Life-Modes in a Changing World Order

LIFEMODES IN A CHANGING WORLD ORDER

The neoculturation of life-modes in a state system under transformation

Thomas Højrup Niels Jul Nielsen

“...one of the most wide-ranging and ambitious cultural and social science works published in a long time in any of the Nordic countries... The book is critical, but also constructive. It presents an alternative, both to the dominant strands of these sciences with their many sub-disciplines, but also to classical Marxism represented by historical and dialectical materialism”

Ove Kaj Pedersen, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Political Economy

Thomas Højrup & Niels Jul Nielsen

Life-Modes

in a Changing World Order

The neoculturation of life-modes in a state system under transformation

Vol. 1

NORD ACADEMIC

Life-Modes in a Changing World Order. The neoculturation of life-modes in a state system under transformation, Volume 1/3.

By Thomas Højrup & Niels Jul Nielsen

1st edition 1st print run, 2024

© The authors and Nord Academic, 2024

Authored by Thomas Højrup and Niels Jul Nielsen: Preface, Introduction, Chapter 1, Conclusion

Authored by Thomas Højrup: Chapters 2-4, 6

Authored by Niels Jul Nielsen: Chapters 5, 7-12, 14

Authored by Niels Jul Nielsen & Sigrid Leilund: Chapter 13

The development of concepts presented in Part I and II has been going on for forty years and earlier approximations to elements of the exposition we are able to deliver in this work, have been published in several languages during the elaboration.

Copy editing: Steven Sampson

Illustrations: Lise Glinvad (fig. 6-34, 42), Jan Ulrich Lauridsen ( fig. 37-41), Tina Nielsen (fig. 1-3, 5, 6)

Graphic design and layout: Tina Nielsen, Toptryk Grafisk ApS

Cover design: Spine Studio

ISBN 978-87-12-07841-8

Published by Nord Academic | www.nordacademic.dk

Please cite as: Højrup, T. & Jul Nielsen, N. 2024. Life-Modes in a Changing World Order. The neoculturation of life-modes in a state system under transformation. Nord Academic, Copenhagen

The printed version is funded by Christian Emborg. The Open Access publication is funded by The Velux Foundations.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers, except for reviews and short excerpts in scholarly publications.

AUTHORS

Thomas Højrup (1953-) is DPhil in Ethnology at the University of Copenhagen. He has been head of department of Archeology and Ethnology, teacher at the Danish Academy of Defence, researcher at EUCIS, and member of several commissions and thinktanks of different Danish governments. As full professor in Ethnology his main research themes are theory of science and culture theory, state and life-mode theory, material culture, social culture, political culture, and spiritual culture. He is research leader at the Danish Centre for Sustainable Lifemodes.

Niels Jul Nielsen (1963-) is PhD and DPhil in European Ethnology at the University of Copenhagen. From 1999 to 2009 he was curator at the Museum of Copenhagen. He has been a member of several museum boards and research councils. His main research themes are the establishment of industrial society, 20th century labour market development, and the major national and global changes that have characterised recent decades. The main focuses concern the connection between different forms of everyday work and family life, and their broader societal, governmental, and international contexts.

Photo: Carsten Munk Hansen

Photo: Donald Michael Chambers

First

Second specification step: Reciprocal actions in the duel lead to explosive

The extension of the second specification step is problematised: Is explosivity a general feature?

New exploration of the intension of the first

a

comple-mentary

How general are the first four steps in the specification process of the theory of war?

The duel or battle concept presupposes two prior steps of specification: a. the praxis concept; b. the self-consciousness concept .....................................

