Theories of Globalization

Barrie Axford

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745671352
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Globalisierung

Theories of Globalization offers students and scholars a comprehensive and critical introduction to the concept of globalization. Barrie Axford expertly guides readers through the full range of perspectives on the topic, from international political economy to geography, global anthropology to cultural and communication studies. In so doing he draws out the common threads between competing theories, as well as pinpointing the problems that challenge our understanding of globalization. Key terms such as 'globalism' and 'globality' are carefully explained and central themes like capitalism, governance, culture and history explored in full.

In assessing the contribution made by globalization theory, Axford's account also sheds new light on several crucial current issues. These range from the changing shape of democracy and citizen engagement with governance, to issues surrounding 'just war' and humane intervention, and problems relating to empire and post-colonialism.

This wide-ranging and detailed new book will be essential reading for students and scholars of international politics, sociology and any area where the concept of globalization is discussed and disputed.

CHAPTER 1

What's in a Name? Themes, Concepts and Obfuscations

Introduction

Although the genealogy of the term ‘globalization’ reaches back to the 1920s, it is possible to identify the precursors of contemporary global theory in the writing of luminaries such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx and Georg Simmel; while the study of global history has its roots in the historiography of civilizations with considerably less than planetary extent (Spengler, 1918; Toynbee, 1934–61; Robertson and Inglis, 2004; Browning, 2011). Writing about the key concept of globality, Jens Bartelson (2009b, 113) refers to a ‘medieval cosmology’, perhaps even a scholarship, which entertained the idea of what we now call statelessness. We should also remember that any discussion of global change involves both human biological and social change as well as changes in the natural world. So it could be argued that we have chosen an arbitrary starting point from which to launch this analysis, while being unduly limited about its scope.

But as James Mittelman notes, although globalization is a concept whose early study owed much to developed research on social change under modernity, the rise and spread of capitalism and the origins and development of the state system – in other words, to classical social theory – it is really only towards the end of the 1980s that anything resembling a theoretical and empirical literature explicitly about the global begins to emerge (2004; Sklair, 2007). Some early and popular work on globalization tended to abrogate history and the influence of key historiographies in pursuit of the claim that the last decades of the twentieth century constituted a major rupture with preceding modernity. There may be some empirical weight to this view, but as we shall see the idea of the global cannot, or should not, be bracketed within a scholarship that not only claims globalization's novel ontology, but is cavalier in its treatment of earlier readings of world-making practices (Rosow, 2003; Browning, 2011; Featherstone, 2006).

The search for tight conceptualization and analytical rigour has to be uppermost in the minds of those who study globalization, but its popularity and notoriety have meant that almost any discussion of the concept leaves room for obfuscation and ideological special pleading. We will adopt a more forensic and interrogative stance on the ways in which globalization has been theorized during its brief period of intellectual and popular celebrity. In that pursuit, we will canvass the breadth of social-scientific scholarship on the theme of the global, since not all reflection can be understood as theory and not all theory is good scholarship (Shaw, 2000; 2003). Threaded through the critical account is the awkward and, for scholars of globalization, enduringly sensitive question of just how much we have learned about the world and how far the social sciences have developed through employing globalization as a descriptive term and a concept that fosters and perhaps transforms social-scientific explanation (Albert, 2007; Leander, 2009).

Scholarship on globalization is driven by both normative considerations and the pursuit of an empirically rigorous and historically informed social science; not always an easy mix. While it is the product of a number of disciplines it is probably no exaggeration to say that today much of it is located within the, admittedly broad, field of international studies, especially international political economy (IPE) – standing as a feature of that field's continuing search for intellectual identity – and, of course, in sociology (Bruff, 2005; Berry, 2008; Mittelman, 2004; Sassen, 2006). Which is not to claim that contributions from other disciplines have not had a significant, even seminal, influence on the canon, or that there is no developed globalization scholarship outside international studies and sociology (Sassen, 2007; Tomlinson, 1999; 2007; Rossi, 2007; Modelski et al., 2008).

