Living the Global City

Globalization as Local Process

John Eade

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134772414
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Politicians and academics alike have made globalization the key reference point for interpreting the 1990s. For many, globalization threatens both community and the nation-state. It appears to represent forces beyond human control. Living the Global City documents globalization's impact on everyday lives by drawing on research rather than rhetoric and arrives at a very different perspective. Living the Global City offers an analysis of globalization and global/local processes by focussing on specific issues and themes which include community, culture, milieu, socioscapes and sociospheres, microglobalization, poverty, ethnic identity and carnival. By advancing the debates which surround these issues through a redefinition of the terms in which they have been developed and engagement with the everyday lives of people in a global city, this book reveals how such key concepts as community, culture, class, poverty and identity can be reconceptualized in the context of global/local processes.

1
INTRODUCTION

John Eade

INTELLECTUAL AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS

This is an exciting time to produce a volume on living the global city. There is a widespread sense that the world is changing rapidly and drastically. While an awareness of change is nothing new contemporary debates about specific changes raise novel issues. These issues are debated not only in the mass media but in academic institutions where popular discourses concerning an emerging new world both inform and become the objects of analysis.

Sociologists have inevitably played a key role in this public debate about a ‘changing world’. They have engaged in a continuing process of discursive revision during the last twenty years as different structural paradigms have been challenged by the deconstructionist critique of those who have announced the ‘end of the social’ and, therefore, of conventional sociology. A rich diversity has emerged where different constituencies position themselves tangentially to others as locality, particularism, hybridity and heterogeneity are celebrated in opposition to the ‘grand narratives’ of the sociological Masters (sic). Usually described as ‘post-modern’, these critiques have sought to provide intellectual space where various minorities could speak, i.e. gays, lesbians, black people, refugees, migrants, residents of the ‘Third World’. Advocates of a ‘third space’ inhabited by these minorities have also challenged the traditional methods of Western analysis such as the preoccupation with binary oppositions.

As the twentieth century draws to a close an intellectual and political challenge has emerged from the diverse post-modern celebrations of a highly localized, heterogeneous, fragmented world: how to reveal the possibility of strategic alliances across such divisions as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and nation? This crucial question lies behind public debates about the resurgence of ‘ethnic violence’ in former Yugoslavia and USSR as the Cold War gave way to what the opponents of communism hailed as the ‘new world order’. At the more specific level of British politics the increasing popularity of single-issue campaigns has raised the question of how these different interest groups can find common ground in challenging central government.

During this period of rapid fragmentation and heterogeneity attention has been drawn by politicians, business leaders and journalists to a contradictory process of globalization. References by George Bush to a homogeneous new world order following the collapse of communist regimes are an example of a political attempt to anticipate and determine what that order might be. The deficiencies of United Nations missions in Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina have strengthened the position of those who question the reality of such a world order or the feasibility of a world order emerging. Attention is drawn to the abiding significance of the United States as the dominant partner in any global political arrangement and the continuing importance of nation-states. These reservations have also informed popular debates about the economic dimensions of globalization. Sceptics contend that the emergence of global markets where capital and information flow freely and instantaneously across time zones and geopolitical space is related to the continuing dominance of the United States or Western industrial nations. They also argue that globalization refers to a free enterprise project which is far more limited in its extent than its exponents would like to think.

The social and cultural dimensions of globalization are also popularly associated with debates concerning the extent to which differences between nation-states are diminished or eliminated by the global flow of ideas, information, capital and labour. The advocates of national and sub-national differences inevitably hail the continued vitality of those heterogeneous practices as a witness to the very limited impact of globalization or what some would prefer to call Americanization.

These popular debates have been paralleled by an academic discourse which has drawn on the homogeneity/heterogeneity opposition in an attempt to go beyond the formulations of politicians, journalists, business leaders and nongovernmental organizations. They have have also tried to move away from two academic paradigms which dominated the sociological analysis of international social and cultural change during the 1960s and 1970s—modernization and world systems theories. The drive to replace these two theoretical perspectives can be partially attributed to the very developments which the exponents of globalization wished to investigate, i.e. the decline of traditional class solidarities, the proliferation of de-centred social and cultural worlds and of third spaces between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, the end of the Cold War and the expansion of allegiances which referred to both supra-national and sub-national ‘imagined communities’.