The third specification step of war is general: The resistance of the praxis concept is the source of the defence

Figures

Fig. 1 Specifying and correction method

12

Fig. 2 The scientific process develops theoretical specifications and ruptures 52

Fig. 3 Relations and terminals of the capitalist mode of production 81

Fig. 4 The Danish version of the life-mode organised welfare state 186

Fig. 5 The Danish version of the universalist welfare state. ................................................ 191

Fig. 6 The circular movement of causal figures. ................................................................. 220

Fig. 7 The connection of opposite figures of circular causality ........................................... 221

Fig. 8 The three internal dimensions of Hegel’s Sittlichkeit ............................................... 225

Fig. 9 The state’s absence in modern cultural theories ....................................................... 228

Fig. 10 The absent sublation of the struggle for recognition ................................................ 232

Fig. 11 From the life concept to concepts of spirit and self-consciousness 241

Fig. 12 How causality and finality are sublated in the praxis concept 268

Fig. 13 The sequence of specifications from praxis to struggle for recognition 269

Fig. 14 D > O sublates the struggle for recognition into mutual recognition 276

Fig. 15 State formation and interpellation of dependent subjects 285

Fig. 16 Nine dimensions of the fission-theoretical mode of analysis and synthesis 291

Fig. 17 Steps of specification from the life concept to the life-mode concept 296

Fig. 18 The defence capability’s intensional prerequisites in the life of the state ................. 298

Fig. 19 Interpellation is a cultural formation process ........................................................... 301

Fig. 20 The opposite theories of state forms and modes of production are sublated by D > O ............................................................................................... 302

Fig. 21 The two first steps in the homogeneous state system’s sequence of specifications 317

Fig. 22 Three steps in the homogeneous state system’s sequence of specifications 319

Fig. 23 Second step in the martial state systems' sequence of specifications. 324

Fig. 24 Second step in the mercurial state systems’ sequence of specifications 340

Fig. 25 Fusion theory versus fission theory 363

Fig. 26 Fission-theory’s sublation and alternation between external and internal dimensions 373

Fig. 27 The praxis concept’s self-determination constitutes an intensional point of departure ............................................................................................................... 581

Fig. 28 Overview of intensional features and theories derived from the praxis concept ............ 582

Fig. 29 From the concept of praxis to the concepts of labour and production .................... 583

Fig. 30 From production process to social division of labour and economic system ............ 584

Fig. 31 From the division between subject and object to relations of production 585

Fig. 32 From producer’s life to the concepts of commodity market and labour market 586

Fig. 33 From market concepts to the intensional relations of CMP 586

Fig. 34 The specification of five form variants of SCMP and its life-modes 801

Fig. 35 Civil servant life-mode variants 1 1708

Fig. 36 Civil servant life-mode variants 2 1709

Fig. 37 Intensional relation of SCMP production unit Note 630

Fig. 38 Demand curve of fish market ........................................................................... Note 640

Fig. 39 Conditions for coexistence of a SCMP and a CMP fleet .................................. Note 640

Fig. 40 Diminishing conditions for coexistence of SCMP and CMP ............................ Note 640

Fig. 41 SCMP squeezes CMP out of the fishery............................................................ Note 640

Fig. 42 The sequence, testing and correcting of theories ............................................ Note 646

Preface

This work is the outcome of an ongoing research seminar, begun fifty years ago, on Structural Dialectics at the Department of Sociology, succeeded by the Department of Ethnology, University of Copenhagen. The main focus of the Structural Dialectics seminar, organised by the professor of scientific theory, high-energy physicist and cultural sociologist Anders Boserup (who like several atomic scientists from the Niels Bohr Institute engaged in developing peace and conflict research) and the philosopher of science Helmuth Hansen in 1973, was to bring their experience from cooperation in the ‘Copenhagen-school’ research communities that emerged around the Danish theoretical physicist Niels Bohr and the linguist Louis Hjelmslev into an interdisciplinary scientific forum that sought to scrutinise and develop theoretical concepts. Over the years the historical sociologist Ole Bernild and the ethnologist Johannes Møllgaard have played an important role as scientific motivators and organisers. Many research projects have come out of the Structural Dialectics group. The present work, supported by a 2013 grant from the Velux Foundation, had the working title The Neoculturation of Life-modes during the Current Transformation of State System and World Economy. 1 As such, we have worked for a decade to produce the three parts of this work.

