Every country in the world has been
experiencing the most formidable economic climate for several decades. A major
focus has been on transnational financial institutions and lack of regulation
for consumer populations in different nation states. Hence, these problems require
a global response by the international community, not just by political leaders
but also by social scientists. Historically, there have been a number of social
scientists who explored how the Enlightenment and its legacy have impinged upon
the emergence and creation of and social science disciplines that have
attempted to explain social, economic, political and cultural transformations
in modernity (Layder, 2006). The processes of globalisation in the twenty-first
century are not associated with encompassing ideologies in the way that was the
case with processes focused at level of the nation state. The world is changing
at a rapid pace, and the scope and impact of change have multiple dimensions
and implications that transcend geographic and cultural boundaries (Turner
2006). Hence, globalisation has transformed the way people see themselves in
the world. Everyone must now reflexively respond to the common predicament of
living in one world. This provokes the formulation of contending worldviews. In
a compressed world, the comparison and confrontation of worldviews are bound to
produce new cultural conflict. In such conflict, old traditions and new ideas
play a key symbolic role, since they can be mobilised to provide an ultimate
justification for one's view of the world – a case in point being the
resurgence of Islamic fundamentalist groups that combine traditionalism with a
global agenda but also the response of US/UK governments that wished to promote
‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ through a ‘War on Terror’ against such groups (Sands
2006). A globalised world is thus integrated but not harmonious, a single place
but diverse, a construct of consciousness but prone to multiplicity and
fragmentation. In that context, it is highly pertinent that critical social
science steps up to the challenge and rethinks how we ‘unmask’ the implications
of globalization and impact on modern society.
The power of globalization
Globalization
has become one of the central but contested concepts of contemporary social
science (Ritzer 2004). The term has further entered everyday commentary and
analysis and features in many political, cultural, and economic debates. The
contemporary globalised world order originates in the international
organizations and regulatory systems set up after World War II – including the
United Nations, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade
Organization), the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank (Smart
2007). However, the end of the Cold War was the prelude to the maturity of the
concept of globalisation. From 1989 to the present, it is possible at least to
imagine a ‘borderless’ world (Ohmae, 1990) in which people, goods, ideas, and
images would flow with relative ease and the major global division
between East and West had gone. A world divided by competing ideologies of
capitalism and state socialism has given way to a more uncertain world in which
capitalism has become the dominant economic and social system, even for the
communist-led People’s Republic of China. Coinciding with these changes, a
major impetus to globalisation was the development and availability of digital
communication technologies from the late 1980s with dramatic consequences for
the way economic and personal behaviour were conducted – this has transcended
to mass communication from the Internet in the 1990s to Mobile Phones from 2000
onwards (McGrew 2007). The collapse of communism in
Eastern Europe and the USSR, and its modernising in China, plus growth of
digital technologies further coincided with a global restructuring of the
state, finance, production, and consumption associated with neo-liberalism.
Coupled with this, in a post 9/11 world, there has been the recent ‘War on
Terror’ and its implications for the re-ordering of the geo-political global
agenda.
Since
the advent of industrial capitalism as a feature of development of modernity,
intellectual discourse has been replete with allusions to phenomena strikingly
akin to those that have garnered the attention of recent theorists of
globalisation (Bauman 2001). Nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy and
social commentary include numerous references to an inchoate yet widely shared
awareness that experiences of distance and space are inevitably transformed by
the emergence of high-speed forms of technological transportation (for example,
rail and air travel) and communication (the telephone) that dramatically
heighten possibilities for human interaction across existing geographical and
political divides (Smart 2007). Bauman has proposed nothing less than a
rewriting of human history based on what he called ‘the retrospective
discovery’ of the centrality of spatial distance and speed of communication in
the constitution of all societies (Bauman 1998: 15).
Long before the introduction of the term
globalisation, the appearance of novel high-speed forms of social activity
generated extensive commentary about the compression of space. Indeed, Karl
Marx, in 1848 formulated the first theoretical explanation of the sense of
territorial compression. In Marx's account, the imperatives of capitalist
production inevitably drove the bourgeoisie to:
nestle
everywhere, settle everywhere, and establish connections everywhere. The
juggernaut of industrial capitalism constituted the most basic source of technologies
resulting in the annihilation of space, helping to pave the way for intercourse
in every direction, universal interdependence of nations.
(Marx 1979 [1848]: 476).
Thus, Marx identified an
ever-rising scope and volume of transnational relations, along with
technologically orchestrated process of deepening spatio-temporal integration,
as central to the very ‘laws of motion’ of capitalist development. All manner
of factors might interrupt or constrain these tendencies.