At the Roehampton Institute we have debated the theoretical and substantive issues raised by the burgeoning academic interest in globalization. Our Research Cluster has brought together those undertaking research projects as well as colleagues from different departments who are generally interested in the topic. Given the highly generalized nature of the globalization debate our research strategy has focused on how people’s everyday lives are caught up in the globalization process. Our location within London has provided us with an opportunity to investigate locales within one of the world cities where it is widely accepted that the interweaving of global and local developments is intense. Through our discussions and substantive research we have produced a volume which is intended to: (a) engage in the theoretical issues raised by the globalization literature; and (b) relate those debates to an analysis of the engagement between global and local processes within London. As far as we are aware our project is the first of its kind to be undertaken within the UK and we believe that it could provide a model for new and appropriate research on globalization anywhere in the world.

Before we consider the particular arguments proposed by this volume’s contributors more light needs to be shed upon the key concepts with which we engage in our respective chapters.

KEY CONCEPTS

Globalization, glocalization and globality

Although Roland Robertson (1992) has noted the considerable disagreement over definitions of globalization, a prime concern among commentators has been the compression of both time and space. Anthony Giddens (1990), for example, analyses the ways in which space and time have become compressed in terms of two processes—‘distanciation’ and ‘disembedding’. Distanciation refers to ‘the conditions under which time and space are organised so as to connect presence and absence’ (Giddens 1990:14), while disembedding concerns the ways in which social relations are lifted out of their local contexts and restructured ‘across indefinite spans of time-space’ (ibid.: 21). The significance of nationstate boundaries and institutions declines as global and local social relations interweave and worldwide social relations intensify. Globalization does not necessarily lead to increasing social homogenization according to Giddens because distanciated relations are frequently engaged in a dialectical transformation. For Giddens ‘[l]ocal transformation is as much a part of globalization as the lateral extension of social connections across time and space’ (ibid.: 64, emphasis in the original).

While the analysis of globalization provided by Giddens focuses on social relations, Roland Robertson chooses to emphasize ‘the scope and depth of consciousness of the world as single place’. Globalization, therefore, involves not just ‘the objectiveness of increasing connectedness’ but also ‘subjective and cultural matters’. Robertson draws attention to the growth of ‘globe talk’—‘the discourse of globality’—which ‘consists largely in the shifting and contested terms in which the world as a whole is “defined”’ and which is ‘a vital component of contemporary global culture’ (Robertson 1992:113).

The implications of globalization for notions of locality are developed by Robertson in a more recent discussion where he claims that globalization entails the reconstruction and ‘the production of “home”, “community” and “locality”’ (Robertson 1995:30). Rather than the local and the global constituting analytical opposites locality ‘can be regarded, with certain reservations, as an aspect of globalization’ (ibid., emphasis in the original). Through global compression localities are both brought together and invented (ibid.: 35). While globalization is useful as an analytical concept referring to the ‘simultaneity and the interpenetration of what are conventionally called the global and the local, or—in more abstract vein the universal and the particular’, Robertson suggests that ‘glocalization’ might be a more accurate term to describe the global/local relationship. Glocalization refers, in the subjective and personal sphere, to the construction and invention of diverse localities through global flows of ideas and information.

Although Giddens and Robertson share a mutual interest in the interweaving of global and local processes, Robertson’s discussion of globality leads him to criticize Giddens for failing to appreciate ‘the significance of culture’ (Robertson 1992:144) and, therefore, being unable to theorize ‘the issue of “other cultures”’ (ibid.). Giddens is further taken to task for not realizing that:

The whole idea that one can sensibly interpret the contemporary world without addressing the issues that arise from current debates about the politics of culture, cultural capital, cultural difference, cultural homogeneity and heterogeneity, ethnicity, race and gender, and so on, is implausible.

(ibid.: 145)

Despite their differences in approach towards globalization Giddens and Robertson have both emphasized the importance of reflexivity in their understanding of global/local relations. In the process they have drawn on a sociological heritage which includes such ‘masters’ as Weber, Simmel, Durkheim and Parsons. Against post-modern attempts to deconstruct the social their discussion of globalization presents a case for the continuing relevance of academic sociology and its intellectual heritage.

Martin Albrow also rejects the post-modern deconstruction of the social but claims that globalization presents sociology with a novel challenge. The coming of what he calls the ‘global age’ (cf. Albrow 1996) requires a new sociological framework as sociology is itself globalized as individual sociologists enjoy the freedom of collaborating with their colleagues ‘anywhere on the globe’ and appreciate ‘the worldwide processes within which and on which they work’ (Albrow 1990:7). He detects, therefore, the emergence of a ‘universal discourse’ which embraces ‘multiple interlocutors based on different regions and cultures’ (ibid.: 8). An illustration of the way in which traditional sociological concepts can be reconstituted is provided in Chapter 2 of this volume where we explore community, culture and milieu. We suggest that globalization entails, for example, the deterritorialization of traditional concepts, their disaggregation and resynthesis, their extension ‘to embrace new realities’ and their global operationalization as well as ‘the generalization of local concepts to the level of global relevance and their assimilation into a transnational discourse’.