The Neoculturation project was started by two Danish ethnologists, Niels Jul Nielsen and Thomas Højrup, together with the two junior researchers Jeppe Høst and Sigrid Leilund. In connection with our teaching at the Ethnology Department at the University of Copenhagen, several students have also taken part in the field-research of the project.

A wealth of informants, collaborators and international colleagues have contributed to this work with their time, information, inspiration, critique, and helpfulness. We owe warm thanks to all of you for your contributions to this long project. Lone Rahbek Christensen and Pipsen Monrad Hansen have contributed substantially to the elaboration of Housewife, Home-front,

and Career-professional Life-mode concepts. Henriette Buus, Dorthe Vejen Hansen, Klaus Schriewer, and Lisbeth Haastrup contributed to the development of ‘welfare’ and civil servant life-mode concepts. During field research in Salling, Pastor Toni Irgens Møller and her husband Rector Sven Irgens at Jebjerg Vicarage made their facilities at our disposal for the research group as a field station in Denmark. For our field research in China, Professor Chunrong Liu has been our travel guide, scientific colleague and organiser of seminars on life-mode and state form research at Chinese universities. Tom Winther has opened doors for us to owners, managers and wage-earners of local enterprises in China. The participants of the fifty-year-old seminar on structural dialectics made it possible to succeed in accomplishing this ethnological contribution so that the neoculturation concept could truely reveal the interdependency between temporary and durable cultural processes of a changing world order.

We owe great thanks to Steven Sampson for his careful work with the English text.

It is thanks to the Velux Foundation that we became able to accomplish this project and publish the results as an open access source of further thinking and scientific development. We want to thank the foundation for its confidence to the research group through ten years of critical endeavours to reach the end. We are particularly grateful to Christian Emborg who generously gave his support to the publication of the three printed volumes of this work.

Introduction

This work is about cultural modes of life as distinct from natural modes of life.

It is about cultural modes of life in the plural, as these modes differ from each other in distinct ways.

Further, this work explores how opposing cultural life-modes coexist and understand each other. Although separate, they are also interdependent, providing the conditions of existence for each other.

In this way, the work deals with the larger social formation that contains the composite totality of these interdependencies between cultural modes of life.

At a higher level, entire social formations, each composed of several lifemodes, also have to be understood as interdependent. Hence, this work explore how the interdependency of composite social formations (also known as states), presupposes their individual ability to defend their domain of sovereignty and integrity as integral state forms.

We argue that the system of states is itself a composite totality; state forms coexist as self-defending units, which despite (and as a prerequisite for) their independence, are also interdependent on each other in terms of mutual recognition.

In sum, this work deals with the coexistence of different cultural life-modes in families, companies, communities, and societies, at the scale of social formation, and the interrelated and changeable state forms of a dynamic global whole, at a world scale.

In dealing with cultural forms and configurations of states, we pursue in this work distinct unsolved questions: What constitutes a cultural life-mode? How can a distinction between parts and wholes be made at the two levels mentioned above? How can interdependency and independence be comprehended scien-

tifically in one and the same theory? How do the features of temporariness and durableness imply each other? What is the difference between a variation and a genuine transformation? How do people maintain, re-establish, improve, or change their cultural modes of life? This last question concerns what we term the ‘neoculturation processes’.

