Globalization and Belonging

Mike Savage, Gaynor Bagnall, Brian J Longhurst

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781446223253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

? Globalization and Belonging? s headline message - that place matters, that locality remains vital to people, is arresting? - Frank Webster, Professor of Sociology, City University, London

Drawing on long-term empirical research into cultural practices, lifestyles and identities, Globalization and Belonging explores how far-reaching global changes are articulated locally.

The authors address key sociological issues of stratification as analysis alongside ?cultural? issues of identity, difference, choice and lifestyle. Their original argument:

"Shows how globalisation theory conceives of the ?local?

"Reveals that people have a sense of elective belonging based on where they choose to put down roots

"Suggests that the feel of a place is much more strongly influenced by the values and lifestyles of those migrating to it

"reinvigorates debates in urban and community studies by recovering the ?local? as an intrinsic aspect of globalisation

Theoretically rigorous, the book is brought to life with direct quotations from the authors? research, and appeals to students in urban sociology, urban geography, media studies and cultural studies.

1

---

Global Change and Local Belonging

Over the past two centuries sociologists have frequently pronounced the end of local identities, and yet attachment to place remains remarkably obdurate. This obstinacy endures even though the terms of the sociological debate have changed radically in the past decade. The early social theorists Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel argued that capitalist modernity shattered the personal bonds of face-to-face community (see generally, Kumar 1978) and their concern animated sociological reflection for much of the 20th Century. Yet, despite these prophetic accounts, many urban sociologists emphasised that community ties could be reconstructed even in a modern, complex world (see Gans 1962; Wellman 1979; Fischer 1982; Savage et al. 2002). Since the early 1990s, however, globalisation theorists have re-energised these old debates. These writers emphasise that in a world characterised by virtual communication, institutional deregulation, and the movement of capital, information, objects and people at great speed across large distances, social life cannot be seen as firmly located in particular places with clear boundaries. Identities are therefore diasporic, mobile and transient. The leading British sociologist John Urry (2000) has issued a manifesto for the 21st Century centred on a new sociology of flows to replace a sociology of ‘territory’, arguing that belonging ‘almost always involve(s) diverse forms of mobility’, so that people dwell ‘in and through being at home and away, through the dialectic of roots and routes’ (Urry 2000: 132–133).

Although these issues are widely discussed, they have rarely been subject to systematic empirical examination. Our book explores how far-reaching global changes are articulated locally through examining the cultural practices, lifestyles and identities of 182 residents in four locations around Manchester, England, in the late 1990s. Our study is timely. It is widely recognised that local case studies, if not conceived as studies of fixed and bounded communities, but as studies of sites from which forms of mobility as well as fixity can be empirically observed, are vitally necessary for elaborating the nature of contemporary social change. This is a point of agreement between those writing from within the community studies tradition, such as Graham Crow (2002) who claims that local studies have always been crucial for generating insights regarding social change, and Ulrich Beck (2002: 23), who insists that ‘you cannot even think about globalisation without referring to specific locations and places’. The issue, however, is how to elaborate these programmatic statements into viable empirical research. This first chapter lays out the theoretical and methodological basis for our study. Firstly, we show how globalisation theory conceives of the ‘local’. Many globalisation theorists want to abolish the distinction between the global and the local, yet it is also clear that without some reference to the ‘local’, the meaning of the ‘global’ also becomes obscure. This unstable tension between the local and global goes to the core of globalisation theory. In the second section we explain how Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory can be developed to provide a distinctive way through these uncertainties by offering a spatially sensitive, but non-reductive account of social practice. The third part of this chapter explains our research methodology, showing why Manchester is a telling site in which to study global change and local belonging, and justifying our use of qualitative methods. Finally, we explain why we chose our four locations within the Manchester area, and offer brief pen portraits of them which will serve as a foundation for the more detailed analyses in later chapters.

1.1 Globalisation and the problem of the local

Globalisation theory emerged from the later 1980s in response to new forms of capitalist hegemony (Robertson 1992). The collapse of most state socialist regimes, as well as the weakening power of labour movements and socialist politics within many capitalist nations removed the main political alternative to free-market capitalism (Bauman 1989). Economic restructuring, state deregulation, the power of large transnational corporations, and the proliferation of new technologies facilitating the mobility of goods, capital, people and symbols, led to a new sense of global connectivity. New kinds of consumerist post-modern aesthetic, and intensified forms of individualised identities, were heralded as indications of new social relations generated by global flows (see Harvey 1987; Lash and Urry 1987; Bauman 1989; Jameson 1991). By the early 1990s it was possible to conceive of one world organised around common capitalist parameters, for the first time since the First World War (see Fukuyama 1992).

