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Genealogies of the Global
Abstract
The term global suggests all-inclusiveness and brings to mind connectivity, a notion that gained a boost from Marshall McLuhan's reference to the mass-mediated ‘global village’. In the past decade it has rapidly become part of the everyday vocabulary not only of academics and business people, but also has circulated widely in the media in various parts of the world. There have also been the beginnings of political movements against globalization and proposals for ‘de-globalization’ and ‘alternative globalizations’, projects to re-define the global. In effect, the terminology has globalized and globalization is varyingly lauded, reviled and debated around the world. The rationale of much previous thinking on humanity in the social sciences has been to assume a linear process of social integration, as more and more people are drawn into a widening circle of interdependencies in the movement to larger units, but the new forms of binding together of social life necessitate the development of new forms of global knowledge which go beyond the old classifications. It is also in this sense that the tightening of the interdependency chains between human beings, and also between human beings and other life forms, suggests we need to think about the relevance of academic knowledge to the emergent global public sphere.
... As the global balance of power shifts from the West to Asia, alternative accounts of globalization are likely to challenge Western or Eurocentric narratives of the emergence of the modern world, such as Wallerstein's (1979Wallerstein's ( , 2004. Thus, in a long-term historical perspective (Frank 1998), China has played a central role in world trade, except for the period of the last two centuries (Pomeranz 2000), which construes word history in terms of oriental globalization (Featherstone 2006: 388, Hobson 2006, Pieterse 2006, Pomeranz and Topik 2006. Being historically central to the world economy and its development, Asia and the Middle East were, however, absent from Weber's (1956Weber's ( , 1958Weber's ( , 1968Weber's ( , 1993 accounts of Western capitalism, modernity, and their origins. ...
... Initially driven by economic processes, globalization, thus, affects cultural phenomena, as communications technology, everyday life, and social change become interlinked. Since a global society entails complex structures, self-organizing principles and unpredictable patterns, such as those found in global markets (Featherstone 2006: 391, Knorr Cetina 2005, emergent global social, economic, and cultural processes challenge existing analytical frameworks, theoretical models, and classical approaches (Adam 1999). Global developments, such as ecological catastrophes, make interdisciplinary, cross-border and complexity-sensitive approaches necessary (Adam 1999, Featherstone 2006. ...
... Since a global society entails complex structures, self-organizing principles and unpredictable patterns, such as those found in global markets (Featherstone 2006: 391, Knorr Cetina 2005, emergent global social, economic, and cultural processes challenge existing analytical frameworks, theoretical models, and classical approaches (Adam 1999). Global developments, such as ecological catastrophes, make interdisciplinary, cross-border and complexity-sensitive approaches necessary (Adam 1999, Featherstone 2006. Associated with unfettered capital flows around the world (Robinson 1996: 13-14), deregulated global economy (Hirst and Thompson 1999: 47-48), and globally informed cultural identities (Giddens 1996: 367-368), globalization is far from being a theoretically precise term. ...
By becoming more economically preeminent, consumption shifts emphasis from economic and material constraints toward the symbolic economy (Baudrillard 1972, 1981) of expanding international monetary and financial networks (Harvey 1989). Arguably increasing international economic volatility, growing cross-border monetary transactions outpace the trade in goods and materials, since information technology enables fast and continuous information transfer, financial coordination, and transaction adjustments (Dodd 1995: 1). As money and transaction volumes that international financial networks handle increase, speculation starts to be more lucrative than investment, while the financial system gains unprecedented autonomy from production (Harvey 1989: 194). Moreover, readily available personal credit and corresponding legislative and institutional changes in monetary and financial markets are essential to the expansion of consumption (Hall 1987a, 1987b, Lomax 1987, Reid 1988). Since sociological theorization traditionally privileged production over consumption (Callinicos 1989, Warde 1990), property prices, personal debt, and the money economy are subjects of predominantly postmodern commentary. While possibly ephemeral phenomena, growing consumption, monetary speculation, and personal indebtedness were considered by postmodern theorists to be of more than passing significance (Dodd 1995: 2). Dodd (1995: 2-3) suggests that increasing consumption indicates a growing media-driven impact of theories, perceptions, and representations of money upon structural developments in and interconnections between the consumer economy, the financial system, and the media industry.
... Global consumer culture, which is emerging and being adapted to local cultures is not a thing that is produced and distributed all over the world (Ger and Belk, 1996). Featherstone (2006), Alden, Steenkamp and Batra (2006), and Steenkamp and de ...
... Recently, international consumer research focuses on the consumers who share common beliefs, values and cultural orientations, in short or namely global consumers (Cleveland and Laroche, 2007). Globalization process widened consumers' frame of references and increased the potential of consumers to communicate from all around the world (Featherstone, 2006). Globalization process created a new culture, global consumer culture (Steenkamp and de Jong, 2010). ...
... Depending on the definition of McLuhan's (1962) "global village," globalization is used as the connectivity; later on, it turned into a daily word which is used by not only academics, but also media in all around the world (Featherstone, 2006). ...
Economic integration and interactions among consumers, companies, and governments have resulted in fading borders. These processes force markets to globalize to higher degrees of globalization. Even in this globalization era, there is an ongoing debate on globalization and there is no agreement about whether consumers, thus their culture as well, are globalizing, glocalizing, or localizing. Despite it sounds like that absence of agreement on debatable globalization, the topic is challenging and day-by-day world continues to globalize more and more. The reason of the debate on globalization is that even globalization is mostly accepted as a homogenization force, consumers are getting more diverse than ever. As a result of confusing and paradoxical process of globalization, there is a strong need for new research in order to understand the emerging nature of world culture or namely global consumer culture.
Making decisions on consumption is a big challenge for contemporary consumers. In the age of globalization, this challenge is even stronger in the case of global consumption, because in this situation, they are under the effects of global and local cultures, which make consumption more complicated. Many times, consumers are exposed to both global and local products, and they are forced to select between them. Therefore, the interplay between globalization and localization is at the central of attitudes towards global consumption. In these circumstances, it is essential to understand the reasons of consumers’ preference for global products and their global consumption behavior. However, extant literature focuses on the negative attitudes/tendencies towards global products and neglects the positive ones. Globalization process reversed the trend of negative attitudes/tendencies toward foreign/global products to positive attitudes/tendencies toward foreign/global products; therefore, in this dissertation, not only negative but also positive attitudes/tendencies are analyzed as the antecedents of global consumption. Moreover, military, political, and economic perspectives are no longer sufficient to understand the new global economy, which has become very complex and it cannot be comprehended by existing and old views and models. Now, cultural view suits better than any other perspective. Therefore, lack of studies and scales in the literature on global consumer culture limits our understandings about global consumers. For these reasons, it is the purpose of this dissertation to fulfill this gap in the literature by proposing two new constructs, namely openness to global consumer culture and conserving local consumer culture, which are identity-based and supposed to be more suitable for both global consumer culture and international market segmentation, are proposed and tested.
With the increasing role of globalization, international market segmentation is a critical success factor for firms, which aim for international market expansion. Globalization leads to several distinct consequences, this further increase the importance of international market segmentation. However, international market segmentation is still an under-researched area, especially at the consumer level. For international market segmentation, stability of segmentation base becomes more important than other segmentation levels. For this reason, consumer identities, as the important, stable, and underlying determinants of consumers’ needs, attitudes and behaviors, are valuable bases for international market segmentation. In this dissertation, consumer identities are treated as the core-underlying dynamic of consumers’ attitudes and tendencies. For that reason, understanding this relationship along with the interactions between new and existing culture and consumption related constructs would provide us valuable and strategic insights and understand consumers’ preferences for products in the globalized market environment. Additionally, segmenting consumers based on a model and analyzing each segment’s behavior is more valuable than understanding them in general.
It is the aim of this dissertation to understand this interaction among the constructs, which are recognized and used to understand consumers’ attitudes towards global consumption; they are namely openness to global consumer culture, conserving local consumer culture, consumer cosmopolitanism, religiosity, and ethnic identity. Thus, this study proposes two new constructs namely openness to global consumer culture, conserving local consumer culture, which are identity-based motivations, builds a model that integrates the constructs in consideration together, and based on this model, segments global markets where international market segmentation studies lack to develop model-based segmentation. Therefore, the objectives of this dissertation to contribute to cross-cultural consumer behavior literature are threefold: one is to propose and develop two new and multidimensional identity-based constructs with a cultural perspective (openness to global consumer culture and conserving local consumer culture); second objective is testing these newly developed scales in a model where attitudes towards global consumption holds the central place, it is aimed to link new constructs proposed in this study as the antecedents, attitudes towards global consumption, and consumer attitudes or identities in relation with consumer culture; and third objective is to segment international markets based on a model which is developed and validated in this study.