However, because they
were rooted in its core relations, private property and wage labour, they would
keep ‘reasserting themselves’, and on an ever greater scale, so long as those
relations were reproduced over time. The consequence is that globalisation as a
spatial process that has facilitated the emergence of a new kind of global city
based on highly specialised service economies that serve specific,
particularised functions in the global economic system at the expense of former
logics of organisation tied to manufacturing-based economies. To enable global
markets to function effectively, they need to be underpinned by local
managerial work that is concentrated in cities. Further, privatisation and
deregulation during the 1980s and 1990s shifted various governance functions to
the corporate world, again centralising these activities in urban spaces. In
post-industrial cities there is a concentration of command functions that serve
as production sites for finance and the other leading industries, and provide
marketplaces where firms and governments can buy financial instruments and
services. Global cities become strategic sites for the acceleration of capital
and information flows, and at the same time spaces of increasing socioeconomic
polarisation.
One
effect of this process has been that such cities have gained in importance and
power relative to nation-states. There have emerged new ‘corridors’ and zones
around nodal cities with increasingly relative independence from surrounding
areas (Davis 2007). Globalisation simultaneously
brings home and exports the processes of privatisation, competition,
rationalisation, and deregulation as well as the transformation of all sectors
of society through technology and the flexibilisation and deregulation of
employment. As a process, debate centres on the uses of globalisation as the
rationale and means by which corporate capital may transnationally pursue new
low wage strategies and weaken the power of labour, women, and ethnic minority
populations.
But
whether globalisation is imagined or real requires rigorous analysis. The next
section attempts to pull together main authors, ideas and trajectories of the
globalisation and illustrate it by using key examples to consolidate
understanding.
Theoretical
complexities of globalisation
The
theorisation of globalisation is extremely complex. Roland Robertson refers to
the concept of ‘global consciousness’, which refers to ‘the compression of the
world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole’ (1992:
8). Through thought and action, global consciousness makes the world a single
place. What it means to live in this place, and how it must be ordered, become
universal questions. These questions receive different answers from individuals
and societies that define their position in relation to both a system of
societies and the shared properties of humankind from very different
perspectives. This confrontation of worldviews means that globalisation
involves ‘comparative interaction of different forms of life’ (1992: 27). Unlike
theorists who identify globalisation with late (capitalist) modernity,
Robertson sees global interdependence and consciousness preceding the advent of
capitalist modernity.
However,
European expansion and state formation have boosted globalisation since the
seventeenth century and the contemporary shape of the world in the 19th
century, when international communications, transportation, and conflict
dramatically intensified relationships across societal boundaries (Mann 2006).
In that period, the main reference points of fully globalised order took shape:
nation-state, individual self, world-system, societies, and one
humanity. These elements of the global situation became ‘relativised’
since national societies and individuals, in particular, must interpret their
very existence as parts of a larger whole. To some extent, a common framework
has guided that interpretive work; for example, states can appeal to a
universal doctrine of nationalism to legitimate their particularizing claims to
sovereignty and cultural distinction (Delanty and Isin 2003). But such limited
common principles do not provide a basis for world order.
For Anthony Giddens
(1991) the concept of time-space distantiation is central. This is a process in
which locales are shaped by events far away and vice versa, while social
relations are disembedded, or ‘lifted out’ from
locales. For example, peasant households in traditional societies largely
produced their own means of subsistence, a tithe was often paid in kind (goods,
animals, or labour), money was of limited value, and economic exchange was
local and particularistic. ‘Reflexive modernisation’ replaced local exchange
with universal exchange of money, which simplifies otherwise impossibly complex
transitions and enables the circulation of highly complex forms of information
and value in increasingly abstract and symbolic forms. The exchange of money
establishes social relations across time and space, which under globalisation
is speeded up. Similarly, expert cultures arise as a result of the scientific
revolutions, which bring an increase in technical knowledge and specialization.
Specialists claim ‘universal’ and scientific forms of knowledge, which enable
the establishment of social relations across vast expanses of time and space. Social
distance is created between professionals and their clients as in the modern
medical model, which is based upon the universal claims of science. As expert
knowledge dominates across the globe, local perspectives become devalued and
modern societies are reliant on expert systems (Beck 1992). Trust is
increasingly the key to the relationship between the individual and expert
systems and is the glue that holds modern societies together. But where trust
is undermined, individuals experience ‘ontological insecurity’ and a sense of
insecurity with regard to their social reality (Giddens 1991).
