Sociologists have struggled since the nineteenth century to express the shared, relational, joint features of social thought and behaviour, and to resist the image of the individual self as encapsulated, largely self-contained. Not only Marx, then Durkheim, with his exploration of ‘social facts’, but writers in the twentieth-century tradition of the sociology of knowledge have emphasised this key facet of sociality. Their efforts include Mannheim’s attempts, however flawed, to encompass the ways we think in terms that are afforded to us by our cultural circumstances and marked by patterns of power. Also in the 1930s, the scholars of the city studies in America were brought, among other places, to Ireland: Lloyd Warner’s students, Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball, had been taught that ‘the unit of analysis is the relation’, not the individual. This goes along with recognising that individual people are not generally self-contained and rational, but in many ways incoherent and often inconsistent, as Schütz pointed out in ‘The Stranger’ in 1944. It ought also to be accompanied by an appropriately holistic grasp of thought that eschews the artificially cognitive, and accepts emotions as part of thinking and reasoning rather than contrasting them with ‘rationality’. This part of appreciating sociality remains in some ways the hardest: the rhetorical force of contrasting emotion with reason, misguided as the dichotomy is, continues to present itself as irresistibly sensible through much of the sociological world.
This idea of the decentred self needs perpetually to be reinvented in sociological theory, as it was, not least, by Foucault, but it can be hard to reconcile with telling stories. Foucault was not alone in pointing out that through most of human history the notion of the individual was experienced in ways that were less encapsulated than those that may seem natural to us now. Nonetheless, old stories still concentrate on heroes and dragons rather than the social settings within which their actions could be located. However adeptly we feel we are conceptualising and evoking this shared realm, when it comes to describing concrete actions, like the ancients we find it hard to write and read empirical work in its terms.
The articles in this issue can all be read as contributions to understanding both this joint realm and the tensions inherent in discussing it. Suzanne Ekman focuses directly on the type of individual conduct thrown into prominence by managerial ideals of ‘entrepreneurship’ – she offers us a typification of a classical hero, with massive virtues and massive flaws – while Carla Huisman deals with the oppression of individuals that can result from the very ideology of individuality. The next two articles deal with the impacts of public expectations on whole groups of people. Jan Goldenstein, Philipp Poschmann, Sebastian Händschke and Peter Walgenbach interrogate the local and global origins of the ways large companies feel obliged to present themselves as ‘responsible actors’ in the public realm, and Pierluca Birindelli explores the impacts of centuries-long self-representations on Italians themselves. It is worth noting that, in all these cases, emotional reactions, anticipations and positionings form part of parcel of the patterns of reasoning involved.
The first two pieces thus overtly address changes in public assumptions and expectations, where cultural and political currents blend to yield or prohibit new possibilities. Both of these articles directly concern the ideology of the encapsulated individual, and the fact that we live in a time that promotes and valorises it. Susanne Ekman’s ‘Enterprise culture and the ethics of entitlement’ focuses on remarkable and unexpected results of ‘the enterprise culture’ in organisations, which was thought of by its proponents as ‘freeing’ individuals’ ‘creativity’. This culminates, she tells us, in the rise of a Promethean figure: the destructive hero whose actions rebound on the firm that created him (it seems typically to be a man who is involved). Carla Huisman deals with the impact of another feature of individualism in the field of public protections in the rental sector in the Netherlands: social solidarity is tacitly abandoned by governments preferring to depend on the image of the lone individual, sovereign and responsible for his or her fate and happiness. National laws become imaginary, in the sense that they are real and unreal at the same time, officially present but ignored for practical purposes: individuals are dissuaded from thinking and feeling in their terms at all. In the cases of both these articles, the self-reliant individual concerned is in many ways a fantasy.
Ekman’s work takes a novel approach to organisational governance: organisations do not merely compel people to behave in certain ways, they also enable certain sorts of people to become such active members of their firms that they establish themselves as dangerously indispensable. The article describes the career of an emblematic individual, ‘Clark’, and ‘his quest for power and influence at work’. Ekman’s aim is to understand how the enterprise culture’s stress on ‘talent and excellence’ has promoted the emergence of ‘entitled’ individuals who in some ways have much to offer their employers, but whose ‘maverick and disruptive’ conduct nonetheless endangers the social cohesion that employers also need. Rather than merely selfish in a straightforward way, they are also dedicated; this ambiguous feature makes their positioning all the more fascinating as their firms become victims of the innovative ‘excellence’ they had envisaged as so beguiling.