Scapes and spheres

The issues raised by Robertson’s examination of cultural homogeneity and heterogenity can be further explored through a seminal treatment by Arjun Appadurai of what he describes as a disjunctured ‘global cultural economy’ (Appadurai 1990:296). The relative autonomy of this global culture is sustained by the disjunctures between cultural, political and economic processes (ibid.). Appadurai outlines ‘an elementary framework’ for analysing the disjunctured global culture consisting of ‘the relationship between five dimensions of global cultural flow which can be termed: (a) ethnoscapes; (b) mediascapes; (c) technoscapes; (d) finanscapes; and (e) ideoscapes’ (ibid.). These scapes are ‘deeply perspectival constructs’ and comprise a ‘set of landscapes’ which are ‘navigated’ by individual social actors ‘who both experience and constitute larger formations, in part by their sense of what these landscapes offer’ (ibid.).

One of the advantages of the term ‘scapes’ lies in its reference to ‘the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes’ (ibid.: 297). From these scapes are built ‘imagined worlds’—‘multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe’ (ibid.: 296– 7). For Appadurai these scapes are engaged in processes of inequality and power. People across the world can challenge and perhaps undermine the ‘imagined worlds’ of state officials and entrepreneurs (ibid.: 297). The fluidity of these different components of global cultural flow is contrasted with the ‘relatively stable communities and networks’ through which people move (ibid.).

Appadurai’s model is attractively sensitive to the asymmetric flows of ideas, information, people and capital and it complements Robertson’s cultural perspective through its rejection of the highly economistic approach adopted by Wallerstein in world systems theory. Yet a question is raised by Appadurai’s assumption concerning the stability of the communities and networks through which people move. As Martin Albrow, for example, writes in Chapter 3 of this volume: ‘from the perspective of participants are they not equally “-scapes”?’ and suggests that Appadurai’s model needs to incorporate the concept of ‘socioscape’ —‘the vision of social formations which are more than the people who occupy them at any one time’. Conventional descriptions of local socioscapes in terms of ‘community’ and ‘neighbourhood’ are made redundant by globalization. In an extension of the argument introduced in the previous section, Albrow detects a ‘growing indeterminacy’ in people’s application of both old and new categories as social formations become delocalized. He suggests both that ‘sociosphere’ might describe ‘the sense of varying but overlapping spatial scope’ as local attachments are disembedded and that ‘socioscapes’ emerge where these sociospheres intersect.

Collective solidarities and individual meanings, the universal and the particular

The formulations devised by Giddens, Robertson and Albrow in particular reveal a persistent engagement in the relationship between the universal and the particular and between collective solidarities and individual understandings. Integral to Giddens’ model of globalization and reflexive modernity, for example, is his understanding of risk and trust where individuals can sustain physical and psychological security in a rapidly changing world where local social relations are disembedded. In a recent discussion Giddens refers to the ways in which ‘the most intimate connections between gender, sexuality and selfidentity, are publicly placed in question’, as people disengage from traditional relations (1994:106). Violence and dialogue are possibilities at both the level of the personal and the global and he detects ‘a real and clear symmetry between the possibility of a “democracy of the emotions” on the level of the personal life and the potential for democracy on the level of the global order’ (ibid.).

It appears that individual meanings for Giddens are the outcomes of the structural process of distanciation, disembedding and reflexivity. As Waters notes each of these three ‘main dynamics of modernization implies universalizing tendencies which render social relations ever more inclusive’ so that individual understandings of self and society increasingly extend across the globe (Waters 1995:50).

At the core of Robertson’s model of globalization is ‘the relationship between the universal and the particular (Robertson 1992:97). This relationship is analysed in the contemporary context of ‘a massive, twofold process involving the interpenetration of the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism’ (ibid.: 100). The universalization of particularism entails ‘the idea of the universal being given global-human concreteness’ (ibid.: 102) through ‘increasingly fine-grained modes of identity presentation’ (ibid.: 178). Particularization of universalism, on the other hand, involves ‘the search for global fundamentals’ where movements and individuals look for ‘the meaning of the world as a whole’ (ibid.).

