Introduction: The Problem and the Perspective
The present book explores how political mobilization from “below” may influence the distribution and dynamics of power in the context of a thoroughly bureaucratized, democratic state. The main case is Norway, but the larger Scandinavian context is also analyzed in some detail. My main objective is to try to understand the potential of horizontally organized social relations for cutting across and challenging hierarchical chains of command and centralization of political and bureaucratic power. This potential, I argue, is closely related to how motivations, identities, and social relations formed in contexts where social agents control largely informal resources that can be used to influence formal institutions , and to some extent shape them. The “institutional ecology” of the Norwegian welfare state, and the Scandinavian model more generally, seems to be characterized by a relative openness—or perhaps “institutional vulnerability” is a more apt expression—that to some extent has made it possible to prevent elite seizure of political and bureaucratic power. It seems to me that this phenomenon must play an important role in any attempt to explain how and why the welfare state emerged in the first place (Vike 2012, 2013; Stenius 2010).
In my perspective, two aspects stand out. First, political activity in local politics in Norway is heavily influenced by the morality and practice of membership commitment in formal organizations. As I show in this book, this seems to inspire an egalitarian social dynamic that imposes limits on the autonomy of political and managerial elites, whose interests are very often driven by the felt need to seek to establish more and better control over what they tend to see as inefficient and/or unruly institutions. Second, the welfare state’s universalist orientation, the idea that rights to entitlements and services are founded on citizenship rather than on some highly specific criteria implying extensive means testing (Kildal and Kuhnle 2005), seems to make it natural and easy to make strong and legitimate claims on “the state,” and to challenge the autonomy and rationality of elites. Universalism contributes heavily to make public services “the heart of the state” (Fassin et al. 2013), and because so much of both political legitimacy and trust in public institutions depends on responsiveness to needs, the actual responsibility of public institutions is very hard to define and delimit. And, because public institutions, the municipalities in particular, “lack” clear-cut boundaries , they are relatively open and, consequently, accessible to many interests other than those of institutional elites that are supposed to control them from the top. At the same time, this logic seems to provide the local, democratically controlled institutions of the state—municipalities—with much more agenda-setting leverage than one would expect.
In sum, I call the unintended effects of these dynamics and conditions “the low center of gravity state,” and argue that it is not some form of “Scandinavian” cultural disposition that generates such effects, but rather political mobilization and struggle of a particular type. By exploring such processes ethnographically within their proper social, cultural, and historical contexts, I seek to contribute to explaining why the Norwegian/Scandinavian version of the welfare state experiment has not (yet) collapsed. This endeavor has some analytical worth, as I see it, in the light of the fact that welfare states of the type that defined the utopian post-World War II horizon, and the vision of egalitarianism that formed part of it, today seems to be deemed unattractive, unrealistic, or impossible. The “low center of gravity state” metaphor seems appropriate insofar as it denotes both public institutions as centers of political gravity (Iversen and Soskice 2006), and the relatively decentralized and “messy” distribution of power within the institutional system. When the center of gravity is relatively low, maneuverability increases.
My perspective is anthropological, and does not focus primarily on how institutions ought to work according to some imaginary normative standard of rationality, but on how they are socially organized and work in ways that tend to differ distinctly from such standards. In order to map the social organization of the state, I have pursued an ethnographic strategy that I call “in and out of institutions,” that is, collecting data across contextual and formal boundaries , following actors and the social relations they form across institutional contexts, moving up and down hierarchies, and exploring processes of decision making over time (Thelen et al. 2014). Another important element in this strategy is to explore institutional feedback, that is, the ways in which interpretations of the diverse and largely unintended effects of institutional action are conventionalized, authorized, and contested. Viewing institutions as emergent, contingent phenomena, I agree with Mary Douglas’ statement in her influential book, How Institutions Think (1986):
…[It] is highly improbable that institutions could emerge smoothly from a gathering momentum of converging interests and an unspecified mixture of coercion and convention. We have too much experience of how easily they come apart and collapse. The thing to be explained is how institutions ever start to stabilize. (Douglas 1986: 111)
On the other hand, I am sceptical about other aspects of her sweeping, almost determinist generalizations, some of which seem to have had a significant influence in social science beyond anthropology:
Institutions systematically direct individual memory and channel our perceptions into forms compatible with the relations they authorize.… Any problems we try to think about are automatically transformed into their own organizational problems. The solutions they proffer only come from the limited range of their experience. If the institution is one that depends on participation, it will reply to our frantic question: “More participation!” If it is one that depends on authority, it will only reply “More authority!” Institutions have the pathetic megalomania the computer whose whole vision of the world is its own program. (Ibid., 92)
I hope that in this book I am able to show why this perspective is unsatisfying. It portrays institutions as though they are formed by one single interest.
My perspective is also historical. Inasmuch as the institutional dynamics and properties I wish to uncover and describe emerge from forms of power struggles that over time generate specific sociocultural and political forms of contention, opposition, and identification, the analytical task of mapping continuities and discontinuities in institutional dynamics seems interesting and important. Many of the ethnographic descriptions in this book date back to the 1990s and 2000s, when I carried out several extensive fieldwork projects in Norwegian municipalities . These descriptions, and my analytical framing of them, can be seen as parts of an ongoing process of historical transformation in which the struggle to oppose the centralization of power meets new and more profound challenges. Finnish historian Henrik Stenius, in a comparative study of the role of associational life in political modernization on Norden, formulates a very fruitful question with regard to this transformation.
