There are strong forces working against the formation and health of local social systems. Increasingly we operate across significant distances (for example, via letters, the telephone and the Internet) when dealing with financial matters such as banking, shopping and the payment of bills (Beck 1992; Giddens 1984). The various forces linked to globalization (commodification, marketization and the corporatization) have led to significant shifts in the locus of power. Governments (whether local or national) have become increasingly market-driven. 'It is not just that governments can no longer "manage" their national economies', Sennett, R. (1998) comments, 'to survive in office they must increasingly "manage" national politics in such a ways as to adapt them to the pressures of trans-national market forces'. This has entailed two particular dynamics: a growing centralization in key areas of policymaking in many countries (with local agencies having to meet to centrally-determined targets with regard to the way in which they work and the outcomes they achieve); and a hugely increased presence of commercial enterprises in local services with the obvious consequence of an erosion of democracy and the notion of there being public goods.
However, in a world where market ideologies have become dominant and infused all areas of life, we have increasingly lost a sense of working together to make change.
“Insecurity affects us all, immersed as we all are in a a fluid and unpredictable world of deregulation, flexibility, competitiveness and endemic uncertainty, but each one of us suffers anxiety on our own, as a private problem, an outcome of personal failings and a challenge to our provide savoir-faire and agility. We are called, as Ulrich Beck has acidly observed, to seek biographical solutions to more systematic contradictions; we look for individual salvation from shared troubles. That strategy is unlikely to bring the results we.......