For these purposes, other than the studies for scale development, three separate studies are conducted. Two of them in Turkey (student and non-student samples) and one of them in United States (student sample) are conducted for sustaining cross-cultural validity of the research model. In line with the aim of dissertation, first, traditional scale development processes for two newly proposed constructs are followed and all the psychometric tests are conducted including exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and other reliability and validity tests. Later on, research model is tested with structural equation modeling and evidence for the hypotheses developed are supplied. Additionally, common method variance and measurement invariance are also checked. Then, based on the research model, both country-level and consumer-level international market segmentation analyses are conducted with K-means cluster analysis and multi-group structural equation modeling. Consumer-level international market segmentation was superior to country-level one. Afterwards, consumer-level international market segmentation is conducted within and between countries. Among all the alternatives, between countries international market segmentation performed better than other alternatives. By this method, it is shown that each segmentation approach has its own benefits and advantages; however, between countries consumer-level international market segmentation provides the best results.
Consequently, this dissertation with having the social and cultural perspectives rather than economic ones is successful in explaining consumers’ global consumption choices. Integrating self-identity theory and identity-based motivation with the global consumption context increases the performance of the research model and builds an effective model for international market segmentation. This model is applicable at both country- and consumer-level and it could provide important insights to marketing practitioners. Additionally, two newly proposed constructs function better than existing constructs and provide more stable bases for international market segmentation. In addition, between countries consumer-level international market segmentation results indicate that it is superior to other international market segmentation alternatives. This could move the recent international market segmentation and global consumer culture literature one-step further.
... Mike Featherstone (2006) argues that while globalization began with economic processes, it has now brought about an acknowledged need for more cultural work "in understanding the others with whom we come into contact" (p. 390). ...
... 373-374). In these respects, interdisciplinary understanding resembles the engaged, values-based and 'state-of-mind' cosmopolitanism (Cheah, 2006;Featherstone, 2006;Werbner, 2006) discussed at the beginning of this paper. ...
In this paper we examine the tension between the educational needs of a globalized world and the institutional structures of a globalized education system. One of the most important consequences of the current discipline-based education system is a missed opportunity to encourage reflexive thinking about discipline-based normative assumptions and world views. We argue that this is one of the conditions necessary for producing researchers and students who are culturally competent: able to engage with the community in messy non-discipline-specific problems, critique and integrate information from many knowledge sources and work collaboratively. We report on two case studies in Indigenous Australia and the Pacific: projects that involved students and that demonstrate the special quality and value of cultural competence and its connection with work across, and beyond, academic disciplines.
... Globalization, which first appeared about six decades ago in the context of economy and business (Featherstone, 2006), had its heyday in 1990s by being transferred to the academic usage. Historically, globalization has been conceptualized in light of two ideological standpoints of modernism and postmodernism, each associated with a distinct hypothesis on globalization. ...
In the absence of ample practical studies which explore how ELT teachers perceive teaching with respect to various hypotheses associated with globalization, namely homogenization, polarization, and hybridization, and how their practice reflects the tenets of the global flows, this study was conducted to address these neglected issues. Three main aspects of language teaching, mostly affected by various orientations towards globalization and, in consequence, ELT-namely the primacy of native speaker variety, the appropriateness of Western-led methods, and the appropri-ateness of Western-led materials-were the focal points of our study. Twenty teachers, selected through criterion-referenced sampling technique , participated in this research. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and classroom observations accompanied with field notes. The thematic analysis of data revealed that the only area less affected by the tenets of the Global English is ELT teaching methods. Our
... It is often stated that the globalisation process has led to increased cross-connectivity between individuals, groups, and states (e.g. Featherstone, 2006) and to a growing deterritorialisation (Backhaus, 2009). A relevant component of this dynamic is mobility, for which increased prominence of modern living has been underlined in the last years (e.g. ...
Literature has often underlined the relevance of mobility for modern lifestyles. However, it has frequently overlooked that mobility has long been the rule in Senegal. There, mobility has allowed households to cope with environmental and economic vulnerability. Over the last decades, households have extended their traditional mobility through internal and international migration. This paper investigates how place-related vulnerability and structural constraints influence the way Senegalese households construct translocal spaces and livelihood strategies in the global age. For this purpose, a multi-sited ethnographic study has been conducted at four villages in Senegal and at two immigration destinations in Italy and Spain. The empirical results show that vulnerability and structural constraints in the home place do not prevent households from adopting strategies based on mobility, but rather influence the composition of translocal spaces, the ability to move between places, and the construction of translocal livelihood strategies.
... Castells's key argument was that these movements were successful because they were able to gain sympathy and support from a global audience, an audience that was only accessible to these relatively small and under-funded groups because of the availability of, and their effective use of, the Internet medium. More recent work by Featherstone (2006) expanded these foundational efforts around globalization and transnational (and largely Internet-driven) networks in his description of recent political movements against globalization that "include proposals for ' de-globalization' and 'alternative globalizations'" (p. 387). ...
By considering three main questions, this article develops an argument for rethinking existing approaches to understanding both sport-related social movements and "local" responses to globalizing forces in light of the emergence of Internet communication. They are: (a) How can extant conceptions of sport-related social movements be expanded to account for more advanced forms of cultural and political opposition that result from and are potentially enhanced by the Internet? (b) How does the link between the development of the Internet and the enhanced formation and functioning of (new) social movements offer a foundation from which to expand understandings of relationships between global sport-related influences and the responses of local cultures? (c) What methodological approaches are best suited for studying Internet-related forms of sport-related activist resistance? The article concludes that recent developments in communication technology have contributed to a situation in which there is immense revolutionary potential in sport-related contexts, and for sociologists (of sport) interested in contributing to activist projects.
... The broader definition of culture, as well as its understanding in terms of dynamic learning processes, leads scholars such as Featherstone (1994Featherstone ( , 2006 to make the case for the globalization of culture. Pieterse, in turn, has outlined how this global culture must be looked at with reference to a process of hybridization and creolization. ...
The chapter argues for a lecture of the notion of development as strongly linked to the uneven distribution of material and non-material sources of power among groups. It thus analyses the rise of a public environmentalist awareness in the late twentieth century as a challenge to the capitalist pattern of production and consumption. Finally, the chapter aims to shed some light on the process of mainstreaming these claims by subsuming them within the western model of societal transformation, under the new, catchy label of sustainable development.
Pressing for institutional solutions to environmental depletion has meant to further spread the sustainability goal worldwide. On the other hand, it has also implied a kind of betrayal of the truly transformative instances of many social movements and local communities, which were seeking for a revolutionary, rather than reformative, path to societal change.
... Conventionally, qualitative researchers orient to globalization as a confluence of changing conditions which affect their chosen objects of study, and which provoke the revision of existing theory and methodology (Brown & Labonte, 2011; Featherstone, 2006; Gille & O'Riain, 2002; Quilgars, et al., 2009; Ramabrahmam &Hariharan, 2005; Sreberny, 2008). These conditions include the increasingly fluid movement of material and symbolic phenomena (e.g., bodies and information) within and across national borders, the erosion of the regulatory state by multi-national corporations and international regimes of aid and development, Bryan C. Taylor* Thomas R. Lindlof** ...
Existing discussion of the relationships between globalization, communication research, and qualitative methods emphasizes two images: the challenges posed by globalization to existing communication theory and research methods, and the impact of post-colonial politics and ethics on qualitative research. We draw in this paper on a third image – qualitative research methods as artifacts of globalization – to explore the globalization of qualitative communication research methods. Following a review of literature which tentatively models this process, we discuss two case studies of qualitative research in the disciplinary subfields of intercultural communication and media audience studies. These cases elaborate the forces which influence the articulation of national, disciplinary, and methodological identities which mediate the globalization of qualitative communication research methods.
... As a concept, globalization suggests an 'all-inclusiveness' (Featherstone, 2006) which, in turn, can be critically translated into 'an expansion of capitalist production, market-based consumption and Western culture' (Waters, 2001: 232). In addition, in its common usage the term 'globalization' is often framed as an entity and an actor in its own right rather than a process -or set of processes -grounded in agentful human actions. ...