Contributions from geography are among the most ambitious and most cited in globalization studies; while anthropology, cultural and communication studies, history and, in considerably smaller measure, mainstream economics all contribute to a rich weave of research on the complex theme of the global. Cross- or non-disciplinary themes such as gender, health, poverty and war have also inflected their research with a global(ization) dimension. In turn the study of globalization has drawn on these themes to produce more fine-grained accounts of, inter alia, migration, pandemics, inequalities and violence in the contemporary world. But in the case of economics a word of caution is necessary. While a good deal of globalization scholarship has addressed the economics of globalization, or considered globalization as an economic phenomenon or ideology, economics as a discipline has not engaged wholeheartedly with the concept (Stiglitz, 2002; Rodrik et al., 2004). The dominant approach from mainstream economics consists of cost–benefit analysis of globalization effects and, from authors like Joseph Stiglitz and Dani Rodrik, quite impassioned critiques of market economics. In these accounts commentary has passed over from the formal scientism of neo-classical economics to the realm of normative engagement.

In work on globalization from IPE the engagement has been much more wholesale around the interplay of states, non-state actors, markets, commodity chains and networks, as well as around the staple antinomy of agency versus structure as the ontological basis for social inquiry. On some accounts, IPE research, especially in the USA, has been depleted by a desire to ape more scientific, positivist work from mainstream economics at the expense of the investigation of big ideas and grand themes, including globalization (Cohen, 2009; Keohane, 2009; 1986). At the same time, the effects of neo-Gramscian ideas and constructivist thinking on understanding the political economy of the global may have been to soften the analytical cutting edge of mainstream economics unduly. Despite its normative or ‘black-letter’ approaches to global themes such as human rights and corporate governance, international law has also been less than engaged over globalization, especially from within the academic core of the discipline. Today, synergies between international law and international relations (IR) are receiving much more attention (Cutler, 2005; Noortmann and Ryngaert, 2010). And disciplines aside, there are many authors whose ideas have been extensively borrowed across fields contributing, as Martin Shaw says, to a ‘relativisation of … historic disciplines’ (2003, 42; Giddens, 1990; 1992).

Yet the grail of critical globalization scholarship – multidimensionality, by which is meant a systematic account of the analytically separate but interconnected and perhaps mutually constitutive dynamics of economics, politics and culture, delivered through a robust interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity – has proved elusive, approximated only in a small number of studies, achieved in even fewer (Robertson, 1996; Rosenau, 2003; Hay and Marsh, 2000; Appelbaum and Robinson, 2005; Featherstone, 2006; Rosow, 2003; Giulianotti and Robertson, 2009; International Political Sociology, 2009). On the face of it this dearth is strange, because as Roland Robertson says (2007a, 406), ‘[c]ategories for the comprehension of human life are … becoming destabilized’ mainly as a result of our growing sense of the global. As our consciousness of the world grows, so do our fears about its fate, along with the recognition that we cannot contain many problems and crises at particular scales, or provide understanding of them from within the confines of normal social science (Albert, 2007).

This same awareness conjures its own brands of protectionism, ones not confined to personal and collective coping strategies for a world perceived as unsafe through the threats of planet death, pandemic, global terrorism or economic slump. Within academia the walls between disciplines remain extant to a degree that mocks the ambition to create – Ulrich Beck says ‘reframe’ – analytical categories for a globalizing world (Beck and Sznaider, 2006; Scholte, 2000; 2005b; Rosenau, 2003; Rosow, 2003; Rosamond, 2006; Robertson, 2007a). Much social science suffers from the propensity to analyse areas of collective life in terms of discrete categories – a besetting weakness – and the study of globalization, a concept that challenges the very idea of boundaries, has not been well served by scholarship largely predicated on their maintenance.

