Anthony Giddens
Anthony Giddens, former Director, London School of Economics;
Giddens is best known for the 'theory of structuration'. Giddens offers three descriptions of structures in social systems: signification, legitimation, and domination.
- Signification: ERA produces meaning (i.e. persuades councils, central government etc. to part with cash through repeating and reinforcing various buzz words based on codes, schemes and practices whereby 'The Public' becomes simply a word used for the vested interest of big business and so forth.
- Legitimation: ERA produces (admittedly laughable but a workable lie in the guise of) a moral order via the naturalisation of the societal norms, values and standards of in this case neo-Liberalism and social elites. This is the job of assembling names on the board which look to the gullible like some sort of assembly of 'trustable' wise men — the 'great and the good:' hucksters, Shabbes goy, Shleppers to the rest of us.
- Domination: This of course originates from the control of resources, in this case privileged access to information on money flows and funding priorities and how they work together, consider how the signification of a concept (e.g., the use of the word "social inclusion" in political speech) borrows from and contributes to legitimization and coordinates forms of domination (e.g., the policing on NGO's), from which it in turn gains further force. For instance:
Giddens has been an advisor to Tony Blair, helping to popularise the "Third Way."
Giddens is on the Editorial Advisory Board of Renewal, The Policy Network Policy Advisory Board of the Social Market Foundation, Institute for Public Policy Research, the Centre for the Study of Global Governance.