3. TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY IN MODERN SOCIETY
There is a considerable level of agreement amongst social scientists over the idea that in every society there are, at least analytically, three spheres around which the majority of social practices take place and which order social life: the economy (material reproduction), politics (giving order to conflict) and culture (symbolic integration). This supposition is present in both the functionalist and systemic approaches and in the structuralist and Marxist ones. One does not need to take recourse to Marxism to note that the world of production has always been the driving force of society’s material reproduction, although it has been within this scientific conception that this dimension has found a more central role. Besides, every society needs a certain symbolic integration amongst its components, beyond its mere material reproduction. Religion and the different conceptions of the non-natural or transcendent origin of the social order have historically assumed the role of guaranteeing the sacred character of the social link (Durkheim). Politics, as the sphere in which power is exercised and distributed, appears as the referent of every programme for maintaining or transforming the order on which the kingdom of domination and social inequality rests. What interests me in this section is not to elaborate a detailed socio-genesis of their evolution, but instead the erosions to which these three central social institutions have been subjected and their resulting loss of social relevance as sources of social identity for contemporary man and woman.

3.1 WHEN THE PULPIT IS FOUND EMPTY

It is unnecessary to assert that religion is, at the start of the XXI century, the force that mobilises the most wills. Millions of people have made religion into the centre of their everyday social practices: they pray, they abstain from doing certain things, they go on pilgrimages, they mobilise, etc. No other element that is adopted more or less consciously as an inspiration for action has shown itself to be so powerful. This has been the case for centuries and continues to be the case nowadays. Nevertheless, social scientists are asserting the crisis of religion as a social institution. How is this possible?
We are witnessing a deep transformation of the religious phenomenon. R. Bellah has drawn up an evolutionist scheme within which a progressive differentiation of religion operates. One of the results of this differentiation is that in modern society mass religiousness is gradually distancing the faithful from the institutional viewpoint and from orthodoxy. In this way, religiousness orientated towards the churches is losing its relevance for believers, although this does not mean a lower index of religiousness. The question is displaced towards the possible existence of other forms of religiousness on the margin of, or alongside, those religious practices that are traditionally orientated. Within the numerous diagnoses of the religious phenomenon in modern societies3, it can be highly relevant to concentrate on two that coincide partially: that of P. Berger and that of T. Luckmann.

P. Berger graphically expresses the situation of religion in modern society with the metaphor of the grave and the gravedigger. According to him, the seed of secularisation present in the tradition of Christianity has unleashed such processes of transformation within that tradition that this has resulted in its being jeopardised, or, if one prefers, the religious tradition itself has dug its own grave. The process of secularisation of Christianity, which has its root in the religious tradition itself, is producing a situation of growing pluralism. This pluralism generates two interesting processes for the future of religion: a) the loss of the monopoly of cosmovision, b) a market situation, obliging the religions to compete amongst themselves, to standardise their messages, and to adapt to the needs of the believers. These processes, according to Berger, pose very serious problems to the task of maintaining a plausibility structure that permits a constant and effective social confirmation of religious beliefs by society, which would suppose that the maintenance of these beliefs would gradually become a subjective and private affair (Berger, 1967; 1994). 

The point of view of T. Luckmann is not far removed from this diagnosis. Secularisation is a process of withdrawal by traditional religiousness through which it loses its public and social dimension. This situation would be reached by the lack of subjective acceptance of the “official” models, eroded by the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation characteristic of complex societies. However, the decadence of religion cannot be plainly asserted, at least not while human being continues to be engaged in the construction of a sacred cosmos so that his experience might have a final meaning. 

Religion will be present in society, Luckmann tells us, to the degree that it is capable of generating social cohesion but, at the same time, it is possible that certain historical forms of religiousness will lose social influence. The forms that are most exposed to this process of secularisation would be the most institutionalised and most traditional forms. Religiousness would be displaced from its most visible and public expressions to the private ambit and the sphere of intimacy, which is why Luckmann talks of invisible religion (Luckmann, 1967).

It is far from our intention here to consider the debate on secularisation, or to discuss the arguments of those who defend the present relevance of the religious, or the new forms of giving a sacred character to the profane. What I would like to emphasise is the fact that we are witnessing a loss of the capacity of traditional religion to generate “final significations that give meaning to the experience of living” in advanced industrial societies, and that as a result of this situation of crisis human beings will seek/build meaning on the basis of other non-religious experiences. The argument that I would like to defend is that beyond the temporal extension of certain religious forms, as we shall see subsequently, what we are witnessing is a structural weakening of institutional forms of religion as a source of collective identity.

