ABSTRACT
The theme of globalization has in the last three decades become the key topic of the social sciences. This outcome is even more true of the five years since the first edition of this Handbook was published. The continuing rise of China as a world power, the further globalization of terror and crises of economic globalization all play out across borders influencing every aspect of human life in every corner of the planet.Nevertheless globalization is probably more feared than understood. Unsurprisingly there are now a large number of major handbooks, companions and textbooks on the subject such as Frank Lechner and John Boli’s The Globalization Reader (2004), Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s Global Future (2000), George Ritzer’s The Blackwell Companion to Globalization (2007), Saskia Sassen’s Sociology of Globalization (2007), Bryan Turner and Habibul Khondker’s Globalization East andWest (2010), Robert J. Holtons’s Globalization and the Nation-State (2011), Barry Axford’s Theories of Globalization (2013) and Martin Albrow’s Global Age Essays on Social and Cultural Change (2014). In addition, there has been much sociological interest in both the social instability caused by globalization in, for example, Ulrich Beck’s World Risk Society (1999) and the radical uncertainties associated with financial crisis in Robert J. Holton’s Global Finance (2012). This Handbook of Globalization Studies, however, has a somewhat different focus, being not
only an analysis of globalization as such, but also an overview and critical assessment of globalization as a field of study within the social sciences. The aim therefore is to provide an assessment of the analysis of globalization processes in political science, demography, cultural studies, film studies, sociology and so forth. As such this Handbook examines fields of considerable multi-disciplinary interest, such as global population movements and global migration, information technology and social inequality, as well as new areas of enquiry such as the complexity of international taxation, the rise of global Islamophobia and the various cultures of sexual life in Asia. It also attempts to take a balanced view of both the negative dimensions – global crime and environmental pollution – and the positive side – the spread of human rights and international law – of contemporary globalization. While globalization studies have become in the twenty-first century a major field of inquiry,
recognition of globalization started much earlier. For example, one legacy of Marxist sociology
was recognition of the importance of international trade, economic imperialism, transnational corporations and capitalism as a world system of exploitation and production. Awareness of such global economic institutions produced a number of schools and approaches whose research examined the structure of economic exploitation between the core and the periphery of capitalism. This focus eventually gave rise to the notion of ‘underdevelopment’ as a key feature of capitalist economic growth; that is Marxist economic sociology rejected the simple distinction between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in modernization theory and argued that capitalist growth at the core underdeveloped the periphery (or semi-periphery) through a network of exploitative relationships (Baran, 1957). This perspective was originally applied to the developmental problems of Latin America (Cardoso and Faletto, 1979; Frank, 1971) and more recently to the Orient more generally (Frank, 1998). This Marxist legacy, coupled with Polanyi’s economic anthropology, underpinned a major academic development in understanding the global world around the work of Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) who developed ‘world systems theory’, initially on the basis of his research in Africa.Wallerstein’s theory simply postulates that it is impossible to study the modern world successfully without recognizing the multiple connections between societies and the global processes that shape them, but the world systems approach has also emphasized the historical depth of these processes. Furthermore it has recognized that de-globalization can also take place in conjunction with major periods of recession and economic decline, and hence this approach is especially relevant today (Chase-Dunn, 2006). While there were important early developments in theories of economic globalization, there
were equally significant developments in the study of the cultural and political dimensions of globalization. To some extent, the analysis of the cultural and social dimensions of globalization was a reaction against the predominance of political economy in the social sciences. Although the study of globalization has been growing in importance since the 1990s, perhaps the key intervention in the popular literature came in the 1960s with the growth of communication research. In the study of communication and media, Marshall McLuhan (1964) made ‘understanding the media’ a major topic and developed the popular idea of a ‘global village’. Research on communications and the media has ever since occupied a dominant position in the field (Castells, 1996). In comparative religious studies, growing awareness of global processes added weight to the conventional debate about religious fundamentalism. These cultural studies often painted a picture of the world in terms of major binary contrasts such as East and West. The struggle to understand the Orient also has a long history. In the late 1970s Orientalism as a largely implicit paradigm forWestern research came under increasing critical scrutiny, giving way to greater awareness of the interconnectedness of human societies and their cultures (Said, 1978; Turner, 1978 and 1994). In historical research, historians such as Marshall G. S.Hodgson began to invent ‘world history’ as an alternative framework for the study of Islam in terms not of specific societies but by reference to Islam as a global movement. He came to see Islam as part of world history and from an ecumenical standpoint as a world cultural system. Political globalization has also been addressed by some influential studies of the consequences of globalization for democracy and civil society (Held, 1995; Keane, 2003). Political globalization involves the study of the institutionalization of international political structures, and the evolution of the European interstate system has given rise to ‘both an increasingly consensual international normative order and a set of international political structures that regulate all sorts of interactions’ (Chase-Dunn, 2006: 85). This development has been labelled as simply the growth of ‘global governance’ (Murphy, 1994). In retrospect, it can be suggested in broad terms that globalization theory has gone through
three stages of development from an early emphasis on the economic system, through a focus
on culture and finally a concentration on its political dimensions, giving rise to debates about world governance and cosmopolitanism. These economic, political and cultural themes were outlined early on by Barrie Axford in The Global System (1995), which examined the axial features of globalization in terms of the world economic order, the world political order, the global military order and cosmopolitan cultures. Axford’s observation in 1995 that, while there has been much intellectual excitement about
