Abstract
In What Makes a Social Crisis?, Jeffrey Alexander engages with the important question of how an emerging problem within an institution is converted into a social problem or crisis. Alexander develops his account, which he terms ‘societalization’, in which he proposes a five-part linear model. The first stage, (T1), is ‘steady state’ in which there is a clear boundary between the institution and civil society and any ‘institutional strains’ are institutionally insulated. At (T2) societalization occurs and there is a semiotic ‘code switch’ in which public attention of the ‘civil whole’ is often shifted on to the institution so that these intra-institutional strains are interpreted as violations of the civil sphere. Then in (T3) outrage often follows and the ‘communicative and regulative institutions of the civil sphere’ (p. 9) act to impose harsh regulatory interventions. At (T4) as the interventions build up, ‘backlash’ from elites within the institution occurs and there is struggle to redraw boundaries between the institution and civil society. In (T5) the boundary between the institution and civil society is (contingently) restored.
Alexander argues that while social strains are real, what causes ‘societalization’ is not the ‘substance’ of the strain, but rather the ‘societal interpretation’ of the strain. Theorizing the role of civil society in a democratic society he builds on a Durkheimian point regarding the need to protect the collective consciousness, arguing that: ‘When semiotic shifts push social problems beyond steady state, the moral and institutional foundations of society itself seem endangered’ (p. 9). Alexander then proceeds to justify the value of this theoretical framework through analysing four different cases of ‘societalization’: Catholic Church paedophilia in the USA; phone hacking in the UK; the 2008 financial crisis (with primary focus on the USA); and the #MeToo movement (focused primarily on the USA).
The virtues and limitations of this book are both significant and I will try to give a sense of both in this brief review.
First, in terms of strengths, Alexander’s attempt to deal with some of the most important and difficult contemporary social issues is both timely and to be lauded. Even if Alexander’s theorizing is ultimately superseded, in excavating these areas and providing a novel treatment of many of these issues, What Makes a Social Crisis? importantly advances these debates. Additionally, Alexander has provided insight by showing how contemporary crises tie into Durkheimian concepts of collective consciousness and the sacred, as well as highlighting the importance of democratic civil society and social indignation.
In terms of limitations, first, while there a few pages in the conclusion and in a long footnote, the book says relatively little about how this account of ‘societalization’ relates to others who address the issue of how issues or strains become social or political problems. There is a very brief discussion of theories on ‘moral panics’ and ‘scandal’, but without more of a discussion of how other literatures, especially literatures in other disciplines, such as politics, speak to these issues, the book risks closing its account off from larger debates. Without connecting ‘societalization’ to these other approaches, there is the risk that ‘societalization’ itself becomes its own intra-institutional siloed theory, thus limiting its more general contribution to civil society or civil debates.
Second, the treatment of the financial crisis raises a further concern. This is whether the paradigm of ‘societalization’ has been developed in relation to some types of crises in which there are long-standing problems (Church paedophilia, phone hacking) and then applied to a case with very different features (financial crisis)? In particular, while it is plausible to argue that for Church paedophilia and phone hacking the key change is in the subjective dimension of social knowledge and interpretation of ongoing events, this appears much less plausible for the financial crisis, where the emergence of the crisis was much more closely tied to changes in the functioning of the financial system than in how society regarded the financial system. Furthermore, in trying to fit the financial crisis into this framework, the temporal understanding of the five stages is suspended, as resistance and backlash to intervention (T4) was there from the crisis’ origins. Likewise, the extent to which banks were subject to harsh regulatory interventions is overstated, with Alexander ignoring the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which in the USA was extraordinary action to benefit banks in response to the crisis, rather than imposing harsh punishment in response to the crisis.
A further possible query is in regards to the epistemological status of this five-stage model. That is, is it just a descriptive model that helps to classify the stages of a crisis, or is it in some sense explanatory? To refer back to the financial crisis, does the model have the tools to explain the path of crises or, for example, to explain the differences between the much more generous terms of the bailout of the USA over the UK’s bailout, or rather is it an ex post mode of description of crises? In this vein, the depiction of crisis as a phase in which universal civil morality overwhelms the secular interests of different groups is perhaps too much of one moment of the ‘late Durkheim’ to stand up to a more extensive analysis of the causes of and responses to recent crises. Nevertheless, in raising these questions with intelligence and in a systemic way, in this thought-provoking book, Alexander has done an important service in providing a framework to think through these issues.