Page 127 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

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of Castells and that of Dore. Dore’s vision is in the British rationalistic
tradition. His concern is how this Anglo-Saxon rationality can be supple-
mented by Japanese rationality – broadened from the individual to the
firm and to society – including global society, so-called ‘reverse conver-
gence’. Yet the common idea which connects all these outlooks – multiple
modernity and network society theory – is the thought that information
technology offers society an opportunity to return to a more communal
way of life on a modern basis. Even authors who attempt to develop a
socialist alternative to monopoly capitalism looked mistakenly to the model
of the Japanese ‘communitarian firm’ presented by Dore, as an institution
which provided a model for overcoming worker alienation at the enterprise
level. 66
The key point in multiple modernity theory therefore was to detach
capitalism as an economic system from the particular individualistic cul-
tural form which it takes in the West. The implication was that it was
from this individualism that the worst problems of poverty, oppression and
exploitation arise, not inherently from monopoly capitalism as such. In
fact, there may not be any such thing as ‘the capitalist system as such’ –
only various ‘modernities’ – neither capitalism nor monopoly capitalism but
simply ‘capitalisms’. It was reasonable, therefore, to hold out the prospect
of different, more just forms, of modernity arising in other cultures –
in India, Israel, China, the Arab world, Africa, as, it was claimed, had
already occurred in parts of East Asia. But these uncritically idealistic
assessments of the Toyota production system, the ‘three sacred treasures’,
the Third Italy or Scandinavian socio-technical systems have more or less
been exploded. 67
Nevertheless, all these sociological theories – risk society, ‘disorganized’
capitalism, network society – have a major advantage over the theories of
cultural studies. This has to do with the fact, that all of them to varying
degrees attach central importance to an analysis of the economy. In the
writings of Giddens, Lash and Urry and Castells, there is not the preoc-
cupation with the issue of ‘economism’ in such a manner that the entire
economic sphere is practically excluded from the analysis. On the con-
trary, a large part of their sociological conclusions is based on the ideas
which they have of how the modern global economy functions. Their
weakness is not the neglect of economics but the particular way in which
the economy is incorporated into their analysis. In the theories of Giddens
and those influenced by him, because of the abstraction of the market
from the relations of production, it is the economy as a global marketplace –
exchange relations and trade alone – which become central. This comes
out most clearly in the work Global Civil Society published by a group of

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