Ohmae's (2005) concept of a
‘borderless world’ epitomises enthusiasm and the belief that globalisation
brings improvement in human conditions. Ohmae describes an ‘invisible
continent’ – a moving, unbounded world in which the primary linkages are now
less between nations than between regions that are able to operate effectively
in a global economy without being closely networked with host regions. The
invisible continent can arguably be dated to 1985 when Microsoft released its
first version of Windows, CNN as a 24 hours a day new
channel was launched, Cisco Systems began, the first Gateway 2000 computers
were shipped, and corporations such as Sun Microsystems and Dell were starting
out. Today, there has been an explosion of such corporations that affect
virtually every social, economic and political relationship. Transnational
corporations increasingly do not treat nation states as single entities and
region states make effective points of entry into the global economy. For
example, when Nestlé moved into Japan, it chose the Kansai region round Osaka
and Kobe rather than Tokyo as a regional doorway (Smart 2007). This fluidity of
capital is creating a borderless world in which capital moves around, chasing
the best products and the highest investment returns regardless of national
origin.
The Internet has changed not only
the way business works but also the way people interact on a personal level –
from buying and selling online to planning for retirement, managing investment
and on-line bank accounts. Although, in recent times, the dark side of the
Internet has revealed illegitimate ways that groups and individuals use ‘hyper
borderless worlds’ with data espionage, data theft, credit card fraud, child
pornography, extremism and terrorism - are ever more common on the internet
with up to £40 billion a year made by international organised crime syndicates
on the web (Huber 2004).
The Internet is a global system and
decisions made on virtual ‘platforms’ (that are created by corporations rather
than governments) determine how money moves around the globe. The emergence of ‘around-the-world’ 24/7
financial markets, where major cross-border financial transactions are made in
cyberspace represents a familiar example of the economic face of globalisation
(Schneider 2007). The
definition and social construction of ‘the problem’ of state power is
transferring from the state and its citizenry to private sector global finance.
For example, Powell (2006) points to how the economic stakes and social
consequences of ‘ageing populations’ cannot be underestimated for the upholding
of power by multi-national corporations. Looking ahead, the race is on for
‘Global Custody’ through the socially constructed ‘Ticking of the Pensions Time
Bomb’, as described by the Financial Times with Europe as a
‘battleground’ for the US Banks (The Bank of New York, State Street Bank, JP
Morgan and Citibank) competing against the European Deutsche, BNP Paribas and
HSBC for custody of the growing pensions market and the highly lucrative
financial services supporting it. As further incentive to eager financial
enterprises, the ‘global picture’ in private wealth drawn from the lucrative
business of pension providing is estimated by 2007 to exceed $13,000 billion in
the USA, $10,000 billion in Europe, and $7,200 billion in Asia. In less
developed countries, women especially have been among those most affected by
the privatization of pensions and health care, and the burden of debt
repayments to agencies such as the World Bank and the IMF (Walker and Naegelhe
1999).
David
Harvey emphasises the ways in which globalisation revolutionises the qualities
of space and time. As space appears to shrink to what Marshall McLuhan (1975)
refers to as a ‘global village’ of telecommunications and ecological
interdependencies and as time horizons shorten to the point where the present
is all there is, so we have to learn how to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression
of spatial and temporal worlds (Harvey 1990: 240). Time-space compression that
‘annihilates’ space and creates ‘timeless time’ is driven by flexible
accumulation and new technologies, the production of signs and images,
just-in-time delivery, reduced turnover times and speeding up, and both de- and
re-skilling. Harvey points for support to the ephemerality of fashions,
products, production techniques, speedup and vertical disintegration, financial
markets and computerized trading, instantaneity and disposability, regional competitiveness.
For Harvey, flexible computer-based production in Silicon Valley or the ‘Third
Italy’ epitomises these changes. Yet it could be argued that an exclusive focus on time-space compression
would be misleading. Thrift
(1994) suggests that international systems reliant upon rapid electronic
communication and diffusion of data do not always result in a lessening of the
importance of individual actors or localised face-to-face micro-social
relations. He acknowledges that the international financial system has become,
to an extent, ‘disembedded from place’, but emphasises that transnational
financial networks generate vast amounts of data and a range of ‘meanings’
pertaining to the interpretation of those data. The result is that
inter-personal exchanges involving individual agency to negotiate, discuss,
interpret and act upon the data are still of considerable importance. Since the vast majority of human
activities is still tied to a concrete geographical
location, the more decisive facet of globalisation concerns the manner in which
distant events and forces impact on the local or ‘glocal’ situation (Tomlinson
1999: 9).
