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48 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

to regain the lost political leadership. Thus social processes that have to be taken into
the neo-conservative emphasis on personal consideration (Hastings, 1998).
responsibility, morality, family values, com- The specific constellation of values, issues
munities and national values has dominated and governmentality in local settings widens
the welfare discourse unchallenged since the the variety of existing welfare models in the
beginning of the 1980s (Gibson, 1997). The world. Welfare systems are often understood
concept that a sector of the population is from an ethnocentric European point of view
defined by a kind of cultural inability to cope as limited to a mixture of three or four
with the challenges of modern society is European models (Abrahamson, 1999;
widely accepted today, not least among pro- Esping-Andersen, 1990; Titmus, 1974). In a
fessional helpers (Gibson, 1997: 175). global sociological discourse these limited
The liberal Democratic discourse in the possibilities seem to be contradicted by a
USA (like the Social Democratic discourse variety of East Asian models with different
in Denmark) had been caught by a paradigm characteristics (Abrahamson, 1999; Clammer,
that understood ‘antisocial acts as simply the 1997; Hong, 2000) Specific studies in this
result of structural factors’ (Gibson, 1997: field, such as Clammer’s study of Singapore
191). This made them incapable of relating (1997) and Joseph Tharamangalam’s study
to issues of morally unacceptable behaviour. of the Kerala Province in India (1998), are
They did not have an answer to the conserva- examples of case studies that focus on the
tive focus on individual responsibility, genesis of a certain governmentality and a
safe communities and a shared work specific welfare system linked to it.
ethic (Gibson, 1997: 191). Furthermore, the The question now is whether trends in
Liberal charity was running directly into a governance are so pervasive that they perme-
critique of being chauvinistic when it ate sociology as well. In the 1980s, theoreti-
reduced poor people to helpless victims who cal sociology seemed to move away from a
had to be saved by liberal experts (Gibson, focus on structural determination, which had
1997: 191). The dominant policy discourse been dominant in the 1970s, towards a stronger
jumped from one-sidedly blaming everything focus on the individual subject acting in a
on structure to one-sidedly holding the field of possibilities. Bourdieu (1980),
individual accountable for all problems. This Habermas (1981) as well as Luhmann (1984)
shows how political discourses can change produced works that exemplify this. All three
the specific definition of the problem and approaches share the same theoretical inter-
the limits of accessible strategies, thus est in overcoming the gap between macro-
redefining what can be perceived as rational level sociological theory and micro-level
solutions. social psychology, and in re-installing the
Vivian Schmidt (2002) argues, in a com- individual as a responsible actor, not totally
parative study of welfare systems in Britain, dependent on the structure, but confronted
New Zealand, Germany and France that it is with the structure. The structure is not seen
a mistake to think that political innovations as a determining structure in these approaches,
that are up against strong group interests are but more as a social field, as defined by
doomed to suffer defeat. The study shows Sartre in his Critique de la Raison Dialectique
that it is possible to succeed by changing fun- (1960/1982: 479–504, 549) and elaborated
damental discourses about social problems by Bourdieu (1980). Understood as a social
and political obligations. In these instances, field, the structure permits the social agent
sociologists have to be able to explain how certain possibilities for changing his or her
these changes in public discourses take place position in the field, and as an effect of
(Schmidt, 2002). It must be admitted that numerous individual movements, the field in
efforts to analyze these changes are rather itself changes and opens up new possibilities
difficult because of the different levels of for other agents.