These principal questions concern the most general features of cultural life. Hence, they are foundational for the way we understand our knowledge of culture, society, and state, and of their formation and development. In the first six chapters, we explore these questions as a theoretical and cultural historical whole. During Part I, Problematique and Part II Problematisation and development of theory, we introduce, elaborate, and apply the dialectical and specifying mode of analysis and synthesis, which is the common thread of this work. In Part III, Analyses of processes of neoculturation, we provide concrete examples of how this method can be applied to grasp how empirically realised life-modes in two distinct state forms have changed during the decades since the end of the cold war until the 2020s. The point of departure for our analysis is the Scandinavian welfare state of Denmark, where we have conducted ethnographic fieldwork within the Danish region Salling, which has been profoundly transformed over the past forty years. To grasp the global dimension of this transformation, we focus on the connection with the Chinese development, which exemplifies an ongoing state formation that, in different and complementary ways, has gained vital importance for other countries all over the world, both as a collaborating trading partner, motivator and friend, but also as an economic and geopolitical competitor, a systemic ‘Other’. Despite the differences between Denmark and China in terms of political regime, economic development, and cultural forms, we find interdependencies and striking similarities in the relationship between their respective life-modes and social formations. In both societies, we find certain life-modes ascendant, and others threatened or in decline. And we observe the state apparatus having to conceptualise and deal with various problematic realisations of life-mode features materialised in social groups such as redundant workers, insecure migrants, industries unable to adapt, corporations aiming to dominate, ambitious middle classes and impatient two-career families, but also having to focus on how to improve innovation as well as requested practical skills in the population.

We shall return later to these principal questions and empirical subjects.

First, we will outline very shortly the content of each chapter of these three parts. The six chapters of the first two parts present the theoretical object, the general outlines of our mode of analysis and synthesis, and the way it sheds new light on how changes in specific ‘modes of life’ and ‘modes of defence’ contribute to the transformation of society and the state. This process of change, implied by what we call ‘neoculturation’, is elaborated and applied with the goal of unifying the micro and macro levels of analysis and synthesis. The subsequent eight chapters of the third part present the application of the life-mode theory using case studies, the goal here being to show how specific features of life-modes and their neoculturation take part in the changing world order. Let us describe the chapters in more detail.

Part I

Chapter 1, Reconfiguring cultural history and theory of science presents the basic set of questions of this work. Subsequently, it sketches out the contemporary context of alternative ways of thinking that point in additional or opposite directions. In this work many important discussions, thorough explanations, and supplementary comments are elaborated in the endnotes. Our thesis is that it is possible to identify fundamental blind spots that prevent resolution of some foundational disputes in social and cultural theory. Our aim here is to offer a new perspective and epistemology, utilising the distinction and connection between intensional and extensional features of scientific concepts (that we explain later in this chapter), originally sketched out in a previous study, State, Culture and Life-Modes (2003).2 As we see it, the scientific task is not just to cast out crisis-ridden theory but to utilise the still unresolved crises and disputes to forge an epistemological rupture with the most sustainable theories of our time. We argue for the need to transcend conventional epistemological and disciplinary standpoints in order to develop a mode of thinking that can help us find constructive ways to manage the challenges of global rivalry, warfare, climate change, biodiversity, and cultural antagonisms that humanity faces in the 21th century.

Chapter 2, The problematique of life-modes and neoculturation, describes the ethnology and ethnography of the ‘life-modes’ approach and the accompanying processes of ‘neoculturation’ i.e., the ways in which life-modes develop and react to changing conditions of existence. Each particular life-mode can only be explored and explained as a distinct part of a total socio-cultural whole

comprising all those modes of life that make up the necessary conditions of possibility of each other. Hence, one of our main themes is that of how people from different life-modes prerequire, look upon and (mis)understand each other. We thus introduce the concept of ‘life-mode-centrism’ and the scientific features of cultural ‘praxis’ and ‘ideology’, as these make it possible to trace and then understand the deep roots of neoculturation processes which might appear to be separate, but are in fact interdependent. Our description (of the scientific mode of production) applies the interaction between the ‘intensional logic’ of theoretical features and an ‘extensional logic’ of their empirical realisation. We aim to demonstrate how the two forms of logic can elucidate each other when we describe their essential features and modes of reasoning. Since all cultural transitions contain elements of change and continuity, this chapter poses the question: Where do we find the main sources of ‘temporariness’ and ‘durableness’, that characterise the cultural features of an epoch of transition and an epoch of continuity? Do we examine the level of modes of production or do we focus on the level of interaction between state forms in the state system? Where are the basic features of the temporariness-durableness dialectic rooted? This chapter outlines the cultural historical background for elucidating this question, prior to the exploration of life-modes’ neoculturation in state forms and modes of production in the subsequent chapters.

