Formative Context - Criteria For Formative Context

Criteria For Formative Context

While a formative context of a society exerts a major influence on the course of social actions and behaviors, it is itself hard to challenge, revise, or even identify in the midst of everyday conflicts and routines. Thus there are two criteria for determining if an institution or structure belongs in a formative context, one subjective and one objective. The subjective criteria considers the perspective of the social actors themselves and the arrangements that are assumed in their speech and actions. For example, the attempts of big business and labor to protect themselves through deals with each other, and the political efforts of unorganized labor and petty bourgeoisie to undermine and circumvent these deals by pressuring the government, operate on the same institutional assumption of the distinction between economy and polity, and that victory in one can be offset by the other. The objective criteria is simply that if a substitution of the proposed structure affects the hierarchies or cyclical conflicts—if it alters the social divisions—then it can be included in the formative context. For example, a change in any one of the following conditions would completely change the formative context of a Western democratic state: if the state stopped being democratic or was democratic enough to allow collective militancy and subject private centers of power to public accountability; if business could have its way and override all regulatory controls of govt; or if no workers could unionize or all of them could and did.