the concept of globalization, there has been little reliable or systematic empirical research on its core components and consequences, remains only partly valid. New empirical analysis has emerged over the last 20 years, in areas such as corporate power (Carroll, 2010), tax havens (Palan et al., 2010) social inequality (Walby, 2009; Piketty, 2014) and global football (Giulianotti and Robertson, 2009). This has included important qualitative studies of financial knowledge and the construction of finance markets (MacKenzie 2006), and the daily struggle for survival of the poor on the Indian sub-continent (Collins et al., 2009). Yet, in other respects, globalization is often difficult to study empirically. This is sometimes
because evidence is far better organized on a national rather than cross-border basis. This makes illegal or subterranean processes of immigration, people smuggling, tax evasion, sex tourism or terrorist networks very hard to pin down. In addition, it is to some extent easier to measure economic globalization through the growth of international trade or the size of multinational corporations than it is to grasp more intangible aspects of cultural globalization.While the measures economists study come readily to hand in financial terms, it is often difficult to identify appropriate measures of cultural globalization. There are some important exceptions such as George Ritzer’s work in The McDonaldization of Society (1993), which does provide both qualitative and quantitative measures of cultural standardization. The study of global consciousness presents even greater problems. However, in his The Origins of Global Humanitarianism, Peter Stamatov (2013) examined the growth of anti-slavery among Jesuits in Latin America in the sixteenth century and among Quakers in New England and London in the eighteen century as a humanitarian consciousness that had a global reach. These antislavery groups developed a global advocacy system that stretched eventually from Europe to Africa and the NewWorld. This study is one further reminder that the origins of globalization are not in the communications revolution of the twentieth century, but can be found in earlier religious movements. In addition, while globalization studies have flourished, there is still little agreement about
the nature of globalization and its overall direction. Although there has been much dispute over the definition of globalization, we need not concern ourselves too deeply over definitional disagreements at this stage. The problem of defining ‘money’ satisfactorily has not stopped the progress of economics any more than the absence of a wholly coherent notion of ‘power’ has inconvenienced the development of political science. There is, however, some consensus that globalization involves the compression of time and space, the increased interconnectivity of human groups, the increased volume of the exchange of commodities, people and ideas, and finally the emergence of various forms of global consciousness which, for the sake of brevity, we may simply call ‘cosmopolitanism’. In this sense, Axford’s comment that globalization remains a compelling idea in spite of definitional problems continues to be very apt. There has also been much dispute about the historical origins of the notion of globalization,
but it is clear that at least in sociology the early driving force in the development of globalization theories was dissatisfaction with the economic assumptions of world-systems theory, especially as this approach had been constructed by Wallerstein and his school. In economic terms, globalization had often been treated as simply another phase of the emergence of a capitalist world system, the principal causal mechanisms of which were the economic
requirements of global trade and transnational corporations. Sociological theories of globalization attempted to establish the independent development of social and cultural forces contributing to the emergence of the world as a single place. The foundations of a specifically sociological approach to globalization had been established by a series of influential articles by Roland Robertson, but these were not finally published as a collection until 1992. At the same time, there was equal frustration with the unidimensional aspects of modernization theory and with the theoretical difficulties of so-called civilizational analysis. Early formulations of globalization theory in the 1980s often assumed either that the process
was equivalent to the inevitable enforcement of cultural standardization or that this form of global standardization in fact involved processes which were merely Americanization. In early sociological versions of globalization theory, as Tony Spybey notes in Globalization andWorld Society (1996: 48-52), the convergence thesis suggested that the world was moving towards a single model of industrial society and that model was indubitably American. George Ritzer (1993) had successfully employed MaxWeber’s notion of a general process of rationalization to write about McDonald’s as a general process of global standardization in his ‘McDonaldization’. The world development of Starbucks, McDonald’s and KFC outlets was compelling evidence of American influence over popular culture and lifestyles. Clearly the United States has played a pivotal role in modern globalization, but it is too simplistic to describe the whole process of globalization as merely Americanization. The impact of Japan on management systems, car manufacture, cuisine, fashion and films would be one simple example of the influence of Asia on the rest of the world. The development of globalization studies has also been characterized by either extreme
pessimism or naïve optimism.With the final collapse of the Soviet system between 1989 and 1992, many social scientists welcomed the potential development of a peace dividend, the end of the Cold War and the prospect of global co-operation over trade, security and cultural exchange. Globalization was welcomed as the flowering of human rights and global peace, and political philosophers looked back towards the Enlightenment and Immanuel Kant’s aspiration for world government and perpetual peace as a model of a future global civil society. The globalization of a rights regime offered the prospect of a more just world (Wasserstrom et al., 2000). However, an alternative voice also became influential at the time in international relations theory. In particular, Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of cultures’ article and later book sparked off a furious debate about the possibility of new conflicts around ethnicity and religion (Huntington, 1993 and 1996). After 9/11, the bombings in London,Madrid and Bali, terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008 and more recent attacks in Boston, Copenhagen and Paris, globalization studies took a more critical and pessimistic turn, with much more emphasis on the state, political borders and security. It is recognized that globalization also brings with it the globalization of violence, low-intensity conflicts, international crime and trafficking in people. Warfare has played a critical role in the process of globalization, but this issue rarely surfaces in debates about the origins and character of global violence (Hirst, 2001). Optimistic visions of hyper-globalization talked about mobility across borders, the porous nature of societies and the decline of the nation state as key features of the global world. The contemporary security crisis, by contrast, produced a renewed interest in state activities in controlling migration and patrolling borders. It was clear that globalization could also result in the ‘enclave society’ creating new walls between communities (Turner, 2007a). In 2014 and 2015, with growing conflict between the West and Vladimir Putin’s Russia over the Crimea and Ukraine, many commentators referred to a renewal of the Cold War. With Russian and Chinese naval operations planned to take place in the Mediterranean in 2015, there is much less optimism about a global peace dividend.
