The synchronization of national policies: ethnography of the global tribe of moderns

Alasuutari does so by encouraging readers to see the ‘global system with fresh eyes’ by understanding that modernity is cultural, because as Alasuutari puts it, ‘it takes special effort to put modernity on a par with any culture’. By describing us as a tribe of self-identified moderns, he wants to confront the presumptions that culture must be characteristic of small-scale, homogenous societies or reducible to individual values and that modern sovereign rational action and authority are the opposite of ‘cultural’. Rooted in cultural theory and research of the last several decades, including his own substantial contributions, Alasuutari defines culture as a grid constituting reality. This view is also found in world-culture theory, which describes culture as an ontology comprising a schema or an order of things within which actors are constituted. This is not essentially a set of scripts as much as an ordered set of categories (identities) from which actors adopt, edit, and enact scripts, whether to construct a web of meaning or, as highlighted by Alasuutari, to use as weapons in situated political contentions. World-culture theorists have tended to emphasise that actors enact ready-made scripts and, while they have argued that actors use their constituted agency to edit and innovate, and that actors such as states are not unitary, they have not extensively analysed empirically the nuances of how this might happen.

Alasuutari focuses on precisely that: how actors take for granted the global cultural schema of modernity, as in situated locales they contest political decisions and assert unique agency. Along with colleagues and students, he has collected samples of debates in national decision-making bodies – parliaments or legislatures throughout the world. This is a rich collection that Alasuutari uses deftly to tease out the nuances of how national political actors assertively press their interests within the power structures of the political arena, assert national uniqueness, and draw on a host of international authorities, resulting in the observed pattern of similarities and differences. These actors already take for granted domesticated modern global culture and consequently synchronise with other nation-states – in part mediated by intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) – by way of constructing policies expressive of the ‘national first person plural’.

As with any cultural approach, the call is to pay attention to the content of world culture, and content is at the core of Alasuutari’s research. Modernity as a cultural imaginary is an instrumentality, what Weber saw in terms of instrumental, bureaucratic, or formal rationality, and what world-culture theorists call global rationalism. Science authority is paramount and the ‘author’ and arbiter of knowledge that is a ground for actors who claim this rationality. Political actors in Alasuutari’s samples repeatedly refer to ‘objective knowledge’ to press for or against particular policies or decisions, appealing to science, experts, and success.

He delineates three imageries that capture world culture and that are found throughout the discourse in his samples: modernisation, a hierarchy of realist actors, and competition among camps of actors (such as nation-states or cities). First, history as evolutionary development and progress is a central imagery that depicts the unfolding of modern rational knowledge. Virtually everyone claims to be modern, in some sense, thereby asserting that they are ‘on the right side of history’, part of the development of human freedom and knowledge. He provocatively argues that even post-modern or post-colonial perspectives implicitly reify a developmental view of history by organising history into periods. Second, he observes that modern actors (politicians, scholars, the everyday lay person) insist that the world is comprised of a hierarchy of egoistic actors out to dominate each other. Actors in his samples switch from one imagery to another in discursive settings, from describing decisions as based on up-to-date science and best practices to viewing them as impositions of hegemons. Added to these discursive layers is the imagery of competing camps. In presuming global cultural rationalism, actors (nation-states, cities) view themselves as camps or teams competing with others to be modern and progressive. This competition to be better at being modern is rooted in actors presuming modernist world culture and is a driving force for synchronisation given that there is no world state – or, in Alasuutari’s terms, given that the tribe of moderns has no chief.

Alasuutari makes a strong assertion: as moderns we tend to deny that modernity is cultural. He implies that the hesitancy of social theorists (moderns par excellence) to recognise this is attributable to the culture itself. This implication is straightforward when applied to rational-actor theorists who self-consciously embrace the modern actor, but it is insightful and somewhat provocative when applied to many critical theorists. Alasuutari does not present these points polemically; rather, he documents in situated discourse that this denial is rooted in world-cultural imageries:

1. Moderns presume that similarities across nation-states result from rational actors producing knowledge and learning from each other about objective reality, including about the operations of markets, states, and societies. New programmes, policies, metrics, and myriad social forms are carriers of progress and result from rational actors learning objective, natural knowledge. Similarities are made insignificant in the sense that there is no puzzle; they are significant only as markers of being modern.

2. Moderns also presume that this modernist rationality, and the associated nation-state similarities, serve the interests of, and are imposed by hegemonic, powerful actors. If actors including scholars refer to this as culture, they interpret it as false-consciousness that is the self-serving construction of realist actors.

Actors (including social theorists) use these imageries to make similarities insignificant, invisible, or artificial and to celebrate agency and individuality. In many cases, the same actor will switch between these. As Alasuutari puts it, moderns have a love–hate relationship with their tribal identity.

This type of system functions through epistemic authority and governance, by which Alasuutari means that actors orient identity and action to a rationalistic ontology. Actors attempt to legitimate action and influence others by changing their knowledge, or more precisely by changing the knowledge that governs the situation. This knowledge is ontological and moral in that it carries imperatives for modern action. This, in practice, as illustrated in parliamentary debates, takes the form of identifying problems and their solutions such that action is legitimated as the necessary, technical solution to a problem. The action thus is morally obligatory.