3.2 WORK IN ORDER TO CONSUME, CONSUME ONESELF WORKING

From its origins, sociology has developed around the social question and the conflicts that were generated starting with the industrial revolution. The societies that we live in are the result of the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation of the two last centuries5. Until not long ago, highly polluting industries with their smokestacks launching interminable columns of smoke towards the sky were considered as symbols of prosperity. The image of hundreds of workers leaving the factory with their blue overalls and their helmets forms part of a generation that is taking early retirement, “the iron generation”.

This reality already forms part of a past that is receding, in which work impregnated personal and even intergenerational identity. Work as the centre of social life became a conception of the world for those who had achieved a class consciousness in confrontation with the bourgeois consciousness of their employers. We will consider two aspects of this question in order to understand its evolution: the job/employment and social class.

The social meaning of work has been changing in recent decades. A relevant factor in these changes has been the generalised introduction of new technologies in the productive process, the automatisation of tasks to the point of their being performed by robots, the massive incorporation of computers, etc. These elements are resulting in a change in the meaning of work as a social institution.

The other aspect refers to the collective signification of work, or to class identification, if one prefers. The progressive institutionalisation of class conflict (Offe) following the agreement signed between businessmen, trade unions and the State - as the final guarantor of the agreements reached in favour of economic growth and a rise in the standards of living and consumption of the workers with the safeguards of a generalised Welfare State - has given rise to a gradual deradicalisation of the political demands of the workers’ organisations in order to make possible the maintenance of that basic consensus. If we add to this the constant weakening of the demographic basis of the productive sectors (metallurgy, shipbuilding, industry in general) from which the majority of the organised working class proceeded, it should come as no surprise that there is increasingly less talk of class conflict and class consciousness. The loss of political signification of social classes and the changes that have occurred in the world of production and employment are also reflected in the appearance of new social significations of work different from identity and class consciousness.

3.3 POLITICS AND CITIZENSHIP: THE SHOW MUST GO ON

Political life unfolds in a space that is increasingly confined, while less persons participate in its dynamic. In recent decades the margins of politics have been continuously reduced facing the advance of technocratic management, while re-politicisation has become a scarce quotidian resource. As I have indicated elsewhere, the processes of political rationalisation that western societies have undergone historically have had a double dimension: a) at the level of infrastructure, this process has meant the establishment of highly specialised bureaucracies which control the institutional spheres and engage in discussion of the affairs that concern these spheres, implying a depoliticisation of social life and social relationships; b) at the level of the consciousness of individuals, this centralisation does not mean its disappearance from social life, but it loses its public character and becomes a question of private choice.

The democratic functioning of political power in our societies implies a competition between different political organisations that act as intermediaries between the ritually expressed desires of the citizens and the continued exercise of power by the elected. The political competition between parties has led to a progressive cartelisation with a reduction in the number of participants, a closed negotiation over the rules for participating and an adaptation to the needs of the electors. The crisis of the great ideologies (narratives) following the fall of communism has contributed to simplifying the political chessboard. The result of both phenomena has been a gradual deideologisation of political discourse and an emphasis on everyday management against the traditional political practices. The complexity of the management of public affairs has promoted a technocratisation of the debates, distancing the average citizen from both the ideological confrontation and from practical participation through expression of his support or protest by means of social mobilisation.

Balandier has justly pointed out that the expression of power tends to be concentrated on media activities, a terrain “on which the real is built on the basis of information, the word, the image and dramatisation; this confers existence through visibility, creates hierarchies depending on the degree of vedettisme, concedes less importance to confrontation posed around points of view, ideas or projects than to their translation into spectacle” (Balandier, 1994: 177). The penultimate attempt to understand this relationship between means of communication and mass politics is the book by G. Sartori Homo videns (1998). The physical distancing of the political structures and the social distance between the world of politics and everyday life have transformed the traditional social meaning of politics as a source of personal and collective identification. The conclusion we can draw, although provisionally, is that the loss of relevance of these three institutions (religion, labour and politics) has been deepened by the impact of the processes of globalisation.

back