LAS REPRESENTACIONES SOCIALES DE LA CLASE MEDIA EN LAS COYUNTURAS DE CONFLICTO SOCIAL EN LA COSTA RICA NEOLIBERAL. 1984-2000

Abstract

This article analyzes the social movements carried out by the middle class toward the end of the Twentieth Century. The article parts from the premise that the major social conflicts that arose during the 80’s and 90’s, and the symbolic and discursive factors that accompanied this conflictive situation, were mainly due to the social restructuring being experienced by the urban middle class strata.

The work shows the persistent use of national labelling in the contending discourses during the climate of social algidity of the 90’s; the key word here is democracy. However, what the social sectors understand by democracy is strictly the formal periodical election processes, emphasizing the need of order and respect toward the authorities in their discursive recurrence. On the other hand, the spokespersons for the social sectors interpret the concept of democracy in terms of substantiation of political inclusion policies and/or social policies whose baseline scenario is implicitly the middle class. In this sense, this semantic divergence opens a wide gap that is exculpated by distrust and delegitimization of the formal representation spaces, such as refusing to acknowledge the General Assembly, per se, as a legitimate space.  The work resurfaces one of the mayor problems which is governance, this time claimed by the social sectors and not the ruling sector.