Globalization is no journeyman concept and yet it remains infuriatingly ambiguous and elusive. While sceptical commentary suggests that this is a necessary consequence of an unworkable, perhaps unteachable, idea, in no small part ambiguity results from a recurring failure to separate ‘global’ concepts – globalization (process), globalism (ideology) and globality, a notion which musters as consciousness, condition, framework, even system – which share the same root but often reflect different discourses about, and sometimes cleave to diverse theoretical positions on, the ‘global’ (Harvey, 2000; Shaw, 2003; Caselli, 2008; Meyer, 2007). We will examine these consequential differences later in the chapter.

The study of globalization also triggers powerful normative and ideological sentiments. At their most stark or most facile, these turn on the question of whether globalization is a good or a bad thing. Such accounts sometimes rehearse the case for alternative forms of globalization to subvent progressive and humanitarian goals or else offer prescriptions for different kinds of universality. This empirical-normative agenda has spawned a number of key research questions. First, what is globalization and what is not? Second, does globalization deliver massive and disjunctive social change? Third, are apparently dramatic changes in world politics and economics merely an unfolding of world history as universalizing modernity achieves its denouement? Fourth, can the idea of the world being made into a single place, demonstrating a systematic rather than a jobbing unicity, be taken seriously? Other important questions address the provenance of globalization, asking whether it is a purely contemporary or a historical phenomenon; whether it musters as a progressive or a regressive force (Wallace-Brown, 2008); whose interests are best served (Woods, 2006; Abdelal, 2007); and finally, whether the idea of the world's unity also requires what Jean-François Bayart (2007, 31) rather inelegantly calls its ‘uniformization’ (see also Guillen, 2001).

Undoubtedly these are important issues, but more challenging for the social sciences is the claim that globalization confounds conventional thinking about the organization and conduct of social life and thus requires a transformation of social scientific knowledge (Scholte, 2000; 2005b; Cameron and Palan, 2004; Rosow, 2003; Shaw, 2003; Bartelson, 2009b). For as Saskia Sassen notes, when discussing globalization, the issues are rarely confinable to the perspectives of one branch of knowledge, even though the tradition in the parvenu fields of social science has been to organize knowledge about different spheres of social life under specific disciplines, each with its preferred epistemologies and methodologies. Instead, good scholarship on globalization requires, at the least, ‘operating at the intersection of multiple disciplinary forms of knowledge and techniques for research and interpretation’ (Sassen, 2007, 11).

Much scholarship on globalization engages with the concept forearmed by established (Western) intellectual and disciplinary traditions, which can make it hard for scholars to speak to each other across disciplinary boundaries (Cameron and Palan, 2004; Rosamond, 2006; Mittelman, 2010). As a result, the study of globalization occupies a rather uneasy space between disciplines and paradigms; which is a weakness, because its study is often seen as in some way inauthentic, or merely diversionary; and a strength, because it might hold out the prospect of a social science more in tune with twenty-first-century social and political realities.

Theory and the Scholarship of Globalization

Early claims that globalization had achieved the status of an ‘ascendant paradigm’ were manifestly overblown (Mittelman, 2004). Yet disputes about globalization's theoretical status are productive because they highlight particular moments of intellectual doubt and excitement as well as reflecting the turbulence and enduring complexity of the real world. Indeed, Martin Shaw has argued that the emergence of globalization scholarship itself reflected the crisis and demise of the old Cold-War system and gave a decidedly geo-political twist to an already advanced crisis of modernity (2000).

When ideas about postmodernity ‘first emerged in the 1980s, predominantly in the cultural sciences, they reflected a general sense of [an] emergent crisis that had not yet reached the stage of decisive political change’ (Shaw, 2003, 35). Prescriptions for a new ‘post-Cold-War’ world appeared at the beginning of the 1990s as the Soviet world-empire broke up and a prevailing sense of epochal change also shaped emerging trends in social theory. The idea of ‘globalization’ became dominant in the mid-1990s, just as that turbulence was partly resolved and new world power relations – driven by liberal economics and new communication technologies – became modal (2003, 35). In Shaw's estimation, our obsession with globalization and our attempts to gloss it as a new theory of the present and paradigm for the future are part of a wider crisis or transformation of world order yet to be resolved fully.

