Legitimating Post-Fordism: a Critique of Anthony Giddens' Later Works

ORE Open Research Exeter TITLE Legitimating post-Fordism: a critique of Anthony Giddens' later works AUTHORS King, Anthony JOURNAL Telos DEPOSITED IN ORE 24 June 2009 This version available at http://hdl.handle.net/10036/71393 COPYRIGHT AND REUSE Open Research Exeter makes this work available in accordance with publisher policies. A NOTE ON VERSIONS The version presented here may diﬀer from the published version. If citing, you are advised to consult the published version for pagination, volume/issue and date of publication Legitimating Post-Fordism: A Critique of Anthony Giddens’ Later Works Anthony King Introduction Although Anthony Giddens describes his approach as “social” rather than “critical” theory, and although there is little obvious Frankfurt School influence in his writing, he believes “social theory is inevitably critical theory.”1 While he might aim at such a critical position, it is far from obvious that he succeeds. On the contrary, his later writings have become an apology for the status quo.2 Failing to consider his prejudices, perhaps because he thinks critique is inevitable, Giddens has increasingly vindicated predominant relations of domination. He celebrates the rise of post-traditional individuals, who have the freedom of choice to create and 1. Anthony Giddens, Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 15. 2. Patrick Baert argues that Giddens’ career comprises four periods: the first (the 1960s) includes his articles on suicide; the second (from the beginning to the middle of the 1970s) includes his writings on Marx, Durkheim and Weber; the third (from the middle of the 1970s until 1984 — the publication of the The Constitution of Society) includes his writings on structuration theory; and the fourth includes everything published in the late 1980s and 1990s. See Social Theory in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), pp. 92-4. This division is not without merit. But Giddens’ structuration theory constitutes a distinct body of texts, published between the mid-1970s and 1984. Moreover, the first mention of “structuration” appears in The Class Structure of Advanced Societies, which Baert consid- ers part of his early period. Dividing Giddens into an early and a later period, situating structuration theory at the end of his earlier period, is more straightforward, and reflects the similar concerns and style of Giddens’ writing from the 1960s to 1984. The key division on which this paper is based, and on which it is in agreement with both Baert and Jeffrey Alex- ander’s “Critical Reflections on Reflexive Modernization,” in Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 13, No. 4 (1996), is that there is a demonstrable divide in Giddens’ writing after 1984. 61 62 ANTHONY KING re-create themselves, while reproducing the global system that has liberated them. His celebration of the individual echoes dominant free market principles, which privilege choice and consumption, and have been central to the post-Fordist transformations in the West. Structuration Theory Giddens’ first serious works in the early 1970s examined the ways in which Marx, Weber and Durkheim can contribute to an the analysis of late 20th century society. Out of these works emerged a more focused the- oretical interest in structure and agency and, from the mid-1970s onwards, his structuration theory sought to overcome the dualism of structure and agency through a synthesis of functionalism, structuralism and interpretivist traditions. Allegedly, functionalists like Parsons and structuralists like Levi-Strauss had overemphasized objective factors in social life, at the cost of the individual agent, while the interactionist and interpretive tradition, represented by Goffman and Garfinkel, did exactly the opposite, overestimating the importance of individual agents. Structuration theory was meant to explain how social relations stretch across time and space to reproduce the social system through meaningful individual action.3 To that end, Giddens postulated the notion of “the duality of structure,” whereby structure,4 consisting of “virtual” rules and resources orienting individual action, is both the medium and the outcome of individual actions.5 These virtual rules are problematic, but the role they play in structuration theory is important. When individuals act, they draw on these virtual rules to carry out certain social practices, thereby reproducing the rules which were the medium of their practice in the first place. Giddens illustrates this duality by the favored example of language use: “when I utter a grammatical English sentence in casual conversation, I contribute to the reproduction of the English language as a whole.”6 For Giddens, individuals do not merely reproduce structure, the rules which 3. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 35. 4. The notion of structure originally arises in Giddens’ work out of the concept of practical consciousness, which he distinguishes from either discursive consciousness or the unconscious. See Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 2. Whereas discursive consciousness refers to those areas of knowl- edge of which one is aware, and the unconscious refers to subconscious motivations, practical consciousness refers to the state of consciousness in which one ordinarily lives. This is captured best by Schutz’ notion of the “taken-for-granted.” 5. Ibid., p. 9 6. Ibid., p. 77. LEGITIMATING POST-FORDISM 63 inform action, but also the system of enduring social institutions, because the rules ensure the appropriate routines for the system’s reproduction. By drawing on the rules appropriate to the institutions in which individuals find themselves, they reproduce those institutions. There is a duality, not only of structure (rules and resources), but also of the social system (institutions), where the system’s properties become the medium and the outcome of individual action. “One of the main propositions of structuration theory is that the rules and resources drawn upon in the production and reproduction of social action are at the same time the means of system reproduction (duality of structure).”7 Although, at first, it is only the rules that are reproduced in social practice, Giddens assumes that these rules are unproblematically connected to the wider system and, therefore, that the system is, more or less, automatically reproduced by individual practice. For the most part, Giddens’ structuration theory is concerned with the system’s reproduction through individual practice, even though many of his critics wrongly argue that structuration theory ignores the social system.8 The centrality of the individual, however, does appear at certain moments. Having argued that the individual must be bound to the system through structure, Giddens insists that “it is a necessary feature of action that, at any point in time, the agent ‘could have acted otherwise’.”9 This contradicts the rest of structuration theory, which explicitly limits the randomness of individual action through “structure” and appears in Giddens’ writing as an unfounded ideological assertion of Western liberal values.10 Thus, Mestro- vic has argued that Giddens’ appeal to the persistence of the free, autono- mous individual in the face of the “juggernaut of modernity” is an act of optimistic bad faith, where Giddens, an optimistic modernist, refuses to accept the darker implications of modernity (which, in fact, he always rec- ognizes).11 For Mestrovic, Giddens cannot accept the implications of his own theory or the reality of modern society, which substantially curtail individual freedom. The subordinate individualist element in structurationist 7. Giddens, The Constitution of Society, op. cit., p. 19. 8. See Alex Callinicos “Anthony Giddens: a Contemporary Critique” in Theory and Society, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1985), pp. 133-166 and Margaret Archer “Morphogenesis versus Structuration: on Combining Structure and Action” in The British Journal of Soci- ology, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 456-483. 9. Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory, op. cit., p. 56. 10. See Nigel Pleasants “Free to Act Otherwise? A Wittgensteinian Deconstruction of the Concept of Agency in Contemporary Social and Political Theory,” in History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1998), pp. 1-28. 11. Stepjan Mestrovic, Anthony Giddens: the Last Modernist (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 4, 23, 78 and 155. 64 ANTHONY KING theory becomes dominant in his later work, where the claim that individuals “could have acted otherwise” becomes the focus. As the liberated individual becomes central, Giddens himself becomes an apologist for post-Fordism. Post-Fordism By the mid-1970s, the Keynesian and Fordist systems of regulation and production were becoming obsolete. As the long post-war boom ended, the consumer market became saturated, multinationals became increasingly dominant, and Western states found themselves unable to manage the economy and to mediate between labor and capital. As Hayek argued, Keynesian efforts to sustain full employment stimulated inflation, which jeopardized the very jobs the state was meant to defend. The mas- sive inflation caused by the 1972-73 oil crises rendered Fordism and Key- nesianism unviable and, from the mid- to late-1970s, there was a move toward new post-Fordist regimes, at the forefront of which were Reagan- ite America and Thatcherite Britain.12 Although it is dangerous to differ- entiate too sharply between this post-Fordist transformation

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