Lecture 2 (2009)
- Globalisation is spoken about in different ways by different theorists. What follows is just a glimpse into some theorists’ arguments here, largely those theorists who occupy the mainstream, that is, who are taught in sociology and who have gained popularity in academia and the media.
- McGrew in Modernity & Its Futures – groups different theorists into those with single or multi-causal explanations and descriptions:
- Single – Castells – stage of informational capitalism; capitalist development and the accompanying advancement of technology; emergence of the network form of organisation – inclusion and exclusion from global networks; Wallerstein – capitalist crisis as the cause of global interconnectedness, going back to before the period identified as globalisation; Rosenau – technological development; Gilpin – political-military relations
- Multi – Giddens – modernity (understood as characterised by the nation-state, industrialism and capitalism) produces the conditions of and for globalisation, characterised by changes in the political, economic, social and cultural spheres of life.
- I would like to use these distinctions to allow us to think through and categorise the different features and causes of globalisation that are identified across theorists:
- Political – changing role of the nation-state, with the strict boundaries between ‘the economic’ and ‘the political’ blurring here; increasing role and influence of the United Nations (UN) system, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) & World Bank (WB), and economic powers like the USA (Giddens, Wallerstein); end of the Cold War and the realignment of political forces at a global level (Giddens, Gilpin, Wallerstein); changing modes of governing & theories of power (Foucault – studied in second year); new social movements and new political forms (to be discussed in the latter part of this part of the course).
- Economic – global crisis – how a crisis that began with the problems being experienced by US and European banks has come to affect every one of us in every part of the globe; global stock market – electronic money and the global control of the flow and exchange of material wealth; global systems of trade – regulated by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which SA joined in 1994, resulting in severed job losses in the textile and footwear industries in the coming years as the rules of trade previously protecting local manufacturers came to be lifted in the interests of a global, export-orientated market – to be looked at in detail when we discuss the experience of globalisation in SA; labour flexibility – example of Levi’s (cf. course pack); neoliberalism (to come back to in later lectures through the example of SA).
- Social – expand through examples on how the experience of social engagement and social relations are increasingly changing because of technological developments and are increasingly characterised by global relations and processes – facebook, skype, satellite tv; global citizens; celebrity; reality tv; gender – while Giddens makes the argument that the position of women and gender equality have been addressed in the period of globalisation, other theorists and researchers would argue that greater inequality and socio-economic hardship has been the result of globalisation for many people in the world, and that women, especially poor women, have been the ‘shock absorbers’ of globalisation – example of women on the global assembly line – see course pack; example of Wits cleaners.
- Cultural – ‘the postmodern’ (Frederic Jameson – the postmodern as the cultural logic of late capitalism) – While this is not something we will have the time to focus on in this course, it is important nevertheless to acknowledge the emergence of a debate within these discussions about globalisation, related to the characterisation of the period of late capitalism as that of ‘postmodernity’ or ‘postmodernism’ as a new epoch replacing modernity. While some sociologists have argued that there are a recognisable number of changes within this period from the 1980s onwards, requiring us to proclaim a new epoch as ‘the postmodern’ or ‘postmodernity’ (including the disappearance of a belief in totalising theories or ‘grand narratives’ like Marxism, a play with the fixedness in meaning and giving meaning or representing, and contestations of teleological notions of progress), other theorists, in particular those who would argue against all-encompassing narratives, would resist such moves, asserting instead that these were features of ‘late modernity’ or corresponding to certain cultural changes at a particular stage of capitalist development (Jameson and David Harvey);
- revival of ‘the local’ – how particular groups respond to threats to their local identities, cultures and religions by reasserting and sharpening their differences;
- ‘westernisation’ vs ‘creolisation’ (will return to through James Ferguson and Gillian Hart in next lecture); consumer culture – how aspirations are determined by a global market and culture industry – example, the ‘idols industry’. Expand through discussion of other examples – blue jean culture through the marketing of the Levi’s brand; the ‘Coca Cola generation’ – problematise this notion through discussion.
- Giddens offers us yet another way of categorising the different conceptualisations of and responses to globalisation – radicals and sceptics – starting his 1999 lecture (see course pack) with a story about a friend who visits an African family and is surprised by the fact she spends the evening watching a not yet widely released American film, Giddens aligns himself with those he calls ‘radicals’ by implying that no place in the world has not been touched by the culture of ‘the west’. For Giddens, those who argue that all parts of the globe are now connected and that describe a set of changed economic, political, social and cultural features at a global level since the 1980s are correct and could be called ‘the radicals’ as they hold the view that social, political and economic relations have been profoundly altered since the beginning of the 1980s through growing global interconnectedness. He describes those who are critical of this view ‘the sceptics’, that is, those who are sceptical that this period of change necessitates being called and described as ‘globalisation’. He gives Immanuel Wallerstein, here, as a sceptic. We could use the lens of ‘radicals’ vs ‘sceptics’ to describe those points of view described above.
- At the end of his speech, contained in the course pack, Giddens makes use of the term ‘runaway world’, implying that globalisation and its consequences have created a world that we as people no longer have any control or sense of control over. Explore through discussion. The question of whether we have control over our individual and collective lives as human beings in this period of globalisation will be something we will try to answer as we proceed through this course.
- What does this particular way of speaking about the world mean for sociology, the social sciences and the study of society today?
- ‘National’ vs ‘global’/‘international’ levels of focus and study
- Bounded totalities vs unbounded potentialities
- ‘Global’ vs ‘local’ visions and lenses
These questions will be explored in our next two lectures in more detail, and throughout the course. We will return to them in our final lecture to try to answer them.
It might seem as though we have just thrown around a number of buzz words to describe this concept ‘globalisation’, and if you are still feeling uncertain about its meaning or have nagging questions about it, that is good. Next lecture we will be looking at theorists who argue that this way of naming our current experience of society should be understood in terms of its operation as a ‘discourse’ (after Michel Foucault), and offer an alternative understanding of what we have been calling ‘globalisation’ thus far.