The main analysis of these cultural elements and dynamics are presented as part of the discourse analyses of situated political actors. Chapters 3 and 4 are especially meaty as Alasuutari describes how policy models ‘diffuse’ even as nation-states create unique identities. In doing so, he criticises a common conceptualisation. World-cultural principles, elements, policies, or models are not fully formed ‘somewhere’ and then diffuse geographically and penetrate locally. Rather, policies and models are generated by various actors, often experts, and they circulate among nation-states; as nation-states synchronise with each other they modify and domesticate these models, resulting in what we might then observe as a world model.

Similarly, he rejects the idea that world culture is a thin structure determined by hegemons colonising local cultures that attempt to resist. The image that dominates scholarship is that powerful actors impose models, standards, and ‘best practices’ on local places. This is accurate historically and as an aspect of international dynamics as far as it goes. But Alasuutari, more clearly than anyone else, documents that the local already is quite embedded in the content and elements of world culture. Local actors are in fact on a global stage synchronising with each other. Culture is thick ontology and moral authority, and by the end of the twentieth century, this process has become a banal aspect of local life resulting not in diffusion of practices but in their circulation. The reasoning here is compelling and documented in the discourse of national actors; even those who argue against adopting a particular policy do so in stylised, rational-actor ways that reflect epistemic governance and modernist imageries.

Alasuutari engages the large literature on fields to elucidate. He suggests viewing modernist culture as a global ‘force field’ analogous to quantum fields (in contrast to the sociologist’s field of organisational networks). It is grounded in banal ways in locales throughout the world. World culture is already local. Any given site, such as a parliament, is itself a field within the global field – a battlefield in which actors contend over political decisions. In battlefields, actors draw on taken-for-granted principles to develop discourse that displays the three modernist imageries: they appeal to the epistemic authority of science and expert knowledge, they construct a unique national identity, and they frame that identity in terms of membership of a team in competition with others. Thus, policies such as children’s ombudspersons (Chapter 3) or catchwords such as social cohesion (Chapter 7) are constructed as they circulate. Even the units (nation-states or ‘tribal clans’) are emergent out of the discourse. It is a mistake to hypothesise norm or institutional entrepreneurs – this is a world in which actors in general have entrepreneurial agency.

In an exceptionally insightful analysis in Chapter 4, Alasuutari documents how actors in national decision-making bodies adopt policies informed by world culture in such a way as to construct unique national identity. It is in this chapter that we really see epistemic governance at work in parliamentary debates. Drawing on technical expertise, national legislators identify problems and develop, assess, and debate solutions. International organisations are used as authoritative sources of knowledge and other countries are referred to either positively or negatively. Modernist rationality is the implicit background for constructing unique national identity: ‘we’ as moderns are morally obligated to find rational solutions. Throughout, legislators assert the uniqueness of the nation, in part by framing the elements of the proposed policies as having a long tradition within ‘our’ national story; indeed, ‘we’ might have invented it.

Particular points in this presentation are elaborated in subsequent chapters. Chapter 5 contributes to the debates surrounding ‘American exceptionalism’ by interpreting how politicians in the USA attempt to ignore anything external. In Chapter 6, the nature and role of international organisations are taken up with some detail, again eschewing scholarly commonplaces. Scholarly work on IGOs presumes that they are results of states taking collective action to coordinate and control each other. In this view, states are principals who create IGOs as their agents. World-culture studies have documented empirical problems with this perspective, and Alasuutari develops an original alternative based on how political actors in national parliaments actually use IGOs. He conceptualises international organisations as accumulated epistemic capital involving ontological, moral, and capacity-building authority appropriated or stigmatised by national actors. Actors in national parliaments refer to IGO standards and metrics as ways to assess problems and solutions domestically and to shame the first person plural (‘us’). They also depict IGOs as threats to sovereignty, as external hierarchical authorities that threaten the first person plural. This is very rich material that supports Alasuutari’s nuanced theorising and belies the simplistic polemics common in the field.

That uniqueness is a cultural element of global consciousness is a hallmark of Roland Robertson’s early formulation – universal particularism. World-culture theorists have emphasised the place of uniqueness and individualism in world culture and its constituting high levels of actor agency. Indeed, it is a major theme of Durkheim’s that individuality is a property of a type of solidarity, and to be a modern individual means conforming to cultural definitions of individuality. This tension seems crucial to understanding modern culture, whether observed in terms of individuals or nation-states that express their particular individuality through everyday action. The empirical work throughout the book documents the nuances in situated interaction of how actors do this as they identify and solve problems, synchronising with each other on how well they are doing at being modern. In short, the construction of particular uniqueness is implicit in rational action.

The penultimate chapter analyses cases in which actors are explicitly attempting to express and display their uniqueness. It turns out that they do so largely through the arts and what Alasuutari terms ‘expressive culture’. The chapter looks at home tourism and the packaging of authenticity, and also how Finnish cities have created cultural identities within a national economic development initiative. He documents empirically, through discourse and media accounts, that expressing particular individuality is highly stylised. This chapter extends the arguments of the book, but it also is an insightful analysis of the arts and humanities. I would have liked the chapter title and overview of the book to have drawn attention to this treatment – it would be a shame if those interested in how the arts and humanities fit into all of this missed it.

We are all moderns of one tribe but of different clans. When we conform to models of modernity by rationally identifying and solving problems, we do so in ways by which we claim uniqueness. When we explicitly express our uniqueness, we do so in highly similar ways. The book establishes a paradigmatic research strategy for examining situated discourse that opens up the interplay between global and local, resulting in an original understanding of global similarities and differences. The comprehensive theorising and well-crafted empirical work do much to explain, but they also stimulate new questions. The result will be energising for the next generation of scholarship.