Our original aspiration for this special issue was to attract a broad base of visual communication scholars working on the nexus of difference and globalization, with the aim of defining the substance and assessing the significance of this particular dialectic in our field. While globalization does entail the ever-growing significance of deterritorialized practices and transcultural flows, these connections, movements and exchanges still largely occur across specific locales and identities, and through appeals to various dimensions of cultural and social difference. Purposefully comprehensive in scope, our call for papers led to over 70 proposals that tackled the relationship between globalization and race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and religion in visual communication from a number of theoretical angles, including but not limited to diasporic, queer, postcolonial, feminist and intercultural perspectives.Taken together, the seven contributions included in this special issue address questions related to the integration and deployment of major dimensions of social and cultural difference in visual communication materials; the perspectives and practices of designers, image-makers and media producers in relation to the work involved in the planning and creation of such materials; and both the dominant ways of seeing and unique experiences that impact on the visual ‘reading’ of globalization. A combination of well-known and emerging scholars makes for an unusually energetic take on concepts and concerns that underlie several of the major frameworks that have become established in the inherently interdisciplinary field of visual communication, including multimodal and critical discourse analysis, social semiotics, rhetorical criticism, visual anthropology and visual sociology.
... The rationale of much previous thinking on humanity in the social sciences has been to assume a linear process of social integration, as more and more people are drawn into a widening circle of interdependencies in the movement to larger units, but the new forms of binding together of social life necessitate the development of new forms of global knowledge which go beyond the old classifications. It is also in this sense that the tightening of the interdependency chains between human beings, and also between human beings and other life forms, suggests we need to think about the relevance of academic knowledge to the emergent global public sphere (Featherstone, 2006). ...
How can we understand the theoretical discussion concerning global consumer culture? Is it possible to affirm that such culture exists as global representation, central to contemporary society? Or should we consider possible localizations of consumption practices as a result of cultural differences from different individuals? Early in modern social theory, consumption has been object of discussion and, with the advent of post-modernist theory, its centrality has become a tonic in social analysis. Further, contemporary studies presented mainly two different perspectives: the centrality of consumption in society or localizations of this practice according to cultural differences. In order to understand global consumer culture, this paper proposes this theoretical discussion between both perspectives:
In the first perspective, there is a rationale that begins with modern social theorists, and their focus on production systems (Marx, Weber, Smith), and that moves to the study of consumption (Simmel, Veblen, De Certeau), whether celebrating or demonizing this practice. Post-modernists have detailed this critique in order to understand the structure of the consumer society (Baudrillard, Bauman, Lipovestky), with consumption as the central practice of contemporary life. This centrality would also explain earlier studies that demonstrate the capillarity of consumption, not disjointed from the production system, but as a continuum that can be translated as prosumption (Ritzer).
The second perspective, present in most contemporary studies of consumption (Bourdieu, Campbell, Featherstone, Miller) has tried to steer a middle course that reconciles pessimistic classical theories with a recognition of the fact that consumption is not only indispensable, but also a domain in which people can express themselves positively in our society. They develop the notion of a consumer culture that refers to norms, values, and meanings associated with a society dominated by consumption. In this culture, there is possibility to localizations and the development of individuals with their respective differences.
... The difficulties of continuing to hold onto its 'state of exception' status (Malik, 2006), to continue to seek to steer the world in line with US political, economic and cultural objectives in this new context, has the danger of producing within the United States a strong nationalism with civilizational and Christian religious overtones -what William Connolly (2007) refers to as The Christo-Capitalist Assemblage.' The above mentioned threat to the capacity to sustain income levels in the working classes in the West in face of the relocation and migration of jobs to cheaper labour markets is driven by the dynamic of neo-Liberal economic globalization (Featherstone, 2001(Featherstone, , 2006. The neo-Liberal pact which became established in the 1980s initially in the United States and Britain, which has subsequently become globalized, provided a package of welfare state cuts, governmental deregulation of financial markets and other bodies, introduction of measurable assessment, competition and league tables for government funded bodies such as universities, hospitals etc., along with low rates of income tax and the promise of economic growth. ...
Body]Postmodernism is a variety of meanings and definitions, is used to refer to many aspects of social life from musical forms and styles, literature and fine art through to philosophy, history and especially the mass media and consumer culture. Post modernism is a slippery term that is used by writers to refer to several different things. Featherstone (1991) points out the term has been used to refer to new developments in intellectual and cultural theory. The suggestion that our subjective experience of everyday life and our sense of identity has somehow changed significantly in recent years. The view that capitalist or industrial societies have reached new and important stages in their development, the shift from modernity to post-modernity.
... Our analysis thus asks how cosmopolitanism can be integrated into the democratic politics of belonging of the national societies and how a cosmopolitan subject can claim a role of the adversary in the negotiation of the collective identities in the emergent post-national era. In the time of globalisation of the world (Featherstone, 2006;Delanty and Rumford, 2005;Habermas, 2001;Rumford, 2008;Turner, 2002), the focus on the national society may seem an anachronism (Kristeva, 1993), yet it is chosen on purpose. Namely, in addition to above-mentioned movements away from the open society model, whose sources lie in part within failed European policies of co-existence, globalization, too, has triggered many different processes of which the evolving cosmopolitan agenda is only one. ...
The paper is a critical contribution to contemporary theory of cosmopolitanism which takes into account specific socio-cultural and political contexts of post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. It is argued that in order for cosmopolitan-ism to become effective politics and the practice of democratic citizenship, it has to be grounded in daily processes of negotiation of loyalty and patriotism to the national society. In this regard, it should not be conceptualised as nationalism's other but rather as an alternative patriotic sentiment, which combines the global ethos of humanity and responsibility towards political and cultural organization of local social life. The paper illuminates this approach from the perspective of post-socialist citizenship in Slovenia and the tragic experience of the "erased".
Erkeklik, çokça tartışılan ancak çok az sorunsallaştırılan bir kimlik konusudur. Bu konunun en çok tartışılan yönü ise ataerkil yapı düzeni içerisinde gücü elinde bulunduran erkek cinsiyetine ait bir kimlik biçimi olması ve ona kazandırdığı avantajlardır. Bu nedenle de erkeklik kimliğine ilişkin sorunsallaştırmalar çoğunlukla yalnızca görünürdeki uygulamaları ele almakta ve her yerde aynı biçimde geçerli olan bir ideal erkeklik tipinin var olduğu kabulü ile hareket etmektedir. Hâlbuki kimlik söz konusu olduğunda evrensel bir kimlik biçiminin geçerli olmadığı gibi ülkelere, bölgelere ve hatta farklı ırk ve etnik kökene dayalı yerel kültürlerin kendine özgü kimlik biçimlerinin olduğu birçok etnografik çalışmada ortaya konulmuştur. Elbette teknolojik gelişmeler sonrası yaygınlaşan kitle iletişim araçları, iletişim alanında devrimsel değişimlere neden olduğu gibi etkileşim alanında devrimsel nitelikte değişimlere neden olduğundan farklı coğrafyalarda yer alan kültürlerin ve kültüre ait kodların birbirinden etkilenmesinin de zeminini hazırlamıştır. Kültürel alanda oluşan bu zemin moda gibi güçlü bir olguyla başka bir boyuta geçmiş ve küresel ölçekte kültürel bir değişimin gerçekleşmesine neden olmuştur. Dolasıyla kültürel kodlarda medyana gelen değişim, aynı zamanda kimlikleri oluşturan kodların değişimi anlamına geldiğinden kimliklerin gündelik hayat alanında sergilenme biçimlerinde, iletişim ve etkileşimlerinde değişimlere neden olarak yeni pratiklerin ve uygulamaların ortaya çıkmasını sağlamıştır.
Bu kitap da kimliklerin yapısında ortaya çıkan bu yeni durumun nasıl yapılandığını anlamak için Şanlıurfa ili özelinde erkeklik kimliğinin izini sürerek geçmiş ve şimdiki zaman arasında değişen kültürel kodları ve bunlar arasındaki bağlantıları “gündelik hayat” kuramları perspektifinde ortaya çıkarmayı amaç edinmektedir. Böylelikle bu kitap ile günümüzde var olan farklı erkeklik kimliklerine bir ışık tutulacağı gibi gelecekte de inşa edilecek olan erkeklik kimliklerine ilişkin bir öngörü oluşturacağı düşünülmektedir.