Ekman’s work is based on ethnographic observations and deep interviews in the whole firm, the IT consulting company ‘Axiom’, then concentrating on the key figure of ‘Clark’. His ‘thuggish’ behaviour is based on defining his own activities as key to the firm, displaying his expertise aggressively, and playing dirty tricks to discredit rivals. Clark ‘displays an immense disregard for formal authority;’ he is confrontational, reckless and scornful, his ‘disregard for sanctions’ ‘rooted in a complex mixture of grandiosity and professional idealism’. ‘This “entrepreneurial hero” has perfected the game of indispensability generated by high-pace, hyper-competitive, and innovative work;’ he feels radically entitled ‘to lead, to be free, to be recognised and applauded.’ We can read the sub-text of this piece as exploring how Clark’s feelings are part and parcel with his views; it also shows that conceptualising the self as social does not entail envisaging individuals as colourless. On the contrary, this extraordinary figure damages those around him, trailing confusion and resentment in his wake: the consequence of a ‘fantasy about freedom and endless possibilities’ generated by the endless pressures of late modernity.
In the subsequent article, Carla Huisman deals with what appears a sleight of magical realism, where regulations can simultaneously exist and not exist. Using both documentary and long-term ethnographic, participative methods, she examines the case of rented housing in the Netherlands to reveal the use of non-enforcement as a governance technique. Culture and politics collude in this effect. On the one hand, rules protecting tenants are relatively strong. On the other hand, these rules are pretty much unknown among the public, and few people would be in a position to try to take action against their landlords anyway. How does this come to be the case? Why is it not openly discussed? And who benefits from the situation? Huisman sees the processes involved as supporting a neo-liberal retreat from the welfare state; ‘instead of seeing the citizen as a social creature, the role of government becomes to help people to assume their own individual responsibility’ – or, rather, merely to assume that they will be in a position to do so.
Huisman treats this compelling instance as a deviant case in the enforcement landscape, quite different from ‘incomplete, imperfect or unbalanced enforcement or explicit withdrawal from enforcement’ – cases such as, say, not spending great sums ensuring that no-one ever crosses the road without waiting for the appropriate traffic signal, or not enforcing rules against possessing soft drugs. She argues that the drift away from enforcing rules protecting tenants is part of a neo-liberal shift in politics: governments and local authorities withdraw from enforcement, in principle in favour of individuals, because of their often-unadmitted political hopes and expectations. In real life, tenants experience this change as ‘risky and scary’, one that wilfully ignores the vast and intricate inequalities of knowledge and power involved. Like Foucault, Huisman sees ‘a technology of power’ as ‘a mechanism for shaping people’s thoughts and behaviour’ that ‘turns out to be politically and economically useful, and thus its use becomes more widespread and institutionalised.’ Like Bourdieu, she argues that individuals are unaware of how ‘they are reproducing (but at the same time altering) the social norms of their time and place … ’.
The protections offered to tenants in the Netherlands sound ‘formidable’ in principle, but in practice they are cumbersome, intimidating and ineffective – even though nearly a fifth of the housing stock is regarded by occupiers as badly maintained. The whole situation forms ‘a remarkable departure from the starting-point of guaranteed rights for tenants’, intended to protect ‘from adverse effects of the inherent power imbalance between tenant and landlord.’ But bringing about this departure sotto voce is easier than starting a long, acrimonious battle for overt repeal of the laws. Through existing and not-existing at the same time, regulations leave citizens’ negative experiences fragmented and their complaints ineffectual; eventually they will perceive how ‘socially reasonable’ it is simply to give up on the efforts that would be involved.