To what extent did associational life – formally and semi-formally arranged horizontal deliberation among equals – substitute old vertical patriarchalism? And to what extent has a culture of everyday deliberation, fostered in the modern associational life, succeeded to defend democratic structures against the primitive forms of neo-liberalism and managerial authoritarianism ? (Stenius 2010: 78)
Enter Ulefoss
In 1989/1990, I carried out fieldwork in Ulefoss, an industrial community of about 3500 people in southeast Norway (Vike 1991). Ulefoss has long industrial traditions, and economically it still relies heavily on the ironworks factory established in the first half of the seventeenth century. Until the 1970s, the community also included a vibrant lumber industry, illustrating Ulefoss’ ideal location along the waterway, the Telemark Canal, running from the foot of the Hardanger Mountain plain down to the sea by the town of Skien (some 120 km southwest of the capital Oslo), on which timber from the interior of Telemark passed in huge quantities. Due to the influx of a large number of migrant workers and artisans taking part in the construction of the canal during the last decades of the nineteenth century, the community expanded considerably. This gave rise to intense political activity at a time vital for the constitution of modern Norway. Around the turn of the century, the labor movement grew very strong, comprising both a social democratic and a sizeable communist element. The main challenge for the movement was the nature of local industrial ownership, which was modeled on a highly paternalistic orientation and anchored in personal dependency.
During my fieldwork, aging members of the Labour Party in Ulefoss offered narratives of their lives and biographies that represented compressed versions of dramatic changes in modern Norwegian history. In interviews, I was presented with numerous illustrations of how people thought of the early twentieth century as a struggle against the form of power enforced by the owners of local industry: personal dependency. Until workers got organized and won the right to unionize, factory owners had more or less complete control over employees, and indirect control over the rest of the community. They could fire people by fiat. At the ironworks factory, the struggle for unionization was carried out very late—in the 1920s—but with remarkable success. The local struggle in Ulefoss was a part of a national mobilization that had already led the Labour movement into a leading position nationally, and thus people in Ulefoss had quite powerful outside allies, both in terms of labor market power and parliamentary influence.
The Norwegian Labour Party first rose to governmental power in 1928 (based on a revolutionary declaration, which made the experiment a short-lived one) and it established itself as the hegemonic political force from 1935 onward. The unionization struggle in Ulefoss ran parallel to a major change in housing standards and the local geography of power. Workers and their families had become able to buy their own land, build houses, move away from the factory owners’ residential areas, and thus symbolically break away from their status as dependent labor. We may add to this, also, that the Second World War established a strong sense of national unity that in Ulefoss contributed heavily to transcending the fundamental experience of class as an imperative identity. This same experience of unity was further accentuated by the unparalleled increase in living standards taking place after the war.
A characteristic feature of the personal narratives I was presented with in interviews with older Labour Party members in Ulefoss was the strong working class identity, and support for the Labour movement and the Labour Party in particular. Being a member of the party was “natural,” they emphasized; something that was both a precondition for a better society and a matter of belonging. Few of them spoke about ideology; they were much more concerned with how to act in unity. For Albert, a former ironworks worker who was 72 years old at the time I interviewed him, some basic experiences had shaped his sense of belonging in profound ways. The hardship imposed upon people in Ulefoss in the twenties and thirties constituted his primary point of reference. Many of his coworkers were unemployed, and he witnessed a deep anxiety growing in the community. In light of this experience, two significant political changes came to play an important part of his life ever since: the unionization of local industrial workers, and the rise to parliamentary power by the Labour Party.
According to Albert, unionization was important because it gave the workers the possibility to negotiate with the local employer “on the basis of law,” as he put it. In this way, their powerlessness and personal dependence could be radically reduced and give way to a greater degree of autonomy and freedom. The success of the Labour Party in the national arena also created many new possibilities. For Albert, as a young worker, the Party’s message, most importantly the slogan, “Jobs for Everyone,” was extremely persuasive. He felt that it was directed to him and his kind. Being an active member of the Labour Party involved taking part in the collective struggle to provide “better conditions” for all, he emphasized. The leaders of the Labour movement were easy to identify with, because one knew that “they were to be trusted.” Albert lost his mother when he was quite young, and the rest of the family depended heavily upon the support provided by fellow workers and their families. Most people experienced similar hardships, and had very similar notions of how things could be improved. For Albert, it was only natural that almost everyone he knew turned enthusiastically to the Labour Party.
Albert joined the union of industrial workers in 1935. In the interview, he thought back on this period as a particularly tough one. In light of the local employer’s measures aiming to divide and rule and prevent unionization, the union leaders’ radical attitude impressed him greatly, but made him somewhat anxious, too. He recalled several “wild and illegal strikes.” He also recalled that things actually calmed down fairly soon. Not only were the factory owners made subject to law, the union radicals soon turned more moderate: their need to “show off” became less urgent. Albert identified with this moderation.
When commenting on the situation after the Second World War, Albert stressed that he happily observed that “things were levelled out.” At the time of my fieldwork, he followed local politics very closely, and although he didn’t attend meetings very often, he was active in informal networks of Labour Party members. He was deeply sceptical towards the leaders of the Party because, like many others, he felt that they were not sufficiently sensitive...