The dominance of Western theories in an age of globalization and swift technological advances, which brought to collective consciousness manifestations of literary and artistic genres in distant geographical places that were once viewed as primitive or exotic, necessitates raising the question of comparative poetics anew. During the second half of the twentieth century, scholars such as James J.Y. Liu, Earl Miner, Stephen Owen, and Wai-lim Yip engaged in comparing Western to Eastern poetics. However, their work fell short of reaching a unifying approach to the study of world poetics. This is the gap that Alaa Abd al-Hadi, a thinker, poet and postcolonial critic, came to fill out. Abd al-Hadi’s Nucleo-genre Paradigm is universally oriented. Based on qualitative logic and Lutfi Zadeh's fuzzy sets, it posits that there are essential elements common to various cultural manifestations of a single genre across time and space. It is these common elements, which help decide whether a certain manifestation belongs to a certain genre, that allow for cross cultural communication and understanding while respecting cultural specificities, manifested by an infinite number of aesthetic elements. Unlike the other approaches to the field of comparative poetics, Nucleo-genre Paradigm distinguishes between two levels of genre, the poetic level of production and the aesthetic level of reception, and gives primacy to reception, which is often disregarded in genre theories. In this paper, an attempt is made to evaluate the contribution of the Nucleo-genre Paradigm beyond comparative poetics.
L’objectif de cet article est de fournir au lecteur un modèle théorique d’appréhension des dimensions culturelles de la globalisation, saisies à l’aune de la circulation des produits issus des industries culturelles globales. Pour ce faire, il procède tout d’abord à une mise en perspective des principaux outils analytiques, proposés dès le début des années 1990, dont certains ont joué un rôle fondamental dans le tournant global de la culture. Les travaux mobilisés mettaient en évidence trois tensions majeures dans les transformations profondes des identités culturelles qui sont loin d’avoir été dissipées : entre homogénéisation et hétérogénéisation, entre impérialisme culturel américano-occidental et résistances ethno-nationales, entre promotion locale et hybridation. Puisant dans ce corpus canonique, l’article propose un modèle à quatre vecteurs pour analyser les différentes dimensions de la globalisation de la culture : la production et la distribution des marchandises esthétiques (dans le cadre du capitalisme esthétique), la compétition politique dans l’arène globale pour l’hégémonie culturelle (par le recours au soft power ), la construction et la promotion de l’authenticité et de la différence culturelles (par le biais des intermédiaires) et le réglage de la distance entre le proche, le familier et le lointain, l’exotique (par des amateurs cosmopolites socialisés à la différence culturelle à travers leurs consommations).
Sociologists have long been interested in the theoretical possibility of a universal ritual. Despite a growing number of indicators of world society and globalization, there have not been attempts to observe and analyze the international reach of particular rituals. We propose an extension of the “interaction ritual chain” by theorizing how an interaction ritual might be created and diffused internationally. We look at the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, which created shared conditions of social distancing and emotional distress. We analyze a discontinuous chain of urban and national interaction rituals that focused attention on the efforts of healthcare workers fighting the virus. We count clapping and noise-making in 101 countries and 26 global cities. While we find similar ritual forms and international symbols of solidarity, there was also substantial evidence of conflict and particularism.
Od zakończenia zimnej wojny dzielenie świata na Globalną Północ i Globalne Południe stało się ogólnie przyjętym sposobem myślenia o globalnej różnicy. Ta opozycja binarna wymazuje jednak istnienie tego, co nazywam Globalnym Wschodem – krajów i społeczeństw, które zajmują pozycję pośrednią, pomiędzy Północą a Południem. Niniejszy artykuł problematyzuje geopolitykę wiedzy powstałą wskutek wykluczenia Globalnego Wschodu, nie tylko z Globalnej Północy i Południa, ale z koncepcji globalności w ogóle. Argumentuje, że w celu odzyskania Globalnego Wschodu dla nauki musimy wykorzystać stanowisko strategicznego esencjalizmu. Analizuje w tym kontekście globalne powiązania kryjące się za szklankami z fazowanego szkła z IKEI, by pokazać konieczność pomyślenia Globalnego Wschodu w sercu globalnych stosunków, a nie poza nimi. Myślenie o Globalnym Wschodzie jako przestrzeni liminalnej problematyzuje pojęcia Północy i Południa na rzecz bardziej inkluzywnego, ale również mniej dookreślonego myślenia teoretycznego.
Carving up the world into Global North and Global South has become an established way of thinking about global difference since the end of the Cold War. This binary, however, erases what this paper calls the Global East – those countries and societies that occupy an interstitial position between North and South. This paper problematises the geopolitics of knowledge that has resulted in the exclusion of the Global East, not just from the Global North and South, but from notions of globality in general. It argues that we need to adopt a strategic essentialism to recover the Global East for scholarship. To that end, it traces the global relations of IKEA’s bevelled drinking glass to demonstrate the urgency of rethinking the Global East at the heart of global connections, rather than separate from them. Thinking of such a Global East as a liminal space complicates the notions of North and South towards more inclusive but also more uncertain theorising.
Cambridge Core - Prehistory - Globalization in Prehistory - edited by Nicole Boivin
In order to identify cosmopolitan attitudes within the experiences that form ‘cosmoscapes’, we develop a study of global brands consumption. We analyse the relations between global brands consumption and their ‘brandscapes’ that lead to a building process of a world view, as well as the representations of local and global cultural symbols that are present in these imbrications. The study was conducted in São Paulo with young people through in-depth interviews (N = 40), two focus groups, and the analysis of interaction with brands in digital social media. The selected individuals interact with the global brands physically or virtually, through different consumption practices. Through them, they may build a global, a glocal, or a local perspective, as well as they may connect to Others and reproduce a cosmopolitan lifestyle, or maintain their own values and lifestyles.
Interkulturelle Beziehungen und Begegnungen, Vorstellungen vom ›Fremden‹ und ›Eigenen‹ sowie damit verbundene Verständigungsverhältnisse sind seit jeher Bestandteile menschlicher Gruppen und Kulturen. Austausch- und Kommunikationsbeziehungen stellen den »Normalfall kultureller Entwicklung« dar (Daniel 2004, 239). Tausch-, Handels- und Heiratsbeziehungen, religiöse Verbindungen und andere, teils auch weniger freundliche Interaktionen und Bewegungen über lokale und ethnische Grenzen hinweg, führten, wie Fredrik Barth bereits in den 60er Jahren des 20. Jahrhunderts darlegte, nicht zur Auflösung kultureller Differenzen, sondern brachten oftmals gar eine Festigung ethnischer und kultureller Identitäten und Grenzziehungen mit sich (Barth 1969, 13). Wie kommt es also, dass heute häufig angenommen bzw. befürchtet wird, die Welt werde durch Globalisierung kulturell vereinheitlicht, oder aber sie teile sich in wenige große, einander feindlich gegenüber stehende Zivilisationen auf?
Cet article se penche sur le mouvement des expositions universelles, de la Great Exhibition de Londres en 1851 à La Foire Internationale de New York en 1939. Il suggère que ces lieux furent des espaces science-fictionnels qui, en exposant leurs publics à des formes de compression d’espace-temps, permettaient de représenter la mondialisation de manière anticipée. Les sites des expositions universelles incarnaient des modèles bien particuliers d’échanges et de transferts économiques. Ces modèles préfiguraient les flux de capitaux sans frontières rêvés par certaines versions de la théorie de la mondialisation d’alors. Cette essence science-fictionnelle non seulement réside dans le spectacle futuriste du « progrès » techno-scientifique, qui devint un modèle omniprésent dans les expositions universelles, mais aussi s’exprime par la spatialisation de l’histoire vue comme un développement. Implacablement, cette perspective historique concevait la modernité comme un « progrès » racial hiérarchisant, mettant en scène le spectacle de « stagnations » anachroniques et de « déclins » dégénératifs. Bien avant le célèbre Futurama de 1939 à New York, les expositions universelles furent parmi les premiers lieux où l’on fit délibérément vivre à un public de masse un systématique désajustement du temps dans une zone bien délimitée, comme un avant-goût de l’immersion dans le « science-fictionnel ».
