The Limits Of Globalization

Alan Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134845842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Both the force and the limitations of the globalizing forces operating in the world today can best be understood through an analysis of their concrete manifestations. Using examples from the people's art of Potsdammer Platz to the ways in which Western cultural icons are reinterpreted in Asian magazines, this collection of essays unpicks the rhetoric of globalization in political analysis, cultural theory and urban and economic sociology and exposes the myth of the global society as in many cases a dangerous exaggeration.

1

INTRODUCTION

Globalization: social process or political rhetoric?

Alan Scott

The danger of the rhetoric of globalization is that it reduces the scope of democratic political life to marginal adjustments in the management of market institutions. It thereby closes the political process to questions about the contribution made by market institutions to the satisfaction of human needs…[An effective opposition] must question this model and expose the desolation wrought on communities by policies that have no justification apart from the spurious claim that they are forced on us by an inexorable historical process. In doing so it will assume a responsibility relinquished by contemporary Conservatism—that of ensuring through political action that the workings of market institutions are compatible with the satisfaction of the human need for a life in common.

(Guardian, 4 January 1994:18)

The new hegemony of the capital markets—and with it new-right pro-market ideas—means the current imperatives are to cut budget deficits, reduce social costs and scale back welfare provision. Worse, all forms of public action are prohibited by the injunction that the private is not only more efficient but also the state has reached the limits of what it can afford to do…

The left and liberal conservatives everywhere have a responsibility to keep a different vision of society and economy alive. Taxation, welfare systems and regulation serve the larger cause of social cohesion; and while ideas of public ownership and planning need to be recast, they, too, serve the same cause. Such heresies need to be said aloud and a political tradition preserved. History demands no less.

(Guardian, 4 January 1994:13)

These two extracts from articles appearing in the same newspaper on the same day are strikingly similar. They express concern that market forces are destroying community and social solidarity The authors criticize the idea that globalization is an unstoppable historical force in the face of which politics is helpless, and they call for a renewal of political projects that can defend society against markets. Both are, in brief, demanding a politics that can resist the subordination of the political and social to the economic. But this consensus is arrived at via quite different political assumptions.

The first quotation is from an article written by the political theorist John Gray who has greatly contributed to the dissemination of new right ideas, particularly in Britain. It expresses what might be called ‘second thoughts’ on the impact of the new right’s project. The argument he makes here and has elaborated elsewhere (see Gray 1993) recognizes the market’s social destructiveness and appeals to traditional conservatism to protect community. The second quotation is by Will Hutton, then the Guardian’s Economics Editor and a leading left-of-centre economic commentator. Hutton derives the idea that markets destroy social cohesion not from conservatism but from Karl Polanyi, one of the earliest and most trenchant critics of the free market economics of von Mises and Hayek. Polanyi’s analysis was written as a response to the rise of European fascism, and Hutton speculates that contemporary manifestations of ultra-right nationalism can similarly be interpreted as a last ditch defence against market logic. Like Polanyi, he calls for social democratic planning as a means of holding the destructive force of the market in check before it is met by some much more desperate political reaction (see also Hutton 1995). So there is a further neat, if ironic, parallel between Gray and Hutton. Both are appealing to pre-existing political positions, namely conservatism and social democracy; the very political ideologies and policies against which the new right ranged its intellectual armoury in the first place.

What Gray here calls the ‘rhetoric of globalization’ is as common in contemporary debate in political science and sociology as it is in politics or journalism. The question thus arises, do Hutton’s and Gray’s criticisms of globalization in political debate apply equally to the social sciences? First, is social science as prone as political punditry to interpreting globalization as historically inevitable and unstoppable? Second, have the social sciences in their diagnosis of late-or post-modernity, of which the theory of globalization is a key element, been sufficiently aware of the extent to which globalization is a political project? If the answer to the first question is ‘yes’ and to the second ‘no’, then a further question arises. Gray and Hutton are at the very least implying that it is precisely the belief of key political and economic actors, even those who oppose its effects, that globalization is inevitable which contributes to its political puissance. The question for social scientists then becomes to what extent are we contributing to a self-fulfilling prophecy by assuming the same inevitablist logic which Gray and Hutton argue has incapacitated political opposition? Expressed differently, are we assisting the process of globalization by providing people with persuasivearguments to the effect that little can be done in the face of these enormous economic, political and social developments?

In this introduction I wish to elaborate somewhat on the ramifications of these questions. I shall suggest that globalization can be interpreted either diagnostically or politically and that this difference may be more fundamental than that, say, between Marxist and non-Marxist perspectives. Later chapters will examine globalization in political analysis, in international relations, in cultural theory, in urban sociology and in political economy. Here I will focus on globalization as a theme in recent social theory (see also Chapter 12). The arguments found in social theory are frequently ‘diagnostic’ in the sense that they attempt to develop a general theory of contemporary social, political and economic developments; a ‘Zeitdiagnose’—a ‘diagnosis of our times’. I hope to provide both a brief overview of the current state of the debate and to highlight the issues which this collection seeks to address.

