16 - The inter-institutional dimension: beyond economism and culturalism

Summary

Having discussed the type of action–structure and micro–macro linkages that are presupposed in a non-essentialist, open-ended, holistic conceptual framework in the two previous chapters, it remains to examine what presuppositions are necessary for examining the linkages between institutional spheres (economic, political, social and cultural) in a way that avoids aprioristic, not empirically founded positions about the dominance of one sphere over the others.

Economism

As pointed out in previous chapters, the strongest argument that can be made for Marx's holistic framework is that it avoids the conflation of objectivist and subjectivist approaches seen in Giddens' and Bourdieu's writings; it also avoids the imbalance between systemic and action approaches seen in Parsonian and Althusserian functionalism at one extreme, and in interpretative micro-sociological approaches at the other. Viewed as a whole, Marx's work achieves a remarkable balance and successfully combines systemic-institutional and actor-oriented perspectives. It views social development in terms of both systemic contradictions of institutional parts (system integration/disintegration) and actors' struggles (social integration/disintegration). It is important to repeat once more that Marx not only accepts methodological dualism (i.e. the necessity, in Habermas' terms, of both an internalist and an externalist perspective), but changes from one to the other without any conceptual acrobatics – since the key concept of technology (the forces of production) plays a crucial role in moving in a theoretically coherent manner from systemic contradictions to actors' struggles.