Reading and writing are often understood, particularly in educational studies, as the efforts of individual minds where readers and writers are seen as more or less efficient processors and producers of texts of particular kinds. In this view, their social positioning, their background and interests, only have bearing on how successfully they are able to learn the skills involved, as if learning to read and write were in the end something like learning how to use a knife and fork. As Harris pointed out, such approaches to literacy “treat the sign as something externally given, an object already provided by society for the learner to ‘acquire’ and utilize.” However, we are reminded from our observations of people (children included) who make and take meaning on and through electronic media resources (laptops, mobile phones, tablets and so on) that reading and writing are always as much about social engagements of varying kinds, by way of various discourse resources, as they are about basic coding activities. Meaning does not reside autonomously in the text itself. The denotational meanings of words, images and sentences are only one aspect of a text or utterance and it is the more connotational, contextual and interactional meanings that are usually critical—for example, what is signalled by a switch to a different style or register and how such a switch is relevant to the activities and social relationships at play.
This article examines the world's fair movement between The Great Exhibition of 1851 and The New York World's Fair of 1939, suggesting that these sites are science-fictional spaces that expose their mass audiences to forms of space-time compression that enable early figurations of globalization. Fair sites embody specific forms of economic transfer and exchange that anticipate dreams of the borderless flows of capital in some current versions of globalization theory. This "sfnal" condition of the world's-fair site is not just in the futuristic displays of techno-scientific "progress, " which became an insistent form of spectacle in the world's fair, but also in the spatialization of developmental histories, reading conceptions of modernity remorselessly through hierarchies of racial "progress" or spectacles of anachronistic "arrest" or degenerative "decline." Long before the famous Futurama of 1939 New York, world's fairs were one of the first spaces in which large populations experienced deliberate and sustained disadjustment in time within a bounded zone, an early sense of immersion in the "science-fictional.".
On February 26, 2015, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed sweeping new regulation for broadband providers. While regulation is typically driven by a combination of economic and political considerations, this article argues that the FCC’s initiative is long on politics and short on economics. For example, the FCC is not able to identify a non-transitory abuse of market power by broadband providers to justify its actions. There is no evidence of excessive returns being earned by broadband providers and the violations of net
neutrality that the Commission can point to, including throttling and blocking of data, are conspicuously few in number. What is more, the FCC has yet to establish that the regulatory oversight it proposes would not stifle more investment than it stimulates.
The analysis of intercultural communication, which is adopted in mainstream applied linguistics and communication studies, aims to explain the meaning of cultural differences and identities in the present global world. The present analysis of intercultural communication is based on theories of cultural variability, which highlight the basic distinctions between values determining cultural differences and identities. Some studies in applied linguistics observe cultural variability as a discursive construction based on a form of epistemological essentialism, produced in the Western part of the world to give meaning to its hegemony. However, these studies share some epistemological foundations with theories of cultural variability. This paper proposes a theorization of intercultural communication, which explains cultural differences and identities as constructed in communication systems and based on their particular structural presuppositions. In this perspective, the hegemonic structure of intercultural communication is ethnocentrism, including the presuppositions of Us/Them basic distinction, positioning of individuals as members of cultural groups and normative expectations about displays of We-identities. This theorisation also provides an explanation of the discursive construction of new hybrid forms of identity, which are observed as a result of globalisation, and of the interdependence between local and global communication systems. Finally, this theorization leads to explain the meaning of intercultural dialogue, which is presented as an alternative to ethnocentrism. The open question regards the explanation of dialogue as either a new discursive construction of hegemonic Western culture or a new structure, introducing equality in participation, sensitivity for participants’ personal expressions and expectations of participants’ empowerment in local and global communication systems.
The seeming discrepancy between postmodern diversity and contemporary concepts of globalization reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of globalization, which should not be taken to imply that there is a unified world society or culture. The process of globalization actually serves to highlight and reinforce cultural heterogeneities. It is the balance between shared sets of practices and local heterogeneities that enables the globalization model to be an extremely powerful tool in highlighting identity expressions, especially those exhibited through material culture choices in mixed cultural contexts. Using such a framework, this paper explores in particular the engagement between Sicilian populations of the seventh and sixth centuries BC and their Greek colonial neighbors, the Greek world and the Mediterranean at large, as a demonstration of how such a model might be used most effectively in interpreting cultural interactions in the past. © The Fund for Mediterranean Archaeology/Equinox Publishing Ltd.
The exaltation of achievement as a measure of collective and individual worth and moral agency has been one of the defining features of Asian developmentalism. Yet in today's age of globalized neoliberal attainment monitoring, the question of who and what an achiever actually is within an achievement-conscious society is far from straightforward or uncomplicated. In Vietnam, the notion of doing well and creditably for self and nation can be deeply problematic for those called upon, either officially or by living and ancestral kin, to embody qualities of attainment and creditable life-course functioning in ways recognizable to those who reward and monitor aspiring achievers. Building on recent fieldwork in Vietnam, this paper explores the ways young Hanoians have engaged with a rapidly changing set of ideas about how the country's tightly regulated schooling and examination system can both unleash and constrain the potential for new and ‘creative’ forms of attainment on the part of the nation's most promising and productive citizen-achievers.
In imagining the 'global' as the product of unprecedented flows and circulations, do we tend to ignore its uneven terrain, heterogeneity, and contestation? How might we resist taking the hydraulic turn and instead write critical histories of 'global' health? Postcolonial analysis can offer critical and realistic histories of scale making in biomedicine, of the configuring of the local and the global in global health. Thus we might hold within the same analytic frame biomedical colonial patriotism in the Philippines, biocolonial collecting in highland New Guinea, and the technoscientific nationalism of Biopolis in contemporary Singapore.
Shah, Nisha. (2011) The Territorial Trap of the Territorial Trap: Global Transformation and the Problem of the State’s Two Territories. International Political Sociology, doi: 10.1111/j.1749-5687.2011.00144.x © 2011 International Studies Association
This paper argues that attempts by theories of globalization to overcome the “territorial trap” have failed. Describing how the modern state emerged with two interrelated territories—a political concept about bounded jurisdiction and public good that over time is effaced but reinforced as territory is defined as brute, physical terrain—it shows that the assumption in globalization theories that territory is the state’s physical area entrenches the normative defense of the territorial state as the framework of political order. The consequence is that overcoming the territorial trap not only requires uncovering how and why territory becomes an assumed political ideal, but also how and why this trap produces the subsequent trap of understanding territory primarily as the “physical substratum” of the sovereign state. Globalization theories’ analysis of political transformation must therefore focus not only on the “permeability” of territorial borders, but whether and how evolving notions of global space might be providing a different political theory. A preliminary discussion of efforts to uncover how an alternative global spatial principle is reassembling political authority suggests a possible means of escape and way forward.
This article introduces the special section on the contribution of Jack Goody, which focuses on The Theft of History (2006). Goody attacks the notion of a radical division between Europe and Asia, which has become built into the commonsense academic wisdom and categorical apparatus of the social sciences and humanities. Eurocentrism is a constant target as he scrutinizes and finds wanting the claims of the West to have invented modern science, cultural renaissances, the free city, capitalism, democracy, love and secularism. Goody’s approach favours a dynamic long-term basis for comparisons between societies and focuses on the exchange of information and goods across Eurasia to argue that the comparative advantage one society gains has been only temporary, swinging between different parts of Eurasia a number of times over the millennia. Goody suggests that China developed an active mercantile urban culture before Europe. Cities and towns with their mixture of luxury and learning, should not be seen as inevitably subordinate to centralized power structures in both eastern and western Eurasia. Goody criticizes the theoretical assumptions and the handling of evidence of Perry Anderson, Fernand Braudel, Norbert Elias, Moses Finlay, David Landes, Karl Marx, Joseph Needham, Immanuel Wallerstein and Max Weber. His concern is that the master categories of world history, such as antiquity, feudalism and capitalism, have been developed against a background of the particular European trajectory, then projected onto the world at large. Goody remains sceptical, not just about eurocentrism, but also the additional danger of being eurocentric about ethnocentricity, which he regards as a trap that postcolonialism and postmodernism frequently fall into.
As environments and their inhabitants undergo a multitude of abrupt changes due to climate, in the aesthetic field there has been a hardening of a few representational figures that stand in for those contested political ecologies. Biodiversity loss and habitat change can be seen to be forcing an acceleration of archival practices that mobilize various images of the ‘play of the world’, including the making of star species to represent planetary loss, and the consolidation of other species into archives implicitly organized around the category of their destruction. The first section of this article looks at Jacques Rancière’s concept of political aesthetics in order to extend an argument about the importance of aesthetics in multispecies living beyond a concentration on practices per se and into a more excessive engagement articulated by Georges Bataille. I argue that aesthetics must be considered as part of the practice of politics and a space that configures the realm of what is possible in that politics. This is to suggest aesthetics as a form of ethics or an ‘aesthetics of existence’, as Foucault put it. The conclusion considers how a biopolitical aesthetic comes into being through such archival practices, and asks what aesthetic shifts would make the ‘play of the world’ more present in its absences.
