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9 - Global Institutional Imaginaries
- from Part III - The Modern ‘Liberal’ Order
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- By Ann Swidler
- Edited by Andrew Phillips, University of Queensland, Christian Reus-Smit, University of Queensland
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- Book:
- Culture and Order in World Politics
- Published online:
- 25 December 2019
- Print publication:
- 09 January 2020, pp 182-204
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Summary
The liberal international order of states has engendered a global order of transnational and supranational agents, institutions, and practices, generating a nascent global polity. This polity is animated by social purposes, including peace and security, economic growth, global health, and the rights and well-being of individuals. It also champions a distinctive diversity regime, centred on the moral primacy of the individual. Focusing on six components of the emerging global polity, the chapter describes both the institutional lineaments and the cultural core of the global polity-in-formation, including its distinctive diversity regime. Ethnic, religious, and other forms of cultural difference are legitimated, but only so long as they do not compromise the fundamental equality and autonomy of the persons who stand as global citizens. The global polity is also in fundamental tension with the liberal order, ultimately challenging basic principles of the nation state: sovereignty, citizenship rights, and national boundaries.
11 - Cultural Sources of Institutional Resilience
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- By Ann Swidler
- Edited by Peter A. Hall, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Michèle Lamont, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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- Book:
- Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era
- Published online:
- 05 May 2013
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2013, pp 319-345
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Summary
One of the great challenges of the neoliberal era is that of institutional capacity: the capacity of collectivities – from communities, to states, to transnational bodies – to create or sustain resilient social forms that embody collective purposes, enforce rights and obligations, and have the capacity to organize collective action. Neoliberalism, both as ideology and as policy, has a love–hate relationship with institutions. On the one hand, as Evans and Sewell (see Chapter 1) make clear, neoliberal ideology has been defined by an attack on government – both public provision of welfare services and government regulation of the economy. Globally, one of the signature policies of the neoliberal era was structural adjustment, which forced government retrenchment and drastic cutbacks in government services throughout the Global South (Stiglitz 2002). At the same time, however, the collapse of the Soviet Union and attempts to establish functioning market economies in many formerly socialist states have highlighted the need for effective institutions, both legal institutions to make markets work (Fligstein 2001) and government institutions capable of restraining ethnic antagonisms and providing social stability.
Even as neoliberal theorists have decried excessive government, the neoliberal era has produced a welter of new or newly empowered institutions through which the world's business is supposed to get done. Indeed, the neoliberal era has fostered wide-ranging institutional innovation (Fukuyama 2004; Slaughter 2004). Alongside the frayed authority of nation states and high-modernist Weberian bureaucracies have emerged more heterogeneous institutional forms: the profusion of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and transnational social movements that address human rights or the AIDS epidemic (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Callaghy, Kassimir, and Latham 2001; Calhoun 2008; Hammack and Heydemann 2009; Watkins, Swidler, and Hannan 2012); initiatives for decentralization and participatory governance (Baiocchi, Heller, and Silva 2008); and new or enhanced international organizations that regulate global trade, provide peacekeeping, or attempt to establish and enforce human rights (de Waal 2009; Sikkink 2009).
5 - Responding to AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa: Culture, Institutions, and Health
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- By Ann Swidler
- Edited by Peter A. Hall, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Michèle Lamont, Harvard University, Massachusetts
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- Book:
- Successful Societies
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 17 August 2009, pp 128-150
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Summary
Peter Hall and Rosemary Taylor (Chapter 3, in this volume) suggest that we think of the health and happiness of individuals as depending on the resources they can mobilize to confront the challenges that face them. An analogous argument might apply to collectivities, from families and communities to national states. Examining the massive threats to human health created by the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa, I ask what shapes the resources collectivities can bring to bear to meet the challenges of AIDS.
This chapter lays out broad questions about the role of institutions and culture in responding to AIDS. It draws on research during three visits to sub-Saharan Africa (Botswana in July 2003 and June 2006 and Malawi in June and July of 2004 and 2006), about seventy interviews with staff from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working on the ground on AIDS projects across sub-Saharan Africa, and an initial effort at mapping the universe of organizations responding to Africa's AIDS pandemic.
OUTLINING THE ISSUES
No one questions the enormity of the AIDS crisis on the African continent. The epidemiological models are inexact, but the best estimates are that of the approximately 33 million people currently infected with HIV, more than 22 million are in sub-Saharan Africa, with an estimated 1.7 million Africans newly infected in 2007. Perhaps 17 million Africans have already died of AIDS, and in some places deaths among groups such as teachers, nurses, and soldiers threaten the collapse of entire institutional spheres.
11 - Culture and social action
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- By Ann Swidler
- Philip Smith, University of Queensland
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- Book:
- The New American Cultural Sociology
- Published online:
- 18 January 2010
- Print publication:
- 28 June 1998, pp 171-187
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The reigning model used to understand culture's effects on action is fundamentally misleading. It assumes that culture shapes action by supplying ultimate ends or values towards which action is directed, thus making values the central causal element of culture. This paper analyzes the conceptual difficulties into which this traditional view of culture leads and offers an alternative model.
Among sociologists and anthropologists, debate has raged for several academic generations over defining the term “culture.” Since the seminal work of Clifford Geertz (1973a), the older definition of culture as the entire way of life of a people, including their technology and material artifacts, or that (associated with the name of Ward Goodenough) as everything one would need to know to become a functioning member of a society, have been displaced in favor of defining culture as the publicly available symbolic forms through which people experience and express meaning (see Keesing 1974). For purposes of this essay, culture consists of such symbolic vehicles of meaning, including beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, as well as informal cultural practices such as language, gossip, stories, and rituals of daily life. These symbolic forms are the means through which “social processes of sharing, modes of behavior and outlook within [a] community” (Hannerz 1969, p. 184) take place.
The recent resurgence of cultural studies has skirted the causal issues of greatest interest to sociologists. Interpretive approaches drawn from anthropology (Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and Claude Lévi-Strauss) and literary criticism (Kenneth Burke, Roland Barthes) allow us better to describe the features of cultural products and experiences.