Part II

Chapter 3, Rethinking the concepts of state forms and life-modes, describes the discovery of hitherto hidden intensional features required by the concepts of social, cultural and war theories that are essential for our understanding of what constitute the necessary socio-cultural whole implied by a plurality of coexisting life-modes. These findings have opened our eyes for the possibility and necessity to explicate and elaborate a self-determined point of departure for the reformulation of these theories’ basic concepts. Hence, this chapter describes how it is possible and well known, but not scientifically satisfying to understand society as the outcome of the fusion of certain key elements. Consequently, we endeavour to elaborate a scientific rupture with fusion thinking that introduces an alternative perspective, showing how certain fission processes divide the world into pluralities of socio-cultural wholes. The fission theory paves the way for a new understanding of the state concept. At the basis of our analysis and synthesis is the importance of the ‘struggle for recognition’, and its role in accounting for a culture historical theory of social evolution. The chapter

describes the nine dimensions of this theory and specifies the core features of distinct state form concepts with a point of departure in their different defence modes. Invoking the struggle for recognition as our base concept opens the possibility for a more coherent way to understand the development of cultural life-modes. As examples of these developmental processes, we focus on Denmark and China, showing how this scientific perspective on socio-cultural wholes and its mode of understanding transcends well known, but more narrow and less exhaustive theories. The result is that essential elements of the dialectic between temporariness and durableness, between change and continuity, are to be found in the reciprocal interaction between cultural state forms and in their transformation.

Chapter 4, Rethinking the capitalist mode of production and its life-modes, continues the explication of life-modes by identifying the ‘scientific temporariness’ of the Marxist concept of capitalism. It presents a method for developing three new steps of specification of the capitalist mode of production with the aim of understanding how the extreme temporariness of all key elements of a capitalist company – paradoxically – is the condition of possibility for the durableness of the capitalist mode of production as a whole and for the neoculturation, development and coexistence of its necessary cultural life-modes. Several capitalist form-variants are identified. The analysis and synthesis show how intrinsic features of temporariness are decisive for the continuity of these life-modes in a socio-cultural whole.

Chapter 5, Rethinking wage-earner life-modes – essential features and prerequisites traces the roots of organised wage-earner modes of life in state forms, which as socio-cultural wholes comprise the capitalist mode of production and require a loyal wage-earner population. To avoid being dispersed by the centrifugal forces of the state system and capitalism, workers – who live from the sale of ‘pre-defined’ work (as opposed to unique, undefined work) – share a fundamental need to monopolise this commodity. Thus, a wage-earner life-mode relies on state recognition of the right to monopolise work in some form or other, including informal means. The most important empirical realisations of these forms of neoculturation are the trade union organisations that began to emerge in the late 19th century. Since the 1990s, however, political support for these unions has declined in some states, thus raising questions about the future prospects of wage-earner life-modes’ potential neoculturation of their conditions of existence.

Chapter 6, Rethinking the simple commodity mode of production and the self-employed life-modes' neoculturation, specifies from first principles this mode of production in contradistinction to capitalism. Further, the chapter rethinks and develops the life-mode concepts implied by this mode of production. We use the neoculturation perspective to test the potential self-determination of these mode of production and life-mode concepts, because this feature of theoretical self-determination is decisive for the appropriateness of the concepts in analyses of self-employed people’s practice. In this chapter, we demonstrate how the neoculturation perspective contributes to the further elaboration of the simple commodity mode of production concept, its possible form-variants and our understanding of the cooperative movement. The chapter tests and demonstrates the appropriateness of this concept structure in the research effort to understand how fishing people develop their distinct life-modes in an industry with old, but ever-changing and still active contradictions between the marine ecosystem, the modes of operation and the state system, again revealing the harsh dialectic between temporariness and durableness in socio-cultural and natural wholes. We also observe the antagonisms between the neoculturation of opposed cultural modes of life interacting with the biodiversity crises of natural modes of life.

