For some time I have been pondering the distinction that is routinely made between state, market and civil society. I have increasingly been drawn to the conclusion that while this is a convenient and seemingly self-evident distinction it is also, at some more critical level, a flawed – or perhaps better, a misleading – distinction.
The basic unit of states, markets and civil society is people. People interacting in different ways, for different purposes, based on their respective values, beliefs, assumptions, worldviews, priorities, etc. Within this broader social figuration, power dynamics play a central role in determining what gains legitimacy over time and how new order emerges.
One of my major concerns is with the reification of state, market and civil society. If we were to adopt an understanding of each of these as particular delimitations of social processes that have been arbitrarily – or at least narrowly – construed as systems or else as system components, then we gain access to a very different perspective on each of these. These different spheres of activity, distinguishable by their perceived and ascribed functions, are not in and of themselves actors but are, rather patterns of interaction. By this I mean to say, that there is no agency that can be ascribed to the ‘whole’ even though it may be possible to describe phenomena as if this were the case.
In moving beyond such ’systemic’ and reified understandings of society, we perhaps are able to dissolve some of the constructs that limit our own understanding of what social change is and how it happens… more to come on this in future posts…
