The Role of Macro-Actors in Professional Practice

Abstract

This chapter expands the focus developed so far to explain how interrelations between managers, students and teachers are shaped by the operations of macro-actors and why this is occurring in contemporary society. The use of ‘actor’ here draws on Mouzelis (1995, 2008) who employs it to refer to an individual or collective social entity which influences the social world. According to this usage, actors are ‘micro’ or ‘macro’, depending on their relative capacity to influence the social world, and therefore each other. To this, I have added ‘meso’ actors to refer to those whose capacity to influence the social world lies between that of micro- and macro-actors. This use of ‘actor’ is not meant to imply a particular relationship between individual actions and social structures and processes, or to deny that the word crudely glosses the complex realities of social life. Rather, it is ‘a convenient shorthand to avoid longwinded descriptions of complex processes of representation and of group decision-making’ (Mouzelis, 1995, p. 15). In developing the explanation I bring this account of social actors to Bourdieu’s critiques of globalization, neoliberalism (1998) and consumer culture (1984). The chapter starts by outlining these. It then traces the ways in which Bourdieu’s critique explains the identities and relationships advanced by the discourse of commercialization before extending this explanation to include the influence of macro-actors.