Early globalisation theorists used these dramatic developments to repackage longer standing concerns regarding the fate of community (Nisbet 1953; Therborn 1970). For Giddens (1990, 1991) ‘the concept of globalisation is best understood as expressing the fundamental aspects of time-space distanciation’ (1991: 2). Communication was no longer confined to the boundaries of particular places as practices became increasingly detached from their local settings. Giddens relied on Heidegger’s existential ontology which saw insecurity resulting from the loss of face-to-face certainty (Thrift 1993). New information and media technologies played a crucial role here. Giddens drew on Meyrowtiz’s (1985) arguments that new media generated ‘no sense of place’, with people defining their salient relationships not in terms of face-to-face contacts but in terms of media characters and celebrities. The geographer David Harvey, whose best-selling The Condition of Postmodernity (1987) emphasised how global flows were related to cultural change, was himself influenced by Raymond Williams’s concern about the instability and fragmentation of the face-to-face community in contemporary life (Harvey 1993). Harvey’s own work engaged with the humanist argument that social life is most secure in face-to-face, communal situations, and his criticisms of post-modern culture was in large part related to his fears about its evisceration of communities, especially industrial, working-class communities (Harvey and Layter 1993). Harvey’s arguments were paralleled by Jameson’s (1991) lament on the emergence of a new depthless post-modern culture, anchored neither in the co-ordinates of time and place, and dependent on a superficial pastiche of signs. Other work in this vein pointed to the transient spaces of shopping malls, fast food joints, and airport terminals to emphasise the rise of new kinds of ‘non-places’ (Auge 1995). The culmination of this early work came with Robertson (1992), who developed the first major account of globalisation as the rise of a ‘global awareness’,¹ and Albrow’s (1996) account of the Global Age as marking the end of modernity.

This early period of globalisation theory was, however, short lived. By the early 1990s any simple sense that a new world order might be generated was dissipated behind growing national and cultural conflicts. It became clear that major global tensions, between religious blocs and between national and ethnic groups, only served to highlight entrenched divisions around the globe. A subtly different approach to globalisation and spatial change emerged by the mid-1990s, represented in the later work of Robertson (1995), in the writings of Lash and Urry (1994), Massey (1993; 1994), and Castells (1996a and b, 1997). These writers did not emphasise the erosion of place but rather focused on new forms of connection and mobility, and their potential to rework social relationships and to re-construct localism. A key point made by these writers was that the local is not transcended by globalisation, but rather that the local is to be understood through the lens of global relationships. Globalisation, therefore, produces new forms of localisation in a dialectical relationship that Robertson (1995) popularised as ‘glocalisation’, where ‘globalisation has involved the reconstruction of “home”, “community” and “locality”’ (Robertson 1995: 30). This argument is indebted to Lefevbre’s claim that ‘the worldwide does not abolish the local’ (cited in Brenner 2000: 369). Versions of this account are now standard fare in globalisation and urban theory. For Ulrich Beck (2002: 17) ‘Globalisation is a non-linear, dialectic process in which the global and the local do not exist as cultural polarities but as combined and mutually implicating principles’. For Michael Smith (2001: 182) ‘the global and local are not separate containers but mutually constitutive social processes’. For John Urry, ‘the global and local are inextricably and irreversibly bound together through a dynamic relationship’ (2002: 84).

This attempt to recover the ‘local’ as an intrinsic aspect of globalisation raises a host of problems. If we do not rely on the outmoded view that the local is defined in terms of face-to-face community, it is unclear what the local is supposed to be. Its scale is also uncertain. The urban is often identified as the local site for global processes (for instance Sassen 1991; Smith 2001), but as Brenner (2000) indicates, there is no theoretical warrant for this. Is the local not also the nation, the neighbourhood, the house, the bedroom? Lurking behind this, it is often unclear what global and local ‘principles’ (Beck) or ‘processes’ (Smith) are. What exactly is at stake in understanding the local from within the terms of globalisation theory? There are in fact five distinct ways of construing the ‘local’ which need to be unpacked: firstly the local as context, secondly the local as the ‘particular’ in opposition to the global ‘universal’; thirdly the local as historical residue, fourthly the local as hub in a network and fifthly the locality as bounded construction.

Firstly, the familiar idea of context offers what might seem a straightforward way of conceptualising the local. John Urry (2002: 137) for instance, argues that cosmopolitanism involves ‘comprehending the specificity of one’s local context’. However, it is not clear what this means when globalisation theory argues that social relationships are stretched over space and are organised through flows and forms of movement. Insofar as this is true, it is not clear how contexts are local, as some anthropologists have noted. Appadurai (1996) thus argues that localities are not contexts, but that contexts define the boundaries of localities. Franklin et al. (2000) argue further that globalisation alters the historically significant way that ‘nature’ serves as a horizon against which human life (or culture) can be defined. Rather than nature being a ‘given’, it is itself produced by culture, allowing a proliferation of meanings and values. This is possible in large part because the global becomes its own context (there are no boundaries other than its own). Instead of seeing agency as linked to the contexts of everyday life routines, ‘emergent global networks offer the chosen – or rather, choice itself – as the origin of the imagined community of global citizenship’ (Franklin et al. 2000: 75). It therefore seems difficult to appeal to the idea of local context within the terms of globalisation theory.

