ABSTRACT
After capitalism and organizations (Fligstein 1990, DiMaggio and Powell 1991), after class and social movements (Somers 1997, Goodwin and Jasper 2003), the state has undergone its own cultural turn in the social sciences (Steinmetz 1999). Positivist brands of sociology had traditionally sought to operationalize the state concept by reducing this rather amorphous entity to a bounded organization or set of organizations with objective contours, explicit functions, and defined responsibilities (to government or bureaucracy). The culturalist approach redefined it as a cultural construct, that is, as an object of discourses and beliefs that is constituted, as a reality, by discourses and beliefs. The goal of this conceptual operation was not to make the state a wholly subjective construct with no basis or consequence in the material world, but, on the contrary, to enable an empirical exploration of the objective manifestations and effects (effects of power in particular) of this construct on politics and social life. The culturalist approach attempts to show how governmental action is embedded in cultural systems that define and legitimate the state’s role in ideological and dependent ways.