All theories simplify social complexity; while social life is rarely ‘cut from whole cloth’ (Giddens, 1990, 27). To be convincing, theory – other than normative theory, which expresses values and cannot be disproved by pointing to actual features of the world around us – should permit some existential reference and thus afford a purchase on what is happening in the world. Theory should also be clear about its explanatory limits, and in this respect, as Shaw also reminds us, since the mid-1990s ‘the decline in the fashion for naïve globalization-thought enables us to see what is more fundamental and durable in global development’ (2003, 35).

Globalization scholarship: Globalization as a proto-paradigm

The scholarship of globalization is riven with disputes, many of them reflecting quarrels within and between disciplines. Within international studies James Mittelman (2004) identifies a robust and continuing battle between those he labels ‘para-keepers’ and ‘para-makers’. The former are protectors of existing paradigms who resist the claim that globalization offers a new way of organizing social life and constituting knowledge about it. Para-keepers, says Mittelman, are found among realists, including Marxist realists, inter­dependence theorists, world-systems analysts, some social democrats (often under the anti- or alter-globalization banner and in certain brands of constructivism) and new institutionalists (Wallerstein, 1974; Keohane and Nye, 2000; Hirst et al., 2009). Para-makers claim to have ‘shifted to an innovatory paradigm’ (Mittelman, 2004, 21) wherein globalization reveals deep flaws in modernist social science. Recent work by sociologists Ulrich Beck, John Urry and Martin Albrow are avatars of such radical approaches (Beck, 2006; Urry, 2003; Albrow, 1996).

The ranks of para-makers include a tranche of theorists conveniently mustered as ‘de-territorialists’, some apostate or post-Marxist treatments of empire, complexity theorists and a smattering of writers who see modernity as giving way to globality (Scholte, 2005a; Cerny, 1999; Hardt and Negri, 2000; Rosenau, 1997; Albrow, 2007a). What divides proponents within and between camps are mainly questions of epistemology and methodology (what globalization means for our understanding of the world around us and how it should be studied). These intellectual differences have translated into an increasingly dynamic scholarship of globalization where the temper of commentary and the objects of research have changed since the early 1980s. Beck and Sznaider opine that as the distinctions between national and international and local and global have become blurred or dissolve, so have the ‘premises and boundaries that define the units of empirical research and theory’ (2006, 13).

Robert Holton (2005) suggests that over this period globalization research has come in three overlapping but recognizable waves – hyper-globalist, sceptical and post-sceptical or, as some would have it, ‘transformationalist’ – each more self-conscious and cautious than its predecessor (Hay and Marsh, 2000; Martell, 2007;Bruff, 2005; Berry, 2008; Rosamond, 2006; Bartelson, 2009a). The wave motif also receives endorsement from Held and McGrew (2007), who identify four such waves: theoretical, historical, institutional and deconstructive. The waves are by no means discrete, but taken toge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1: What's in a Name? Themes, Concepts and Obfuscations
• CHAPTER 2: Theorizing Globalization: Political Science and Sociology
• CHAPTER 3: Theorizing Globalization: Geography, Anthropology and Cultural and Communication Studies
• CHAPTER 4: Theories of Globalization and Space
• CHAPTER 5: Theories of Globalization and Culture
• CHAPTER 6: Theories of Globalization and History
• CHAPTER 7: Theories of Globalization and Governance
• CHAPTER 8: Theories of Globalization and Capitalism
• CHAPTER 9: All Change: Critical Globalization Studies or a Social Science of Globality?
• Bibliography
• Index