A second possibility defines the local as a ‘particular’ in opposition to the global ‘universal’. This idea is related to conceptions of globalisation as an overarching, social process related to epochal social change. Construing the local as concrete in opposition to an abstract universal makes it difficult to avoid an infinite regress in which the local becomes the empirical, so that any concrete instance of anything is ‘local’. It provides no warrant for seeing the local as ‘small scale’. It entails a view that different particulars can at best be seen as contingently inter-related, with the universal standing above and outside such interactions. The idea of the ‘local’ does no analytical work in this account, and could therefore easily be dropped from the analysis (if not the description) of globalisation. This is an account which appears to give the local some significance, but in reality the power of the overarching, universal processes is reaffirmed through the architecture of the conceptual framework. It is not clear that the local matters other than as an instantiation of such global powers.

This is a problem with all epochal, generalising conceptions of globalisation, such as is evident in the work of Beck (2000), Bauman (1998) and Albrow (1996). The work of Manuel Castells is perhaps the most interesting, and bears some attention here. Castells is careful to situate globalisation geo-politically, and he distances himself from ‘simplistic versions’ of the globalisation thesis (Castells 1996: 97) by defining globalisation in terms of information flows made possible by technological developments, especially as linked to global financial markets. He sees global information flows existing in tension with other kinds of more localised processes, paying particular importance to the distinction between economic globalisation and political regionalisation. ‘Historically rooted political institutions’ seek to restrict global economic forces, with the result that:

while dominant segments of all national economics are linked into the global web, segments of countries, regions, economic sectors and local societies are disconnected from the processes of accumulation and consumption that characterize the informational/global economy. (Castells 1996a: 102–103)

For all Castells’s sophistication he thereby upholds a unilinear view of globalisation in which local societies can somehow be disconnected from global processes, and are defined as a historical residue, not themselves motors of change, the sources of which are held to come from elsewhere. These he sees as ‘globalisation and informationalisation, enacted by networks of wealth, technology and power, (which) are transforming our world’ (Castells 1997a: 68), which appear to operate outside any particular ‘locality’.

This formulation leads him to view local identities ultimately as a response to globalisation, and this account of the local as defensive historical reaction is a third way of rendering the significance of the local. The tension between the local and global means that ‘reflexive life planning becomes impossible. … Under such conditions, civil societies shrink and disarticulate … (and) the search for meaning takes place then in the reconstruction of defensive identities around communal principles’ (Castells 1997a: 11). There is thus a new concern to establish community, in which globalising social relations accentuate localised communal identities. This is a kind of change and response model, whereby the motor of change is global informational capitalism, while invoking the local is a reaction to this (see further, Smith 2001).²

The problem here is that the global is thereby removed from any particular local instance, working through an abstract space of flows (see also Allen 2003). For all his careful empirical detail, Castells is thereby still subject to the same kinds of problems found in the work of Albrow, Beck and Giddens, which have been most powerfully exposed by Walter Benjamin’s critique of historicism:

It is very easy to establish oppositions … within the various ‘fields’ of any epoch, such that on one side lies the ‘productive’, ‘forward-looking’, ‘lively’, ‘positive’ part of the epoch, and on the other side the abortive, retrograde and obsolescent. The very contours of the positive element will appear only insofar as this element is set off against the negative. (1999: 459)

Benjamin’s point is that in such accounts the present is defined with respect to a past constructed in its shadow. This ‘present’ becomes a product which the powerful use as a means of denying truths they would rather not face. It thus becomes part of a moral project in which globalisation constructs its own truths, rendering the local as a repository of the defensive past. Using Benjamin’s insights, we can recognise that globalisation is a means for particular people, with specific interests and identities, to proclaim universal rights and powers. Faced with the implications of Benjamin’s insights, we see it as morally essential to champion the local. Rather than seeing the local as an instance of global social change, in which case it has no analytical importance and functions mainly as a cipher within globalisation theory, it is important to champion the idea of the local as an ‘irritant’ to the epochal and speculative character of much contemporary social theory. We can do this by building on two further renderings of the local in recent social theory.

A fourth way of construing the local adopts network approaches.³ Network approaches vary immensely, but both in the form of social network analysis, as well as in actor network theory they insist that global processes do not work at a general level, but operate through specific proximate ties and connections. The global thus does not stand above the local, but are a particular set of network ties, with the result that there is no ‘one’ global, but an infinite multiplicity of global relationships, all constituted in various forms ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Maps
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Global Change and Local Belonging
• 2 The Limits of Local Attachment
• 3 Parenting, Education and Elective Belonging
• 4 Suburbia and the Aura of Place
• 5 The Ambivalence of Urban Identity: ‘Manchester, so much to answer for’
• 6 Work Cultures and Social Ties
• 7 Mediascapes in the Mediation of the Local and the Global
• 8 Cosmopolitanism, Diaspora and Global Reflexivity
• Conclusion
• Appendix: List of Interviewees
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index