Robinson - Theories of Globalization

The Globalization Debate and Theoretical Discourses

  • The pace of social change and transformation worldwide seems to have quickened dramatically, with implications for many dimensions of social life and human culture
  • Social change is related to increasing connectivity among people and countries worldwide
  • Globalization is multidimensional
  • There are many different theoretical discourses

World-System Theory

  • Globalization is not a recent phenomenon but is virtually synonymous with the birth and spread of world capitalism (1500)
  • The appropriate unit of analysis for macro social inquiry in the modern world is the larger historical system
  • Division of the world into 3 regions:   * Core   * Periphery   * Semi-periphery

Theories of Global Capitalism

  • Globalization is a novel stage in the evolving system of world capitalism, one with its own qualitatively new features that distinguish it from earlier periods
  • Sklair   * Transnational practices:     * Economic     * Political     * Cultural-ideological
  • Robinson   * Transnational production, capitalists, state
  • Hardt & Nergi   * Empire of global capitalism is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European domination and capitalist expansion of previous eras   * No identifiable agent

Network Society

  • Castell   * Technological change → causal determination in the processes of globalization   * New age of information   * Development of new information technology   * Capitalist retooling   * New economy is:     * Informational, knowledge-based     * Global     * Networked   * Close link between culture and productive forces   * Internet = new symbolic environment

Theories of Space, Place and Globalization

  • Giddens   * Time-space distanciation: intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happening are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa
  • Harvey
  • Sassen
  • Bell & Toffler
  • Roberston   * Global is only manifest in the local   * Ideas about home, locality and community have even extensively spread around the world in recent years, so the local has been globalized

Theories of Transnationality and Transnationalism

  • Rise of new communities and the formation of new social identities and relations
  • Range of social, cultural and political practices and states brought about by the sheer increase in social connectivity across borders
  • Immigration studies
  • Parrenas: theory of international division of reproductive labour

Modernity, Postmodernity and Globalization

  • Robertson   * Universalization of modernity   * Global field is constituted by cultural, social and phenomenological linkages between the individual, each national society, the international system of societies and humankind in general, in such way that the institutions of modernity become universal
  • Giddens
  • Meyer
  • Albrow

Global Culture

  • Rapid growth of the mass media and resultant global cultural flows and images in recent decades has created a global village
  • Globalization and religion, nations and ethnicity, global consumerism, global communications and the globalization of tourism
  • Robertson
  • Ritzer: McDonaldization   * Sociocultural processes by which the principles of fast-food restaurants came to dominate more and more sectors of the US and later world society
  • Appadurai

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