W.A. Trommel

The state and the reconstruction of civil society

The current relationship between the state and civil society in Europe is a curious and historically unique one. This is no longer a situation in which participation and association prepare citizens for the offices of the state; rather, it is the state urging a sometimes-reluctant citizenry to engage actively in civil society. This phenomenon stems from a combination of changes in prevailing governance paradigms and of the more general process of social liquefaction. In the article, we analyse these two intertwining trends and discuss the new type of relationship between the state and civil society that may be emerging. Points for practitioners The article puts the current vogue for renewed state–civil society relationships in a larger context. It shows that, however commendable many initiatives may be, there is the risk that the desire on the part of governments for their citizens to participate and self-organize may lead the state to take over such initiatives, leading to a manufactured civil society that has little to do with spontaneous citizen initiatives. Another possible consequence is that truly spontaneous citizen initiatives will shun collaboration with the state and focus only inwards, to the detriment of broader public values. Therefore, in this area, the state must strike a delicate balance between encouragement and restraint.

From local to grobal, and back

This is a case study of Vlisco, a Dutch textile printing company since 1846 that produces batik cloth for the West African consumer market. We focus on the changing status of batik cloth in West Africa and related shifts in the relations of Vlisco with its consumers and local trade partners over a period of almost two centuries. We conclude that in the long run, globalisation does not necessarily result in the transformation of authentic and locally conceived products into empty mass products, and even if it does, in time the process can change direction.

Manufacturing Civil Society: An Introduction

Civil society is dead; hurrah for civil society! This simple statement describes the sociopolitical debate in many modern welfare states. Traditional forms of (ideologically or religiously driven) social organisation have gradually declined. Various drivers behind this development have been identified, notably individualisation and changing life patterns, a point to which we will come back later in this chapter. But states have also arguably played a role in this. Welfare-state growth propelled an era of ‘big government’ during the 1970s and 1980s. Although the ‘crowding out’ thesis of a direct trade-off between the size of government and the size of civil society has been largely disproven (see e.g. Salamon, 1995), the collaboration between civil society and the state in the provision of social services has led many organisations to lose contact with their traditional member groups and, by implication, their original legitimacy.

Ritzer malgré lui: Reply to ‘Still enamoured of the glocal: A comment on “From local to grobal, and back”’

Professor Ritzer’s (Ritzer & Richer, 2012) critical comment on our article ‘From local to grobal, and back’ (Hoogenboom, Bannink, & Trommel, 2010) somewhat surprises us. In our article we employ his theory to analyse and describe the changing status of Vlisco products over almost two centuries, and by doing so we believe we demonstrate the great value of Ritzer’s theoretical contribution to the academic globalisation debate. Admittedly, in the article we also formulate some critical comments on his work, but these comments predominantly (with one exception concerning the usefulness of the concept ‘local’, see below) concern the empirical evidence Ritzer presents in his book The globalization of nothing (2007) to back up his new theory. Despite our ultimately positive evaluation of Ritzer’s theory in our article, in his comment he formulates roughly five critical points. Firstly, he claims that we erroneously equate his theory in The globalization of nothing with the earlier theoretical insights he presented in The McDonaldization of society (first published in 1993). Secondly, and in addition to the first point of criticism, he argues that we wrongly claim that globalisation is the central theme of The McDonaldization of society. Thirdly, he denies that, as we claim in our article, in The globalization of nothing he suggests that in the end the ‘grobalisation of nothing’ is the dominant trait of the globalisation process. Fourthly, Ritzer criticises what he sees as our support for the idea developed by, amongst others, Robertson (1992, 1995, 2001) and Appadurai (1996) that ‘glocalisation’ is the dominant trait of the process of globalisation. Finally, Ritzer argues that we are wrong in saying that a service or product in our time can still be conceived of as ‘local’. Before we examine these five points, we would first like to say something about the tone professor Ritzer adopts in his comment on our article. Though he praises our article for standing ‘as something of a model of how to bridge the gap between abstract theory and empirical research’ (p. 798), the criticism he expresses on some of our claims in the article is very strongly worded. He claims, for example, that we employ ‘a strategy to tarnish a theory [Ritzer’s] that they [we] intend to criticise (even though they use it in their research) by making it seem dated, old-fashioned and simplistic’ (p. 799), and that we ‘chose to do violence to Ritzer’s original model’ (p. 802). Subsequently, he