Interestingly, Robertson welcomes Appadurai’s exploration of the disjunctures between different cultural ‘scapes’ at the global level but claims that Appadurai’s ‘chaos-theoretic approach’ rejects the ‘massive, twofold process’ described above (ibid.: 103, emphasis in the original). For Appadurai the prime characteristic of contemporary global culture is: ‘the politics of the mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another and thus to proclaim their successful hijacking of the twin Enlightenment ideas of the triumphantly universal and the resiliently particular’ (ibid.: 308). Individuals have to navigate a world ‘characterized by radical disjunctures between different sorts of global flows and the uncertain landscapes created in and through these disjunctures’ (ibid.).

Albrow implicitly endorses Appadurai’s model of a disjunctive order in his development of the socioscape. The structure of a socioscape is produced by the intersection of individual sociospheres through routine procedures and pragmatic accommodations about which Goffman’s writings and the phenomenological discussion of milieu have much to teach us. Albrow also establishes a link with Giddens’ discussion of time and space and claims that the relationship between social relations and individual perceptions in globalized conditions should be understood in terms of time-space social stratification—the unequal distribution among individuals of control over temporal and spatial resources.

These diverse explorations of the collective/individual and universal/ particular have engaged, implicitly and explicitly, with neo-Marxist perspectives. Robertson, for example, acknowledges the contribution of Wallerstein’s writings on the ‘modern world-system’ to the ‘“global shift” in sociological theory’ (Robertson 1992:65). Appadurai acknowledges his debt to Jameson’s discussion of ‘the relationship between postmodernism and late capitalism’ while admitting that his attempt to restructure ‘the Marxist narrative (by stressing lags and disjunctures)’ may be abhorrent to many Marxists (Appadurai 1990:308). Since those who have drawn even more explicitly on Marxist discourses engage in rather different models of the relationship between individual meanings and structural processes this discussion will be continued later in the next section after a close consideration of the issues of power, inequality and conflict.

Power, inequality and conflict

The various accounts of globalization so far introduced have already referred to the issues of power, inequality and conflict. Their formulations are devised with contemporary struggles around economic, social and political resources very much in mind. Here I want to explore further the ways in which these struggles have been placed within a global perspective through certain direct engagements with Marxist discourses. I will focus on the following contributors in particular— Harvey, Lash and Urry, Hall and Massey.

David Harvey (1989) attempts to make sense of post-modernist ideas in the context of capitalism’s ‘political-economic background’ where ‘the experience of space and time [is] one singularly important mediating link between the dynamism of capitalism’s historical-geographical development and complex processes of cultural production and ideological transformation’ (ibid.: viii). While Giddens differentiates space from time, Harvey understands ‘time-space compression’ as the annihilation of space by time (cf. Waters 1995:55). He delivers an analysis which firmly locates global compression within longestablished Marxist concerns with the contradictions of capitalism and crises both in economic overaccumulation and cultural and political formations (cf. Waters 1995:258). Accepting the transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation in recent capitalist developments (cf. Gregory and Urry 1985) he suggests:

that we have been experiencing, these last two decades, an intense phase of time-space compression that has led to a disorienting and disruptive impact upon political-economic practices, the balance of class power, as well as upon cultural and social life.

(Harvey 1989:284)

Depthlessness, ephemerality, the production and marketing of images, the move from the production of goods to the production and consumption of services are intimately associated with post-modern discourses but these cultural and political shifts are nothing new to those who, like him, wish to pursue a ‘historical materialist enquiry’ (ibid.: 328). Such an enquiry entails the formulation of a counter-narrative based on a ‘project of Becoming rather than Being’ and a ‘search for unity within difference’ (ibid.: 359).

In a more recent deliberation, Harvey emphasizes the way in which time-space compression has ‘undermined older material and territorial definitions of place’. The ‘collapse of spatial boundaries’ has crucial consequences for the relationship between general processes and individual understandings since there is a ‘renewed emphasis upon the interrogation of metaphorical and psychological meanings’ leading to ‘new material definitions of place by way of exclusionary territorial behaviour’ (Harvey 1993:4).

As we have already seen, Harvey builds on models of flexible accumulation and disorganized capitalism proposed by Urry and Gregory. More recently John Urry has joined Scott Lash in an analysis of subjectivity, especially ‘an increasingly significant reflexive human subjectivity’ (Lash and Urry 1994:3). The...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction
• 2: The Impact of Globalization on Sociological Concepts
• 3: Travelling Beyond Local Cultures
• 4: The Delinking of Locale and Milieu
• 5: Working-Class Culture
• 6: Local Lives—Distant Ties
• 7: Rethinking Poverty in Globalized Conditions
• 8: Reconstructing Places
• 9: Identity, Nation and Religion
• 10: ‘Tribal Arts’
• Bibliography