The sociogenesis of the nation-state in European social policy

In: Routledge Advances in sociology, p. 61-75

Abstract

"In this chapter, a world culture perspective is applied to alternative forms of governance within the EU. In contrast to the widely held view in governance research that the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) constitutes a more or less successful arrangement for policy learning, I propose the hypothesis that mechanisms of 'soft' govemance are both means and results of the diffusion (by transposition) of a global culture. (...) The contribution has three sections. The following section introduces the neoinstitutional idea of actorhood with an emphasis an the role of cultural others in the process of becoming a legitimate actor. The next section turns to the empirical object of investigation, the OMC in EU social and employment policies. lt elaborates the world cultural script of good European nationhood and shows how the OMC as a learning procedure serves as a structural bare for the diffusion of this script. The section also argues that the domestication of this script depends an the dynamic of power struggies in national fields. Finally, in the last section the core assertions of the world culture perspective are summarized with a view to explaining processes of domestication." (Text excerpt, IAB-Doku) ((en))