Whereas the first six chapters take their points of departure in the ongoing refinement and development of the theoretical concepts’ intensional features as they determine each other, the next eight chapters provide empirical extensions of these features in the Danish and the Chinese socio-cultural whole. We analyse these totalities using ethnographic methods, continually informed by the theoretical concepts’ internal relations between their necessary features. The case studies, each of which documents the extension of the relevant features, describe empirical realisations of their intensional content, enabling us to scrutinise if, how, and when which life-modes imply each other in the empirical actuality. This is the way in which we 1) produce ‘explanations’ of this actuality and 2) construct an experimental basis for critique and further ‘correction’ of the theoretical concepts.

Part III

Chapter 7, Tempcon – from an owner-driven to a shareholder-based firm, explores a Danish manufacturing enterprise over a period of six decades, from the 1960s to the 2010s. Tempcon’s trajectory is viewed as a set of formative processes tak-

ing place through the prism of the life-modes of the entrepreneur-owner, the investors, the managers and the workers, all of whom (following the intensional specifications of Chapter 4) constitute necessary components of the company as it navigates through the shifting conditions of the world market and state policies. The main focus of this chapter is on the way in which the various life-modes ‘neoculturate’ in their quest to maintain or improve their viability. We show how the initiatives taken by each life-mode to sustain themselves will alter the conditions of existence for the other involved life-modes. For instance, when the Danish workers take on a more flexible and compliant attitude in order to retain their jobs, this affects the top managers who can argue against those investors who want to move Danish production abroad, where wages are lower. Neoculturation among one group thus impacts the entire landscape of competitors at home and abroad, with ripple effects for globalisation and rivalry in the state system.

Chapter 8, TechFac – global high-end supplier with one owner, provides a contrasting case to Tempcon. A global supplier of high-end technological equipment, TechFac’s owner runs the company with an entirely different rationality than that of Tempcon. The TechFac owner-entrepreneur manages to keep control of production and – in contrast to Tempcon – avoiding external investors trying to acquire the company or affect how the business is run. Due to the company’s reliance on constant product-development within an extremely advanced technological field, TechFac provides a vivid example of the revised career-professional life-mode concept introduced in Chapter 4. The intensional essence of this life-mode is to provide uniqueness, helping the company maintain its necessary competitive edge. This uniqueness must be constantly renewed, be it within research, engineering, sales, management, marketing, HR, or sustainability commitments. TechFac’s special profile allows us to use the company as a window for exploring the creation (and recreation) of uniqueness within product-development. In order to analyse processes of ‘uniqueness-production’ in their complexity, this chapter outlines three mutually conditioning dimensions of product-development which are both necessary yet also contradictory. We term them disruptive, managerial, and effectuating uniqueness-production.

Chapter 9, Farmers in processes of neoculturation, shifts the perspective to agricultural businesses that, in contrast to a capitalist logic, operate within the intensional logic of the simple commodity mode of production (although in one case we question if a capitalist logic is dominating). Both operate within sectors of

agricultural production, and both are operated by a farmer-couple. However, the two farms explored in this chapter, are run in entirely different ways. The farmer couples chose two different paths in order to survive on a highly competitive global market. One couple, producing milk, adheres to a logic of constantly increasing production output as a way to ensure sufficient volume when prices generally decrease due to the harsh international competition. The other couple cultivate their main product – boar-genes – in order to supply the market with a product of such excellent quality that they can keep prices high. This is possible due to a broad setup, involving other farmers and the national farm organisation, that builds on the Danish co-operative tradition that dates to the nineteenth century. Because of this arrangement, family and cooperative forces are joined in order to match the competition from larger international players, yet without jeopardising the (highly esteemed) ‘freedom’ of the individual farmer-family.