This article commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of The Sociological Imagination by recalling, renewing and updating C. Wright Mills’ pledge to expand a politically aware, self-reflective and publicly accessible intellectual culture between aestheticism and scientism. We begin by sketching how Mills’ ‘bifocal’ vision of the translation between the close-up perspective on personal milieus and the longer view of social structures contrasts with recent calls for a public sociology which would sustain its professional legitimacy while reviving its critical conscience. To illustrate this point, we argue that his project can be reframed in a way that ‘provincializes’ the universalizing claims and scientific aspirations of much of North American sociology by exposing its imperial unconscious in pre- and post-war movements toward the professionalization and scientization of knowledge. Here our focus turns to the prospects for a ‘sociology of empire’ to trace imperial forms which are symptomatically manifested both in the discipline’s assumptions about historical progress and in Mills’ critique of these assumptions. Finally, with an example from the history of British colonialism in Egypt, we show how, despite its blindspots, Mills’ vision of the sociological imagination implicitly projects an alternative ‘sociological map’ with distinct vantage points that can account for the changing cultural tasks of our time, especially concerning how collectives of human and non-human agents are unequally mediated within networks of power. We conclude by revisiting Mills’ distinctive approach to ‘the craft of sociology’, considered more as a prayer than a profession, and undertaken more as a personal and political calling than as career.
Studies of the global dynamics of combined homogenization and differentiation processes have shed new light on the ways in which the totalization and the de-totalization of knowledge and social representation operate. In this commentary, the question of whether cultural diversity is a necessary ingredient with which to enrich the development of the knowledge society is addressed. Here, this question will be answered in the affirmative and that the consequences of recognizing the epistemic importance of cultural diversity require that we conceive of society in a multi-focal way with relative decentralization. It also implies that we look for compatibility between scientific knowledge and the knowledge that corresponds to other orders. In this way, the future of knowledge and power correlates with the dilemmas of global negotiations of interculturality.
The emergence of the global administrative sector and its new forms of knowledge production, expert rationality, and standardization, remains an understudied topic in science studies. Using a coproductionist theoretical framework, we argue that the mutual construction of epistemic and legal authority across international organizations has been critical for constituting and stabilizing a global regime for the regulation of food safety. The authors demonstrate how this process has also given rise to an authoritative framework for risk analysis touted as "scientifically rigorous" but embodying particular value choices regarding health, environment, and the dispensation of regulatory power. Finally, the authors trace how enrollment of the Codex Alimentarius in World Trade Law has heightened institutional dilemmas around legitimacy and credibility in science advice at the global level. Taken together, the case illustrates the importance of attending to the iterative construction of law and science in the constitution of new global administrative regimes.
By suggesting predictable and controllable patterns of development, the literature on global governance seems to simplify the world for decision-making tractability. In this respect, security narratives often remain analytically frozen, while the dynamics of global life are not. Relying on complexity thinking, this article both comments on the construction and potential reconstruction of the concept of security as it relates to the question of global governance and engages with the cognitive multiplicity of the notion of global security governance. Such an exploration suggests the need for the complexification of the discourses and practices of security governance through the adaptive contingency of “security as resilience”, which rejects the detachment between human and natural systems and the ability of the former to control the latter. The argument is that the logic of “security as resilience” is more appropriate than the conventional logic of “security as control”. In policy terms, therefore, the complexity of global security governance intimates an ability to cope with vulnerabilities, defy adversity and construct a new proficiency in response to the uncertainty, cognitive challenges, complex unbounded risks and the need for continuing adaptation prompted by the alterations in global life.
In a globalizing world of intense intercultural and transnational interactions, learning and knowledge are becoming increasingly more standardized and homogeneous based on the assumption that the world is functioning in real time. This drive for standardization (expressed in practices such as harmonization of higher education, national curriculum standards and international testing) is facilitated in part by technological innovation and it takes place in a world of shrinking time—space where time is seen as uniform, linear and de-contextualized. The author argues that the concept of time is central in the construction of knowledge, the experience of difference and the labour of pedagogy. The dominant assumption of living in a synchronized, globalized world where everyone is connected in real time has implications for the ways in which educational practices generate new ‘scientific’ ways of constructing otherness and justifying inequality, albeit under the banners of quality, accountability and choice.
This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Communication
Climate, History, Society, Culture > Ideas and Knowledge
Examining the rise and fall of a public–private marine biotechnological enterprise in Hawaii, this article analyses how promises to make products and profits from marine microbes in archipe-lagic waters drew upon peculiarly American sentiments about the sea as a politically uncontested treasure-chest of biodiversity. I argue that attention to the material process by which lab and legal instruments are calibrated to one another to generate biotech exchange-value must be joined by consideration of how scientists and their interlocutors imagine the meaning of biology—as discipline and as corporeal substance and process. Without such symbolic analysis, theorizations of biocapital remain incomplete. To discuss the genre of capitalism evidenced in marine biotechnological endeav-ors in Hawaii, I develop the concept of blue-green capitalism, where blue stands for a vision of the freedom of the open ocean and for speculative sky-high promise, and green for belief in ecological sustainability as well as biological fecundity. I show that this vision, dominant in industry–university settings, ran into direct conflict with Native Hawaiian legal epistemologies of the sea. The 'globe' imagined in 'globalization' is a closed system, a finite sphere crisscrossed by flows of people, goods and media. Such an encircling topology coalesced from circuits of mercant-ilism, capitalism and colonialism. With the Cold War and the rise of environmentalism, the globe acquired a scientific icon in the image of Earth from space, a blue-green orb of mostly oceans. At the millennium's turn, the Pacific, once the westward limit of the American fron-tier, morphed into a futuristic force field holding together the Pacific Rim, host to new cur-rents of transoceanic market and telecommunication processes. For believers in the end of history, West spiraled around to meet East, fulfilling a market manifest destiny. Stefan Helmreich is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has writ-ten extensively on the rhetoric and practice of Artificial Life, a field dedicated to the computer simulation of living sys-tems, notably in Silicon second nature: Culturing artificial life in a digital world (University of California Press, 1998), an ethnography of biologists and computer scientists working at the Santa Fe Institute for the Sciences of Complexity. He is now at work on a book about how scientific portraits of the oceans are transforming as marine biologists reima-gine the sea through the language and techniques of genomics, bioinformatics, biotechnology, biodiversity mapping, and systems modeling. Entitled Alien ocean: An anthropology of marine biology, the monograph zeroes in on work in marine microbiology, reporting on fieldwork undertaken with scientists at deep-sea hydrothermal vents and in areas of the open ocean outside national sovereignty.
This chapter provides a critical analysis of the transformation of social movements in complex societies.
Taking a Foucauldian framework as its point of departure, this paper discusses how transnational discourses of knowledge and
learning operate in the profession of computer engineering and form a certain logic through which modes of being an engineer
are regulated. Both the knowledge domain of computer engineering and its related labour market is heavily internationalised
and characterised by a general focus on universalism and standardisation. Moreover, rapid shifts in technologies and institutional
arrangements contribute to an embracement of more wide-ranging discourses related to lifelong learning and the enterprising
self. Thus, dominant discourses of knowledge and learning within this profession reflect processes of globalisation and take
a transnational character. The paper discusses how the discourses in play constitute mechanisms of governmentality that present
certain expectations to professionals and shape their energies, efforts and desires in certain directions. In order to be
influential, however, the discourses depend on individuals who take up the subject positions offered and enact them in locally
relevant and partially creative ways. Thus, careful analyses of the discourses in specific knowledge communities, as well
as of their interrelated subject positions, may enhance our understanding of the more epistemic dimensions of globalisation
and how these come to influence the imaginations of individuals as ‘citizens of the world.’
The First Edition of this contemporary classic can claim to have put ‘consumer culture’ on the map, certainly in relation to postmodernism. Updated throughout, this expanded new edition includes a fully revised preface that explores the developments in consumer culture since the First Edition. Among the most noteworthy areas discussed are the effect of global warming on consumption, the rise of the new rich, changes in the North/South divide and the new diversity of consumer culture. The result is a book that shakes the boundaries of debate, from one of the foremost writers on culture and postmodernism of the present day.
