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global communities – virtual communities, the Olympic community, the
‘international community’. 2

Globalization and social context

For Rose, ‘society’ and community are viewed as discursive constructs
that have changed roles. ‘The formation of the notion of a national econ-
omy was a key condition for the separation out of a distinct social
domain’ (Rose, 1996: 337). Whereas, for Rose (1996), ‘the social’ once acted
as a discursive agent for the integration of persons on the basis of ‘social
protection, social justice, social rights and social solidarity’ (329), for
Touraine (1998), the decline of national communities derives from
the ‘decomposition ... of society’ by way of the ‘growing autonomy of the
economic sphere from institutional controls’ which ‘exist in general at the
national level’ (129). Touraine acknowledges, contra the extreme global-
ists, that the events that are said to have produced globalization – ‘the
increase in international trade; the more rapid intensification of financial
flows; the rise of new industrial countries; the birth of the information
society ... the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet empire’ – are
not systemically linked, but rather are phenomena ‘largely independent
of one another, and are of different natures’ (129–30).
Nevertheless, taken together, these discrete events are said to have
social and political consequences, the first being the ‘breakdown of social
and political constraints on economic activity’, producing ‘the most radi-
cal rupture ever observed between actor and system’, whilst the second is
the weakening of the nation-state (130–1). For Touraine, the most signifi-
cant change is in the decomposition of the institutionalization of norms in
the social world: ‘the main fact is that we no longer recognize the presence
of norms in many realms of life’ (131). Instead, as larger and larger spheres
of behaviour are no longer said to be subject to nation-state/society-framed
norms, ‘[t]he system is no longer a social one, but becomes a global market,
self-regulated by law firms, rating agencies and international financial
institutions and the financial markets themselves ... the social actor disap-
pears, and the remaining actors are no longer social’ (130).
In the contemporary context, therefore, Touraine poses the main task
for sociology today as having to discover ‘a new principle, capable of
replacing the idea of society and more specifically of national society,
which for so long played this role of mediation and integration’ (133).
This leaves him with the question: ‘how can we be actors and create space
for autonomy between the globalized economy and communal cultures,
neither one of which leaves room for the actor?’ (135).
Touraine’s own answer to this question is that ‘there are no longer
transcendent universal values that might unite all of humanity’ (136), as
in the case of the grand narratives of modernity; rather, capitalism, in its