In Chapter 10, China in Denmark – Denmark in China, we enlarge the holistic perspective by exploring how the Chinese divisions of the two companies discussed in the previous chapters, Tempcon and TechFac, do business within the Chinese state formation. We explore life-modes and their neoculturation in an entirely different cultural and governmental context, where the neoculturation of the life-modes is pivotal for understanding the Chinese state’s struggle for recognition as a growing great power bearing ‘the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’.3 This context makes it possible to elucidate how different life-modes, in their pursuit of viability, react to policy measures taken in two distinct state forms as composite, dynamic, and interrelated as the Chinese and the Danish. When Chinese civil servants, workers, specialists, managers, and capitalists cultivate particular characteristics in order to sustain their practice and improve their ability to achieve what they see as the ‘good life’, it impacts their Danish counterparts and their ability to do the same. And vice versa. This chapter also describes a third case of a Danish manufacturer that collaborates with a Chinese entrepreneur. The two entrepreneurs' different ways of using each other to pursue their own agenda lies at the core of the analysis and synthesis of interdependent neoculturation processes in the present state system.

Our point of departure in particular companies operating within the context of the changing interdependencies of the state system provides one understanding of the life-modes and the way they coexist. Another understanding

is made possible by focusing on the distinct life-modes themselves. This more intensive focus can provide an insight into each particular state formation as a whole, with its bonds within the family, of civil society’s market-based contractual and terminable relations, and of society’s relations with the state. Over the next four chapters, we explore the neoculturations and changing modes of life of Danish wage-earners, migrant workers, career-professionals, entrepreneurs, and civil servants.

In Chapter 11, Workers' lives – family, work, and the social formation, we scrutinise the intensional and extensional features of a wage-earner life-mode by focusing on a number of ‘worker families’ (where at least one of the couple is understandable within a wage-earner life-mode logic). All these worker families are historically rooted in smallholder or worker families of the region, and we explore how they adapt and adapt to new conditions over several decades. The cooperation and the tensions between the spouses, issues of raising children and dividing household tasks, are one focus. Another is the families’ roles as community members and their embeddedness in the local milieu, where they must bolster community resilience by, for example, backing initiatives to save the local school. The altered conditions for meeting the increasing demands from the labour market – compared to what their parents experienced – is a third focus. By bringing in the political context around labour organisations, nationally as well as internationally, we highlight the potential for maintaining a wage-earner life-mode. In particular, we describe how competition from non-Danish workers is among the most pressing concerns of many of these 21st century workers, who frequently support anti-migrant political parties.

In Chapter 12, ‘Eastern workers’, we shift the perspective to the immigrating workers themselves. Post-cold war opportunities to freely move around Europe in search of work have posed challenges to and raised resistance from Danish workers because this ‘free movement of labour-power’ represent new opportunities for other workers, in particular from Eastern European countries. Here we focus on the life-mode features of four families – three from Ukraine and one from Poland. We describe their experiences on the Danish labour marked, their familial situation as well as their general life trajectory including their ideas of a future life. Although they are all employed in low-wage jobs within Danish agriculture, our fieldwork reveals that these families pursue highly different priorities and ideas of their future path.

Key conditions of the wage-earner life-mode have been declining since the breakup of the bipolar world order in the 1990s. Conditioned by the centrifugal processes of the economic globalisation inherent in the formation of a more multipolar state system, an increasing political focus has emerged in many states on enhancing competitiveness, creativity, innovation, disruption and idea-making. What is increasingly being sought after is the ability to provide a special quality, what we term uniqueness, that is the core feature of the career-professional life-mode.

This pursuit of uniqueness is described in Chapter 13, Career-professional lives in a key role. In this chapter we explore the composite life-mode features of four different families, where at least one spouse (if it is a couple) can be understood through the intensional features of this life-mode concept As we have done in the chapter on workers, our focus here is on the relations and frictions between spouses regarding issues of where to live, how to divide household tasks, priorities of childrearing and how to manage ever increasing job demands. Despite a political priority on improving the conditions for precisely career-professional families like the ones portrayed in the chapter, we find that the prevailing expectation that both parents share equally in childcare tasks poses a larger challenge to this group than to the worker families because two demanding careers need to be developed and maintained alongside the upbringing of children. Another focus of our analysis is on the different forms of ‘uniqueness-production’ that career-professionals pursue. Thus, in the analyses of the families, we employ the concepts developed in Chapters 4 and 8 in order to reveal the variations in forms of uniqueness-production which differ from the kind of unique product development that one might find in a tech firm.

