Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

global communities – virtual communities, the Olympic community, the

‘international community’.^2

Globalization and social context

For Rose, ‘society’ and community are viewed as discursive constructs

that have changed roles. ‘The formation of the notion of a national econ-

omy was a key condition for the separation out of a distinct social

domain’ (Rose, 1996: 337). Whereas, for Rose (1996), ‘the social’ once acted

as a discursive agent for the integration of persons on the basis of ‘social

protection, social justice, social rights and social solidarity’ (329), for

Touraine (1998), the decline of national communities derives from

the ‘decomposition... of society’ by way of the ‘growing autonomy of the

economic sphere from institutional controls’ which ‘exist in general at the

national level’ (129). Touraine acknowledges, contra the extreme global-

ists, that the events that are said to have produced globalization – ‘the

increase in international trade; the more rapid intensification of financial

flows; the rise of new industrial countries; the birth of the information

society... the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet empire’ – are

not systemically linked, but rather are phenomena ‘largely independent

of one another, and are of different natures’ (129–30).

Nevertheless, taken together, these discrete events are said to have

social and political consequences, the first being the ‘breakdown of social

and political constraints on economic activity’, producing ‘the most radi-

cal rupture ever observed between actor and system’, whilst the second is

the weakening of the nation-state (130–1). For Touraine, the most signifi-

cant change is in the decomposition of the institutionalization of norms in

the social world: ‘the main fact is that we no longer recognize the presence

of norms in many realms of life’ (131). Instead, as larger and larger spheres

of behaviour are no longer said to be subject to nation-state/society-framed

norms, ‘[t]he system is no longer a social one, but becomes a global market,

self-regulated by law firms, rating agencies and international financial

institutions and the financial markets themselves... the social actor disap-

pears, and the remaining actors are no longer social’ (130).

In the contemporary context, therefore, Touraine poses the main task

for sociology today as having to discover ‘a new principle, capable of

replacing the idea of society and more specifically of national society,

which for so long played this role of mediation and integration’ (133).

This leaves him with the question: ‘how can we be actors and create space

for autonomy between the globalized economy and communal cultures,

neither one of which leaves room for the actor?’ (135).

Touraine’s own answer to this question is that ‘there are no longer

transcendent universal values that might unite all of humanity’ (136), as

in the case of the grand narratives of modernity; rather, capitalism, in its

Telecommunity 173

Holmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 173