The current knowledge economy in terms of their human rights component, the author argues, offers a space where demands and claims can be articulated. Websites, databases, documentation and archives about Rwanda, Bosnia or Indian dalits are ‘archives of suffering’. And this databasing of atrocity, deprivation and suffering is a counter-knowledge, an alternate view of both knowledge-work and globalization itself. Using critical theorists in new media and cyberculture studies, I explore the new domain of knowledge that online databases offer exploring a human rights website Witness (www.witness.org) and its poetics.
Concepts and metaphors referring to the idea of mobility have become pervasive in contemporary social theory. The aim of this article is to discuss what is implied by considering contemporary society as constituted by mobility – or rather mobilitiesi, to use the lexicon of scholars in this field. To do so, we start by reviewing some of the most influential contemporary social theories, and provide an account of the ways in which they handle and operationalize the concept of mobility. In the second part, we critically reflect on the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ by seeking to identify its contributions to social theory, as well as its weaknesses and areas for development. We argue, first, that in order to be constructed as a full-fledged theory, mobility studies need to engage in an ontological discussion regarding the similarities and differences between various mobilities; second, that a more substantial conceptual reflection needs to be led with regard to the mutual constitution of mobility and society. We conclude by proposing an analytical framework intended to overcome these limitations, which we then illustrate through an empirical example regarding the mobility of institutions of higher education.
This thesis deals with questions of how state-society interactions of two different states, a weak state - Papua New Guinea - and a strong state - Japan - have influenced responses to their respective internal and external challenges, particularly those caused by the anarchic and economic competitive nature of the post-Cold War international environment, globalisation and fragmentation. It is also a study of state endeavours for the survival of these two states. The investigation was founded on the view that traditional state explanations of international relations do not satisfactorily account for the complexity of how state-society interactions in these two countries influence their internal and external efforts towards their state survival. The thesis is also innovative in that there have been almost no studies that have researched the two countries, side by side. Section One of the thesis provides a theoretical framework and explanatory tools - a theoretical framework in international relations through examining globalisation and fragmentation. In exploring the bases for the survival of the state, this thesis investigates the link between domestic political conditions and foreign policy responses by employing the explanatory tools of the state-in-society analysis and foreign policy behaviour analysis. By so doing, the studies presented in this thesis enable the capture of the dynamics of intensified state-society interactions in two different states, and show how these influence the survival of the state. In particular, it considers the difference between a weak state and a strong state. A weak state is limited in its state strength in terms of compliance, government legitimacy and participation and ability to create social cohesion. On the other hand, a state that can maximise its state strength is a strong state. It is argued that both kinds of states have different abilities when responding and adapting to the challenges of globalisation. Section Two explores domestic and foreign policy in PNG. The first study is a critical examination of the interaction between the state and society in a weak state - PNG. It is argued that a state that is being challenged by domestic social forces is weakened, but also that a weak state is not necessarily synonymous with a weak society. The second part of Section Two offers a critical and comprehensive examination of the foreign policy responses of PNG and how it has responded to its external challenges. It is shown to be a country with limited available state resources and foreign policy options. Therefore, it is also argued that PNG's foreign policy behaviour must be considered from the point of view of the ongoing need for the survival of the state, that is, 'friends to all, enemies to none'.Section Three is a critical examination of how particular social forces penetrate the policy-making of a state in domestic politics and in the foreign policy arena in Japan. It is argued that Japan's hierarchical structure is a fundamental cause for the intensified state-society interaction, and results in certain social forces penetrating the policy-making of the state by gaining proximity to the highest authorities of the state. In domestic politics, it is argued that the penetration of policy-making by certain social forces weakened state capacity, and ultimately resulted in the annihilation of non-conservative politics that led Japan's political transformation in the 1990s. In the foreign policy arena, it is argued that the penetration of policy-making by particular social forces occurred because Japan's Official Development Assistance provides relative material power that the state leaders and elite can mobilise as a powerful diplomatic tool, minimising its foreign policy vulnerability, while maximising its strategic foreign policy objectives. It is therefore argued that Japan's state-society interactions determine its external responses. This thesis has shown how state-society interaction in PNG and Japan has influenced various responses for their survival. The studies throughout the thesis show that while the state that is a strong state has greater capacity than a state that is a weak state, a society in a weak state possesses greater resilience and tenaciousness than its counterpart society in a strong state.
This article examines the architecture of public access and of private digital networks in order to establish in what ways they might be (a) subject to regulation, (b) alter the authority of the national state, and (c) have positive or negative impacts on liberal democracy and on the political potential of civil society. Two of the key issues explored in this context are the meaning of regulation, which is likely to be quite different from our historically grounded understandings of state regulation, and, second, the sharp and often overlooked differences between public access and private digital networks.
In response to Bourdieu and Wacquant, I argue that American hegemony in setting the terms of debate on ethnicity and racism is nothing new, led in the first half of the century by US heterotopic intellectuals, immigrants, outsiders and descendants of slaves. Ironically, in the light of claims made by the authors, in the post-war era the debate is increasingly dominated by ex-imperial British and French postcolonial thinkers. The authors' disquiet is more explicable, however, if viewed against the background of French republican discourses that deny the legitimacy of `difference' in the public sphere. But in the final analysis, terms such as multiculturalism or ethnicity are not legislated from above but respond to grassroots social movements, and in France minority groups are presently claiming a voice and presence in the public sphere.
What fundamental changes in the state, and in the analysis of the state, have been stimulated by economic globalization? In the course of interactions with global markets and regulatory agencies, so-called Asian tiger countries like Malaysia and Indonesia have created new economic possibilities, social spaces and political constellations, which in turn condition their further actions. The shifting relations between market, state, and society have resulted in the state's flexible experimentations with sovereignty. Graduated sovereignty refers to a) the different modes of governing segments of the population who relate or do not relate to global markets; and b) the different mixes of legal compromises and controls tailored to the requirements of special production zones. The Asian financial crisis further demonstrates the concept of graduation in that the market-oriented agenda can mean different things, strengthening state power and protections in certain areas, but not in others.
This text offers insight into one of the classic questions of history: why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As the author shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly, he demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade. The author argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths. Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths, paths Europe could have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas.
Contents BOLI JOHN THOMAS GEORGE M. Part One: 1. BOLI JOHN THOMAS GEORGE M. 2. BOLI JOHN LOYA THOMAS A. LOFTIN TERESA Part Two: 3. FRANK DAVID JOHN HIRONAKA ANN MEYER JOHN W. SCHOFER EVAN TUMA NANCY BRANDON 4. BERKOVITCH NITZA 5. KIM YOUNG S. 6. FINNEMORE MARTHA Part Three: 7. LOYA THOMAS A. BOLI JOHN 8. BARRETT DEBORAH FRANK DAVID JOHN 9. CHABBOTT COLETTE 10. SCHOFER EVAN BOLI JOHN
One of the founding fathers of Italian "workerism," Antonio Negri was associated with the Marxist extra-parliamentary organization Potere operaio [Workers' Power] during the 1960s and with the Italian autonomist movement during the 1970s. He was imprisoned on political charges from 1979 to 1983 and from 1997 to 2003. Between 1983 and 1997, Negri lived in exile in Paris, where he continues to hold a university lectureship.
In the Anglophone world, Negri is best known for his collaborative work with Michael Hardt, in particular for their theory of capitalist globalization, developed in Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London and New York: Penguin Press, 2004). "Empire" is the term coined by Negri and Hardt to describe the flexible, transnational form of sovereignty that develops contemporarily with the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism. Hardt and Negri re-introduce the concept of the "multitude"—taken from the seventeenth-century political philosophy of Hobbes, Spinoza, and others—in order to designate the collective subject that labors and struggles under Empire's global regime of exploitation.
In exploring the transformations of art and culture in the age of Empire, the essay translated below touches on many of the central themes of Negri's recent work. A prime example of Negri's capacity for theoretical synthesis, the essay surveys the economic, political, and cultural developments of the past decades in order to trace them to the anthropological and ontological transformation that accompanies the transition from the system of Fordist nation-states to Empire. Negri invokes a wide range of conceptual apparatuses—from Spinoza's ontology to the theory of space developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus – in order to reverse Adorno and Horkheimer's vision of capital's all-encompassing dominion and to argue for the autonomy and creativity of the multitude.