As mentioned previously, throughout this work the dialectic between continuity and change, between durableness and temporariness, underlies our understanding of the interrelated and changeable social formation and state formation processes of a dynamic global whole. The empirical realisation of this perspective is relevant in each and every local context and will be demonstrated in the final chapter of Part III, where we look at the local social formation processes as a whole of ‘executing’ life-modes.

Chapter 14, Executors of durableness and temporariness – owners, managers, and public leaders, addresses the dialectic between continuity and change from the point of view of people who, as part of realising their mode of life, have the responsibility for initiating, supporting, or eliminating activities that may form condi-

tions of existence for other modes of life and in the last instance for the social formation as a whole. In the Danish state’s private sector, these executors are those (realising the above-described life-modes) who form or close down companies and those who decide whether local production lines should be maintained, transformed, outsourced or closed down entirely. In the public realm, these executors decide whether to close a community centre or develop political agendas to attract new industry. ‘Executors’ connected to the private market have been presented in the company chapters and are only briefly discussed in this chapter. Instead, the larger part of it is dedicated to a further elaboration of the life-mode of those civil servants and officials who ‘run the state’. We discuss the Foucauldian governmentality approach and the scholarly work on ‘governance regimes’ such as New Public Management and New Public Governance. With the life-modes that ‘run the state’, we refer to those distinct life-mode features implied by the practice of the sovereign state-subject, which in the last instance has to constitute a single ruling ‘will’ at the basis of the many lifemode specific ‘wills’ of society, all of which pursue their own agendas. We speak here of the civil servant life-mode. The praxis and project of this life-mode is to assist the politicians in bridging different, perhaps contrasting or antagonising, ‘wills’ of society and to ensure that these wills are so sufficiently cohesive that they do not jeopardise the state-subject’s survivability. This project involves both high level strategic thinking and street-level engagement with the citizens (clients, pupils, students, patients, welfare recipients, unemployed, ‘users’, soldiers, etc.). In order to grasp this complexity, the concept of the civil servant life-mode is further specified into three concepts that in the self-defending units of the state system seem to be necessary and interdependent dimensions of a mercurial welfare state form’s civil servant praxis. We therefore set out the features of 1) the policy-developing dimension (which pursues the strategic development of means required for the state-subject to maintain its recognition), 2) the operationalising dimension (providing the bureaucratic conditions of crafting the developed policies), and 3) the policy-implementing dimension (realising the policy towards the population or towards other countries). These three intensional dimensions may be developed into distinct form-variants of the civil servant life-mode. In this chapter, the features of these three variants are applied in analyses of people’s practice – whether formally employed in the public sector or not. We describe how these civil servant life-mode variants are involved in setting or implementing political agendas, be they settlement policies, social work, education, planning, or economic policy.

Given the widespread tendency of deteriorating political legitimacy that marks our time, the chapter draws attention to a highly important research field that concerns how states both can comprise a complex society with heterogenous, and often contradictory, interests of various cultural groups and at the same time constitute a durable ‘will in the world’ that is sufficiently coherent to achieve the recognition from other states; and thus maintain the conditions of societal life.

In the concluding chapter, the three parts of the present work is summarised and we point out the questions they raise for future research.

Specifying and correcting method to develop the structural features of basic form concepts (str)

Figure 1. This work makes use of a concept specifying mode of developing and correcting pure form concepts (ie., concept structures, abbreviated: Str). This theoretical endeavour is inspired by the application of the ethnological form concepts (Str) in analyses of the ethnographic material and it is used to renew our understanding and explanation of the ways forms are interwoven and impact each other in the composed empirical world. The point is, that every step of specification may put the concept structure (Str), which is forming the present point of departure, at risk and pose the question if it has to be reconstructed.

Str Str Str Str

Str Str

Str Str Str Str