difficult to develop. While heavy/solid/condensed/systemic modernity was composed of compulsory homogeneity, liquid modernity emphasizes momentary impulses. With the end of the illusion of a telos (as a state of perfection to be reached), there is a deregulation and privatization of tasks and duties from collective endowments to individual management. In this view, individualism prevails over the collectivity, as community and corporations no longer offer protection by embedding the individuals in dense nets of social bonds, ensuing insecurity pushes toward the search for scapegoats. In the past, the modern state had managed fears through protection of social state institutions that constructed new webs of social bonds (Bauman 2000, p. 59) or long‐term involvement in the Fordist factory; nowadays, a deregulation‐cum‐individualization develops fears (ibid., p. 67).
In the new context, some scholars singled out the challenges for collective identities to be difficult to develop. Individuals are seen as lukewarm toward the common good, common cause, good society (Bauman 2000, p. 36). However, this is not linked to the colonization of the lifeworld by the state, but rather by its decline, as “it is no more true that the ‘public’ is set on colonizing the ‘private.’ The opposite is the case: it is the private that colonizes the public spaces” (Bauman 2000, p. 39). The collapse of confidence is said to bring about a fading will to political commitment with endemic instability. A state‐induced insecurity develops, indeed, with individualization through market flexibility and a broadening sense of relative deprivation, as flexibility precludes the possibility of existential security (Baumann 2007, p. 14).
However, anti‐austerity movements seem to develop what Ernesto Laclau (2005) has defined as a populist reason. According to him, populism is a political logic: not a type of movement, but the construction of the people as a way of breaking order and reconstructing it. As neoliberalism brings about a fragmentation in the social structure, the discursive construction of the people requires new attention. The search for a populist reason, as the need for naming the self and for recognition of the self, is driven by a crisis that challenges a process of habituation, fueling processes of (new) identification. In times of crisis, a dissonance arises between expectation and reality, as a crisis suspends the doxa, made up of undiscussed ideas, and stimulates the elaboration of new arguments (Bourdieu 1977, p. 168). Actual protests can then be interpreted as nonconformative action using discourse and opinions to challenge habitus and doxa. According to empirical analyses, in fact, in today’s protests the search for a naming of the self that could bring together different groups has indeed produced the spread of definitions of the self as the people, or even more, the persons or the citizens. These ideas have reflected and challenged the cultural effects of neoliberalism (della Porta 2015a).
2.4 STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS, NEW CONFLICTS, NEW CLASSES
The processes of structural change, which we discussed briefly in the preceding pages, contribute in various ways to the weakening of traditional social conflicts and their recent reemergence in new forms. It is more debatable whether it is possible to establish a global characterization of new conflicts on this basis. The transformations we have discussed – and even more so the interpretations that different scholars have provided of them – seem to point in divergent and sometimes contradictory directions.
2.4.1 Still Classes?
Several of the changes we have mentioned point at two common elements. First, there is a marked increase of activities linked to the production of knowledge and to symbolic manipulation, and the identification in the control of those activities as a major stake of conflict. The development of the administrative/service sector in fact reflects the growing relevance in the economic sphere of information‐processing, compared with the transformation of natural resources. The same expansion of areas of state intervention, which leads to the multiplication of identities and of politically based interests, has made ever more essential the role of decision makers and communicators able to develop efficient syntheses between heterogeneous concerns and values.
Second, many recent transformations have produced the potential for conflicts that cut across conventional distinctions between the private and public spheres. Evidence of this includes the influence that certain styles of scientific knowledge and certain ways of organizing it have on the psychophysical well‐being of the individual (for example, in the field of therapies and the health services). Alternatively, one may think of the public and collective relevance of individual consumer behavior and ways of life, which previously would have been relegated to the private sphere. Or, again, one might consider the importance of ascribed traits such as ethnicity or gender in conflicts concerning the extension and full realization of citizens’ rights.
These processes point at a specific area of nonmaterial conflicts. Their stake is represented by the control of resources that produce meaning and allow actors to intervene not only on their own environment but also on the personal sphere, and above all on the link between these two levels. Rather than with economic or political power, contemporary social conflict has, according to this view, more to do with the production and circulation of information; social conditions for production and the use of scientific knowledge; and the creation of symbols and cultural models concerned with the definition of individual and collective identities. This thesis has been formulated in a number of ways and with various levels of theoretical generalization (Touraine 1981; Lash and Urry 1987; Melucci 1989, 1996; Eder 1993), although somewhat diverse conclusions have been drawn as far as the relationship between structure, conflict, and movement is concerned.
In order to try to make sense of what is undoubtedly a highly diversified debate we must first of all keep in mind that those who investigate the relationship between structure, class, and collective action sometimes move from rather different points of departure, and use the same terms in quite different ways. To begin with, we must note the difference between a “historical” and a “structural” (Eder 1995) or “analytical” (Melucci 1995) concept of class. In the first meaning, class is a historical product of capitalist society (referring in other words to the working and the capitalist class, and to the specific structural processes that produced and reinforced their identity). In the second, a class is a group of people with similar “relationships within which social resources are produced and appropriated” (Melucci 1995, p. 117). The inequalities in power and status, peculiar to postindustrial society, might well not be conducive to the reproduction of industrial class conflict, but still provide the structural roots for the emergence of new collective actors. The tension between these two different approaches has affected recent debates on the persistence of class as a factor shaping conventional political behavior, and in particular, electoral participation (e.g. Dalton et al. 1984; Dalton 1988; 2015).
A second issue among those who still recognize the relevance of structural interpretations regards the existence of a hierarchical structure of different types of conflicts, and the possibility of identifying core conflicts comparable to those which according to dominant interpretations shaped the industrial society. The most coherent attempt to identify the core conflicts of postindustrial (or “programmed”) society is to be found in the work of Alain Touraine who has played an important role in the development of social movement studies. According to his path‐breaking work in the 1980s, the category of social movement fulfills a fundamental task, in both defining the rules by which society functions and in determining the specific goal of sociology: “The sociology of social movements,” wrote Touraine (1981, p. 30), “cannot be separated from a representation of society as a system of social forces competing for control of a cultural field.” That is, the way in which each society functions reflects the struggle between two antagonistic actors who fight for control of cultural concerns that, in turn, determine the type of transforming action which a society performs upon itself (Touraine 1977, pp. 95–96). It is in relation to the concept of historicity – defined by the interweaving of a system of knowledge, a type of accumulation, and a cultural model – that different types of society can be identified, along with the social classes which accompany them.
Touraine identified four types of society, each featuring a distinctive pair of central antagonistic actors: agrarian, mercantile, industrial, and “programmed” (a term that he prefers