Formative Context of Western Democracies
The formative context of the North Atlantic democracies can be organized into four clusters of institutional arrangements: work, law, government, and occupational structure.
- The work-organization complex makes a distinction in work between task definers and task executers, with the material rewards concentrated in the task defining jobs.
- The private-rights complex understands the rights of the individual vis-a-vis other individuals and the state. This structure is central to the allocation and control of capital, ensuring all forms of capital distribution and entitlement.
- The government-organization complex is the institutional arrangement to protect the individual from the state, and to prevent those in power from changing the formative context. It establishes a link between safeguards of freedom and the dispersion of powers, e.g. partisan rivalries fail to extend to debates over the fundamental institutions that affect social interactions.
- The occupational-structure complex is a social division of labor characterized by a lack of caste or religious division. It is based on material reward and task defining jobs receiving the highest pay.
Read more about this topic: Formative Context
Famous quotes containing the words formative, context, western and/or democracies:
“The social forces that operate on a family during the daughter’s formative years continue to shape her experience. Thus the families, schools, and jobs that involve poor women are likely to be very hierarchically arranged, demanding conformity, passivity, and obedience—all unsupportive of continued intellectual growth.”
—Mary Field Belenky (20th century)
“The hippie is the scion of surplus value. The dropout can only claim sanctity in a society which offers something to be dropped out of—career, ambition, conspicuous consumption. The effects of hippie sanctimony can only be felt in the context of others who plunder his lifestyle for what they find good or profitable, a process known as rip-off by the hippie, who will not see how savagely he has pillaged intricate and demanding civilizations for his own parodic lifestyle.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed
And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust.”
—Demosthenes (c. 384–322 B.C.)