The third article in the issue returns to the topic of organisations, and global-local self-representation, not at all in terms of rugged individualism but according to a quite different discourse: the worldwide assumption that organisations need to display consciousness of their social responsibility – their concern for the environment, say, or human rights. Jan Goldenstein, Philipp Poschmann, Sebastian Händschke and Peter Walgenbach explore the public accounts of themselves that organisations give, against the backdrop of the ‘glocalisation’ widely discussed in institutional theory. To what extent do globally diffusing formal templates, such as, say, the ten principles set out in the United Nations Global Compact, vary between organisations? And how, if at all, do local cultures continue to affect them? Using novel ‘big data’ methods, the authors argue, in keeping with the ‘glocalisation’ thesis, that there is indeed an orientation towards particular responsibilities that ensues from global templates, but that local variations still account for differences: a ‘sameness-cum-variation’ blend. Examining organisations that are ‘deeply embedded in the cultural web of world society’, in the US, UK and Germany, they concentrate on responsible actorhood as these firms convey it in their self-representation.
The organisations’ accounts of themselves reflect ‘responsibility’ in a sense that relates to the modern ‘core idea that everyday life is structured in standardised means-end relations that serve progress and justice’. The authors offer an intriguing exploration of the sorts of commitment to responsibility that firms display, and whether this involves multiple types of template. To what extent, and in what ways, do they respond to ideas about responsibility in their local fields? How exactly do these make their impacts? Does the corporateness or centralism of their local fields have effects that can be traced?
The concluding article of the issue takes a very different approach to self-representation: Italians’ interpretations of their own collective identity. The attribution of familism and particularism to Italians may be partly imaginary, but it has real consequences nonetheless – as do the other forms of imagining dealt with in this issue. Edward Banfield’s much-criticised, but highly persistent, account of ‘amoral familism’ has been argued (not least in these pages, by Antonella Coco (2016)) to be a simplification. But Pierluca Birindelli takes a different approach, examining literary sources for the ‘familism-particularism’ pairing, going back to the fifteenth century and the work of the Florentine humanist Alberti – who attributed this feature to central Italy, with no sign of the North–South cleavage that later became notorious in the literature. Francesco Guicciardini was then the first to use the term ‘particulare’, in the sixteenth century. Italians, Birindelli argues, adopted this self-image very early, and it later became embedded in outsiders’ perceptions during the eighteenth century, the age of the Grand Tour, where Italians became the beloved and despised ‘others’ of Northern Europeans. It is this long literary acceptance that made ‘familism-particularism’ – whether or not in those exact terms – such a persistent topos. It became to some extent a self-fulfilling prophecy: Italians themselves expect it to be true and act as if it were true.
Birindelli reconstructs the image of ‘passionate, rebellious and decadent Italy’ in the novels of Stendhal and de Staël, together with the import of the notion of ‘national character’ from the same literary milieu. Soon after, Leopardi wrote on the supposedly exteriorising impacts of climate (apparently, living so much outside makes people more conscious of their appearances). Also, Birindelli notes, ‘Leopardi also anticipated the crucial key to the sociological interpretation of Italian society: the absence of a ruling class conscious of its own historical role.’ However, it was the notion of ‘a structural lack of civic sense’, Biridelli argues, that Italians ‘pinned on themselves.’ Of course, commentators such as Alessandro Pizzorno have pointed out rightly that in conditions of long-term poverty and marginality, it is perfectly reasonable to seek certain and immediate advantages rather than an ideal of public good postulated for the future; it was the overall political structure of the national setting that shaped the cultures of small, impoverished communities. But the idea of amoral familism became so rhetorically convincing that its power remained. Birindelli develops this hermeneutic exploration of the impact of a stereotype in connection with older and newer theories of how Italy is thought to work – and how hard Banfield’s ghost is to banish.
Our reviews all deal with works seeking to analyse highly significant features of public life in our time. Victor Albert writes about Leonardo Custódio’s Favela Media Activism: Counterpublics for Human Rights in Brazil, which analyses the role of the media in activism in low-income communities in Brazil. Timo Weishaupt and Vincent Lindner review Policy Design in the EU: An Empire of Shopkeepers in the Making, edited by Jari Aro and Risto Heiskala. Bruno Castanho Silva discusses From Fascism to Populism by Federico Finchelstein, who argues that populism is a postwar re-articulation or reformulation of fascism: he contends that populism works within the democratic system, while fascism rejects it. We shall return to all these discussions, needless to say, in future volumes.