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2. STATE INSTITUTIONS AND RURAL POLICY IN WALES Jon Murdoch During the early 1980s, sociological theories of the state seemed to have collapsed into disarray. The near establishment of a structuralist Marxist orthodoxy in the 1970s had given way to a variety of competing approaches no one of which was able to establish any kind of dominance. The conception of the state as an 'objective' entity which acted as a guarantor of ruling-class interests (in either the first or last 'instance': see Poulantzas, 1969) was replaced by one which, typically, characterised the state as 'an amorphous complex of agencies with ill-defined boundaries performing a great variety of not very distinctive functions.' This latter view was most cogently expressed within a body of work undertaken under the broad heading of 'corporatist analysis' (see Cawson, 1986 for a summary). This concern with corporatism directed attention to the variety of forms that relationships between state agencies and external institutions might take. What was emphasized was the way that these provided the context for the formulation and implementation of state policies. By focusing on the institutional 'dynamic' around the policy process, the determining influences on the form and content of policies could be identified. Attention was concentrated upon the institutional arena consisting of the various participants in a policy area, the relationships between them, their attempts to further their interests, their methods of calculation, the courses of action open to them, the resources upon which they could draw and so on. The state could no longer be viewed as a unified entity (except in the most abstract terms) but was rather, following Jessop (1982), an 'institutional ensemble' whose constituent parts may or may not all be 'playing the same tune'. Furthermore, there was no longer anything particularly distinctive about state institutions themselves. The boundaries between state and 'external' institutions became extremely blurred. Any analysis of state activity, therefore, had to spell out the