institutions of a capitalist economy are capitalist commodification (which
Giddens calls simply ‘capitalism’) and industrialism. A system of capitalist commod-
ity production operates through competitive markets for goods and labour power
and rests on a class division between owners of capital and propertyless wage labour-
ers. Capitalist businesses employ labour that is itself a commodity, and they are the
means through which the private ownership of the means of production leads to the
accumulation of wealth in commodity form. This commodification of resources is
made possible by the existence of money. This is, Giddens argues, a ‘symbolic
token’, a particular type of abstract system, that makes it possible to ‘disembed’ the
exchange of goods and services from particular local contexts and so to transform
interpersonal relations into relations among commodities. Capitalist commodifica-
tion, then, results in the reification of social relations (Giddens, 1990: 22–6, drawing
on Simmel, 1900). Industrialism is a system of institutions in which the production
of goods is undertaken through the intensive use of machine technology, a complex
division of labour, and inanimate sources of energy. The means of production are
organized into rationalized systems of factory, office, and machine technology that
enlarge human productive powers beyond the levels possible in pre-modern societies
that depended simply on human and animal power.
It was the consolidation of capitalist commodification in Western Europe that
made possible the later expansion of industrial technology that is conventionally
described as the ‘Industrial Revolution’. Capitalist commodification, then, was a pre-
condition for the dynamic expansion of industrialism and it is the specific conjunc-
tion of capitalist commodification with industrialism that defines the principal
economic characteristics of modernity.
The key political institutions of modernity are those of the nation–state, though
Giddens sees similar processes occurring in certain other types of formal organiza-
tion, such as large business enterprises. The nation–state is organized around the
institutions of surveillance and militarism. Modern systems of surveillance allow
state authority to operate with much greater intensity than was possible in city–states
and imperial states. Following Foucault and Weber, Giddens highlights the building
of sophisticated systems of information gathering and bureaucratic forms of admin-
istration through which subject populations can be supervised and their deviance
controlled. Militarism, on the other hand, is the means through which modern states
have achieved a monopoly over the means of violence and, in consequence, a high
level of internal pacification. Force and violence are centralized within the state and

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