Forms Of Social Cohesion Research Articles

Brands, Property and Politics

Brands and branding are one of the newer ways in which bridges are built between the worlds of production and consumption, and through which participation in a market society is encouraged and sustained. They are also, as the above example suggests, becoming part of a wider vocabulary, a way of describing a range of concerns about celebrity, reputation, memorability and value. Academic work on the subject is still in its infancy, but sociologists tend to see branding in terms of the new centrality of intellectual property rights to the production and the circulation of goods, while legal scholars have noted that the laws of trademark are becoming increasingly geared towards protecting the rights of producers at the expense of consumers.2 It is, however, in the area of popular and business literature that statements about branding have been most bold. The business sections of bookshops abound with texts describing ways of building and re-building brands, proposing ‘brand communities’ as new forms of social cohesion, and even providing advice on how to turn oneself into a brand. From a very different perspective, popular political texts such as Naomi Klein’s No Logo see branding as a distinctive contemporary version of the fetishism of commodities, concealing not just relations of production per se, but more specifically the striking disparities in wealth and privilege, and new forms of exploitation, produced by a global division of labour.

Two faces of the transnational cadre under neo-liberalism

This article argues that the integration of capitalist society at both national and international levels is coming about as a result of two processes of the ‘socialization of labour’ — market socialization and planned socialization. All relations of power in contemporary society are established through these two forms of social cohesion in combination, one operating blindly, the other involving conscious management and control. Politics is the process of mediating between them, both nationally and internationally. In articulating the sphere of actual control with the uncertainties of the market, politicians tend to rely on implicit frameworks of rule, or concepts of control, in which a particular national/international balance of what is managed and what is left to the market is laid down for a longer period. In the 20th century, a new class of managerial cadre emerged in between the property-owning capitalist class and the working class; displacing an older middle class of state- or self-employed notables. This new cadre is entrusted with managerial tasks and tends to favour non-market solutions over market solutions even when employed to foster the latter. While the current neo-liberal concept of control apparently shifts the balance towards transnational market socialization compared to the preceding corporate liberalism with its managerial emphasis, non-market forms of socialization are therefore continuing to develop even under neo-liberal globalization. Although the world faces a crisis of the exhaustion of society and nature, the potential for re-regulation and manageability does exist and can be identified by reference to this cadre.

Discourses of Community in Criminal Justice

The processes of rapid social and economic change which characterize most contemporary Western societies have promoted ever greater mobility, wrested social relations from localized contexts, weakened family and communal ties and, in so doing, eroded 'traditional' forms of social cohesion. Social order is increasingly thought of as something which cannot merely be protected and maintained but which must, rather, be actively constructed and managed if the social and psychological costs of insecurity are to be minimized. Yet in British debates about social ordering practices, an appeal to the idea of community has gained a particular salience over the past thirty years. Community has furnished a discursive framework within which social policies have been conceived, designed, implemented, and legitimated.' Nowhere has this been more prominently so than within the realm of criminal justice.2 It is the apparent disjuncture between the demise of community and the growth of its rhetorical appeal which forms our starting point. Ideas of community have been invoked explicitly or evoked implicitly in a number of different guises. Notably, they have been invoked for both 'diagnostic' and 'therapeutic' purposes: as explanations for, and as means of curing, social disorder. 'The community' has been accorded a central 'therapeutic' role in preventing crime through Neighbourhood Watch schemes and personal strategies of risk-reduction, co-operation with the police, and the encouragement of 'private' responsibilities such as parental