DIAGNOSTIC APPROACHES: GLOBALIZATION, MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNITY

We know that we are caught within these more complex global networks, because we palpably suffer the prolongations of corporate space everywhere in our daily lives. Yet we have no way of thinking about them, of modelling them, however abstractly, in our mind’s eye.

Fredrick Jameson

One of the most widespread diseases is diagnosis.

Karl Kraus

Recent discussion within sociology and political science has been careful to distinguish globalization theory from the theory of modernization on the one hand and from accounts of colonialism on the other. The concept of globalization should not act simply as a synonym for a new phase of modernization or for Westernization. At the same time, globalization theorists have sought to avoid explanations they consider reductionist or determinist, i.e. which appear to reduce divergent aspects of a complex process to some set of fundamental causes or to some single societal sub-system (e.g., the economy). Thus in the literature one frequently encounters a critique of world-systems theory on the grounds that it subordinates cultural and political developments to the logic of capitalism (e.g. Robertson 1992b, ch.4; Boyne 1990), and we find no less frequently a discussion of ‘aspects’ of globalization in which these aspects are treated if not as autonomous then at least as non-reducible. Similarly, Marxist analysts have tended to argue that while one might explain globalization as an outcome of the logic ofcapitalism, that logic is itself always mediated through political and social forms. In some respects, then, globalization theory has emerged cautiously by defining its own projects negatively: as the avoidance of the limitations of theories of colonialism, earlier Marxist accounts and modernization theory.

This caution is balanced by very bold claims focusing on the assertion that the nation state is losing its historical role as society’s chief organizing principle and that it is being replaced by human, technological, communicative, political, economic and financial networks which have liberated themselves from the territorial limitations of the nation state. Globalization theorists have identified the task for social science as likewise to liberate itself from its own territorial assumptions; to avoid ‘state-centred’ approaches (Sklair 1991:144), to ‘go beyond the category of “the state’” (Holloway 1994:25), and to desist from its implicit but more-or-less automatic equation of ‘society’ with ‘nation’ (e.g. Robertson 1992b:112; also Picciotto 1991). For some, the full appreciation of the impact of globalizing tendencies demands no less than a revolution in the way in which social science conceptualizes its object and a complete rethinking of its most basic categories: society, Gemeinschaft (community), nation, state, etc. Thus, for example, Zygmunt Bauman questions the ‘modern’ and ‘orthodox’ concept of ‘society’ with its unavoidable assumption of unification of the means of violence, administration and even cultural homogeneity within a given territory:

It seems that most sociologists of the era of modern orthodoxy believed that—all being said—the nation state is close enough to its own postulate of sovereignty to validate the use of its theoretical expression—the ‘society’ concept—as an adequate framework for sociological analysis.

(1992:57)

This assumption, so the argument goes, is no longer appropriate for an era in which the state has largely abandoned its mission to create a unified culture within its territory (Ernest Gellner’s ‘cultivated culture’) and left culture to the market with its drive to create new niches through fragmentation. Clearly, this would have quite radical implications for basic social scientific concepts. It may no longer, for example, be possible to define, as Weber famously did, the state as that institution which claims a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence (and exercises unified administration) within a given territory (cf. Hoffman 1995). But for Bauman, more radically still, the notion through and with which sociology has defined itself and its boundaries (society) must likewise be abandoned.

The substantive analysis which lies behind and is thought to warrant such dramatic proposals rests upon a general diagnosis of late/postmodernity which focuses not on increasing cultural homogeneity and universalism—as the theory of modernity typically did—but upon diversity and fragmentation.It is this emphasis which has drawn globalization theory into the general domain of the social theory of postmodernity.¹

Globalization and (late/post) modernity

The question of the relationship between alleged processes of globalization and more familiar accounts of modernity and modernization has been highly problematic. Anthony Giddens, for example, asserts simply that ‘modernity is inherently globalising’ (1990:63 and 177). Roland Robertson is more cautious. While claiming that ‘the problem of modernity has been expanded to—in a sense subsumed by—the problem of globality’ (1992b: 66), Robertson also warns that the ‘present concern with globality and globalization cannot be comprehensively considered simply as an aspect or outcome of the Western “project” of modernity or, except in very broad terms, enlightenment’ (1992b: 27). These proclaimed differences become apparent when we examine the terms with which globalization might be thought to be associated but which its theorists say it is not, namely Americanization or cultural imperialism.

It has been a central contention of recent debate that it is no longer a specific societal model which is being exported or globalized (e.g. the ‘American way’). Even those whose analysis has emerged out of development theory, and who are therefore sensitized to the exportation of Western models, stress that the relationship of globalization to Americanization is by no means a straightforward one. In this spirit Leslie Sklair notes: ‘capitalist consumerism is mystified by reference to Americanization, while Americanization, the method of the most successfully productive society in human history, gives its imprimatur to capitalist consumerism’ (1991:134). Globalization is not, in other words, a polite way of saying Americanization.