Max Henninger (MA, PhD) lives in Berlin and works as a translator. He is the German translator of Italian novelist and poet Nanni Balestrini. His critique of Antonio Negri's theory of post-Fordism is forthcoming in the online journal Ephemera.
ABSTRACT This paper argues that to understand the legitimacy of a culture we need to investigate its relation to the archive, the site for the accumulation of records. Archive reason is a kind of reason which is concerned with detail, it constantly directs us away from the big generalization, down into the particularity and singularity of the event. Increasingly the focus has shifted from archiving the lives of the good and the great down to the detail of mundane everyday life. One implication here is that rather than see the archive as a specific place in which we deposit records, documents, photographs, film, video and all the minutiae on which culture is inscribed, should we not seek to extend the walls of the archive to place it around the everyday, the world? If everything can potentially be of significance shouldn't part of the archive fever be to record and document everything, as it could one day be useful? The problem then becomes, not what to put into the archive, but what one dare leave out. Some of the implications of these questions were considered by Georg Simmel, in his argument that there has been a build up and overload in the production and circulation of objective culture. This is now beyond our subjective capacity to assimilate and order, given the finite limits of the human life course we all face. It is something which confronts the individual with irresolvable dilemmas over selectivity, with each particular choice amounting to a wager which inevitably closes off others. Related questions about the difficulties of handling cultural completeness, were also addressed by Jorge Luis Borges in his discussion of the Library of Babel and the Aleph. Yet both could hardly have anticipated the full implications of the electronic archive: the development of new technologies for storing, searching and communicating information through the Internet with its databases and hypertext links. The electronic archive offers new possibilities for speed, mobility and completeness of access to cultures which have become digitalized, which raise fundamental questions about ownership, intellectual property rights, censorship and democratic access. The implications for culture are clear: the new electronic archives will not only change the form in which culture is produced and recorded, but the wider conditions under which it is enacted and lived as well.
At the beginning of the 21st century the conditio humana cannot be understood nationally or locally but only globally. This constitutes a revolution in the social sciences. The `sociological imagination' (C. Wright Mills) so far has basically been a nation state imagination. The main problem is how to redefine the sociological frame of reference in the horizon of a cosmopolitan imagination. For the purpose of empirical research I distinguish between three concepts: interconnectedness (David Held et al.), liquid modernity (Zygmunt Bauman) and cosmopolitization from within. The latter is a kind of class analysis after class analysis, which takes on board globalization internalized. For the purposes of social analysis, therefore, it is necessary to distinguish systematically between the national manifestation on the one hand and cosmopolitan reality of `global flows', currents of information, symbols, money, risks, people, social inequalities, on the other. This internal involuntary and often unseen cosmopolitanization from below of the national sphere of experience is occurring, however, with the power of economic globalization. So what does inner `cosmopolitanization' mean? The key concepts and questions of a way of life, such as nourishment, production, identity, fear, memory, pleasure, fate, power and politics, can no longer be located and understood nationally, but only globally whether in the shape of globally shared collective futures, capital flows, impending ecological or economic catastrophes, global foodstuff chains, transnational power games, or the `Esperanto' of pop music. In this article I look at transformation in the understanding of space-time, of identity, of the production paradigms, as well as at the resulting consequences for key sociological concepts like class and power and, within this frame, point to certain dilemmas of cosmopolitanism.
The Great Divergence brings new insight to one of the classic questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As Ken Pomeranz shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly, Pomeranz demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade. Pomeranz argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths. Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths--paths Europe could have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas.
The Gutenberg Galaxy catapulted Marshall McLuhan to fame as a media theorist and, in time, a new media prognosticator. Fifty years after its initial publication, this landmark text is more significant than ever before. Readers will be amazed by McLuhan’s prescience, unmatched by anyone since, predicting as he did the dramatic technological innovations that have fundamentally changed how we communicate. The Gutenberg Galaxy foresaw the networked, compressed ‘global village’ that would emerge in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries - despite having been written when black-and-white television was ubiquitous. This new edition of The Gutenberg Galaxy celebrates both the centennial of McLuhan’s birth and the fifty-year anniversary of the book’s publication. A new interior design updates The Gutenberg Galaxy for twenty-first-century readers, while honouring the innovative, avant-garde spirit of the original. This edition also includes new introductory essays that illuminate McLuhan’s lasting effect on a variety of scholarly fields and popular culture. A must-read for those who inhabit today’s global village, The Gutenberg Galaxy is an indispensable road map for our evolving communication landscape.
'Globalization’ is one of the key concepts of our time. It is used by both the right and the left as the cornerstone of their analysis of the international economy and polity. In both political and academic discussions, the assumption is commonly made that the process of economic globalization is well under way and that this represents a qualitatively new stage in the development of international capitalism. But is there in fact such a thing as a genuinely global economy? Globalization in Question investigates this notion, providing a very different account of the international economy and stressing the possibilities for its continued and extended governance. The new edition of this best-selling text has been thoroughly revised and updated to take into account new issues which have become salient in the period since the first and second editions were published. Several new chapters have been added and others combined or re-written to assess the growing supra-national regionalization of the international economy, the emergence of India and China as new super-powers, and the possibilities for the continued governance of the global system. A new author has been added to strengthen the analytical embrace of the book given the untimely death of Paul Hirst in 2003. Globalization in Question's third edition is a continuing intervention into current discussions about the nature and prospects of globalization. The book has far-reaching implications which will be of interest to students and academics in a number of disciplines including politics, sociology, economics and geography, as well as to journalists and policy-makers.
Incluye índice Incluye bibliografía Se realiza una descripción de la forma en que la economía global opera actualmente, estudiando procesos económicos, políticos, y tecnológicos que crean tendencias globales en la actividad económica y afectan comunidades locales en distintas formas.
The new terrorism is a major exemplifying case for complexity theory for example, it exemplifies major disproportionalities between cause and effect, unpredictable outcomes, and self-organizing, emergent structures. It also illustrates, I argue in this article, the emergence of global microstructures: of forms of connectivity and coordination that combine global reach with microstructural mechanisms that instantiate self-organizing principles and patterns. Global systems based on microstructural principles do not exhibit institutional complexity but rather the asymmetries, unpredictabilities and playfulness of complex (and dispersed) interaction patterns. The analysis of complex global microstructures helps to collect and assess empirical evidence for the architecture of the global structural forms of a world society. It also suggests a theory of microglobalization the view that the texture of a global world becomes articulated through microstructural patterns that develop in the shadow of (but liberated from) national and local institutional patterns.
Globalization, Transnationalization and Migration
- J F Friedman
Friedman, J.F. (2004) 'Globalization, Transnationalization and Migration', in J. Friedman and S. Randeria
(eds) Worlds on the Move. London: I.B. Tauris.
Disjunction and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy Global Culture Liquid ModernityThe Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies', Theory, Culture & Society ('Cosmopolis' special issue
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Many Globalizations Constructing World Culture
- P Berger
Berger, P. (2002) 'Introduction', in P. Berger and S.P. Huntington (eds) Many Globalizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boli, J. and G.M. Thomas (eds) (1999) Constructing World Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Briggs, A. and D. Snowman (1996) Fins de Siècle: How Centuries End, 1400–2000.
Recentering GlobalizationComplex Global Microstructures: The New Terrorist Societies', Theory, Culture & Society ('Complexity' special issue
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Iwabuchi, K. (2002) Recentering Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Knorr Cetina, K. (2005) 'Complex Global Microstructures: The New Terrorist Societies', Theory, Culture & Society ('Complexity' special issue, ed. J. Urry), 22(5): 213–34.
Radiated Identities Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World
- B Adam
Adam, B. (1999) 'Radiated Identities', in M. Featherstone and S. Lash (eds) Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World. London: Sage.
Recentering Globalization
- K Iwabuchi
Iwabuchi, K. (2002) Recentering Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
His recent publications include: Automobilities (edited with N. Thrift and J. Urry, Sage, 2005); and Consumer Culture and Postmodernism
Mike Featherstone is editor of Theory, Culture & Society. His recent publications include:
Automobilities (edited with N. Thrift and J. Urry, Sage, 2005); and Consumer Culture and
Postmodernism (2nd edn, forthcoming from Sage, 2006).
- M Hardt
- A Negri
Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2005) Multitude. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms', Theory
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Werbner, P. (2006) 'Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms', Theory, Culture & Society ('Problematizing Global
Knowledge' special issue), 23(1-2).
- Boli, J.