It is thought to be characteristic of late modernity that highly diverse cultural practices and material (from world music to world religion) might provide the source of exportable commercialized culture. Indeed commercialized culture can be sold all the more effectively where it can be tailored to the local context or, alternatively, where it has an ‘exotic feel’. What is being sold in all cases is the idea of selling—of consumerism—itself; the idea that the world is a market of cultural artefacts and resources from whose vast range the consumer must choose. Sklair’s notion of the ‘culture-ideology of consumerism’ is intended to draw attention to this aspect:

The specific task of the global capitalist system in the Third World is to promote consumerism among people with no regard for their own ability to produce for themselves, and with only an indirect regard for their ability to pay for what they are consuming.

(1991:131)

Similarly, Lash and Urry argue that a globalized culture of consumption cannot be subsumed under any one dominant substantive ideology: ‘contemporary developments do not produce a straightforwardly dominant ideology, that is sets of ideas which in some way involve legitimation, dissimulation, unification, fragmentation and reification’ (1994:306).

Thus, not only is globalization thought not to be tied to any substantive notion of the ‘Good Society’, it may, according to its critics, even preclude any discussion of what such a society might look like. As objects of consumption and transmission all social forms are equal. It is the individual as sovereign consumer who must decide on the basis of his/her own preferences what is good ‘for them’:

Junk culture is the spoilt brat of affluence, but in its ceaseless acts of proliferation and unprincipled celebrations of novelty, it also denies the possibility of any debate on the Good Society predicates as that must be on enduring, if contested, principles and on rational discourse for their contestation.

(Archer 1990:102)

Margaret Archer’s observation here suggests that modernization and globalization are really quite distinct indeed. The ethnocentric assumptions of the modernizers have been replaced by the relativism of a market in which consumer preferences rather than any form of public discourse establish the criteria by which the Good Society is to be judged. In Lash and Urry’s terms, a postmodern ‘network of communication and information’ replaces an at least partially rational discourse of ideology. While the claims of modernizers could at least be challenged by holding up some alternative societal model, consumerism and technology claim neutrality and impartiality. They profess to be merely the most efficient mechanisms for placing bets on which societal forms are preferable, the outcome being determined by the aggregate of individual choices.

Of course, this difference may be more apparent than real because (as Sklair’s comments on ‘imprimatur’ imply) it is the market itself, and the idea of the market as the appropriate medium for social interaction, which comes to embody (Archer might say ‘usurp’) a substantive conception of the Good Society. Globalization and modernization may not be so different after all. The notion of the consumer as an isolated individual with sets of preferences upon which basis choices are made can be held to embody quite specific values and assumptions. Later I shall suggest that sociological accounts of globalization have sometimes tended to take the claims of markets and of technology to neutrality vis-à-vis specific societal models at face value.

Globalization and/or fragmentation?

A second theme which has permeated recent discussions is the claim that processes of globalization and fragmentation are complementary. This, too,is thought to distinguish globalization from modernization. No longer is it claimed that the world is converging upon a consensus (cf. Kerr et al. 1960). Nor is it argued, in the style of modernization theory, that we are moving from particularism to universalism. Rather, globalization is held to be a complex interaction of globalizing and localizing tendencies (so-called ‘glocalization’); a synthesis of particularistic and universalistic values. As Robertson notes, ‘we are, in the late twentieth century, witnesses to—and participants in—a massive, twofold process involving the interpenetration of the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism’ (1992b: 100). Likewise, Ulf Hannerz argues that globalization is characterized by the ‘organization of diversity rather than by a replication of uniformity’ (1990:237) while Jonathan Friedman claims that ‘ethnic and cultural fragmentation and modernist homogenization are not two arguments, two opposing views of what is happening in the world today, but two constitutive trends of global reality’ (1990:311).

The point Hannerz and Friedman make about the heterogeneity of global culture has also been made about the global economy. Thus Anthony McGrew argues that ‘globalization is highly uneven in its scope and highly differentiated in its consequences’ (1992:23), while Bob Jessop is even more explicit:

whereas Fordism could plausibly be interpreted in terms of the diffusion of the American model to other national economies, there is currently no single hegemonic growth model (Japanese, American, and West German models are in competition) and even more extensive financial and industrial internationalization makes it even more important for most national economies to find distinctive niches in the world-wide division of labour.

(1988:160)

The suggestion here is that globalization is occurring in the absence of either a cultural or an economic ‘hegemon’ and that processes of standardization and diversification, and unification and fragmentation, are occurring simultaneously.

In the sphere of cultural analysis perhaps the most influential version of this argument is the one advanced by Arjun Appadurai (1990) through his now well-known distinctions between ‘ethnoscapes’, ‘mediascapes’, ‘technoscapes’, ‘financescapes’ and ‘ideoscapes’. Appadurai’s argument is that globalization is characterized precisely by the divergence of these aspects; by the fact that these ‘scapes’ ‘follow increasingly non-isomorphic paths’ (1990:301). With these distinctions Appadurai theorizes the compatibility and simultaneity of convergence and fragmentation which is thought to distinguish both the recent debate from the earlier notions of simple conv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Globalization: social process or political rhetoric?
• PART I. Contesting Global Forces
• PART II. Homogenized Culture or Enduring Diversity?
• PART III. The National, the International and the Global
• PART IV. Theoretical Reflections: Social Theory, Cultural Subjectivism and Disembedded Markets
• Bibliography
• Index