At the same
time, globalisation also refers to those processes whereby geographically
distant events and decisions impact to a growing degree on ‘glocal’ higher
education (Loader 2001). For example, the insistence by powerful political
leaders such as George W. Bush and Tony Blair in the Western world that the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) should require that Latin and South American
countries commit themselves to a particular set of economic policies might
result in poorly paid teachers and researchers as well as large, understaffed
lecture classes in San Paolo or Lima; the latest innovations in information
technology from a computer research laboratory in India could quickly change
the classroom experience of students in Tokyo.
John
Urry (2005) argues that the changes associated with globalisation are so
far-reaching that we should now talk of a ‘theory beyond societies’. This
position is informed by the alleged decline of the nation-state in a globalised
world, which has led to wider questioning of the idea of ‘society’ as a
territorially bounded entity. This in turn prepares the ground for claims to
the effect that since ‘society’ was a core theoretical concept,
the very foundations of social science discipline have likewise been
undermined. The central concepts of the new socialities are space (social
topologies), regions (interregional competition), networks (new social morphology),
and fluids (global enterprises). Mobility is central to this thesis since
globalisation is the complex movement of people, images, goods, finances, and
so on that constitutes a process across regions in faster and unpredictable
shapes, all with no clear point of arrival or departure.
Despite
the contrasting theoretical understandings of globalisation, there is some
measure of agreement that it creates new opportunities or threats. For example,
globalisation offers new forms of cosmopolitanism (Delanty 2006) and economic
growth (Smart 2007) but also new threats and global risks (Mythen 2007) such as
ecological crises of global warming, climate change and environmental
pollution; global health pandemics such as ‘swine flu’; and international crime
and terrorism. Globalisation may be seen as encroachment and colonisation as
global corporations and technologies erode local customs and ways of life,
which in turn engenders new forms of protest. Giddens has argued that the
effects of globalisation must also be seen as positive and that integration
into the global economy increases economic activity and raises living
standards. For example, Legrain (2006) claims that in 2000 the per capita
income of citizens was four times greater than that in 1950. Between 1870 and
1979, production per worker became 26 times greater in Japan and 22 times
greater in Sweden. In the whole world in 2000 it was double what it was in
1962. Even more significantly, Legrain (2006) argues that those nation states
isolated from the global capitalist economy have done less well than those that
have engaged with it. Poor countries that are open to international trade grew
over six times faster in the 1970s and 1980s than those that shut themselves
off from it: 4.5 percent a year, rather than 0.7 percent.
By
contrast to Legrain’s (2006) idealism, it can be argued that global patterns of
inequality have become increasingly polarised (Estes, Biggs and Phillipson
2003). According to the United Nations, the richest 20 percent in the world ‘own’
80 percent of the wealth; the second 20 percent own 10 percent; the third 20
percent own 6 percent; the fourth 20 percent own 3 percent; and the poorest 20
percent own only 1 percent. Throughout the world, 2.7 billion people live on
less than $2 per day. These global inequalities predate globalisation, of
course, but there are global processes that are maintaining a highly unequal
social system (Phillipson 2005). Contradictions in global society are
illustrated in other ways too. The globalisation of capital may not have driven
costs down in developed countries where few workers are prepared to tolerate
the conditions this new model creates. Flexible global ordering systems need
not just produce flexible labour, but flexible labour in excess, because to manage
the supply of labour it is necessary to have a surplus. Migrants have met this
need (Miles 2004). But in the wake of hostility manifest in many developed
countries, especially following threats of terrorist attack in US and Europe
migrants face tightening border controls and deportation of those who are not
in areas where there is a shortage of skills.
Globalisation has been the focus of extensive
social movement activism and ‘resistance’, especially to neoliberal globalism
represented by bodies such as the WTO. Glasius et al. (2002) identify the
emergence of a ‘global civil society’ in, for example, the growth of ‘parallel
summits’ such as the 2001 Porto Alegre meeting in Brazil attended by 11,000
people to protest against the Davos (Switzerland) World Economic Forum. These
are organised through multiple networks of social actors and NGOs operating on
local and international levels. There may appear to be an irony that many of
the internationally organised or linked social movements use globalised forms
of communication (the Internet) and operate transnationally, mobilising a
global consciousness and solidarities on such issues.
The major contentious claim is that
globalisation is a new form of imperialism imposing US political and economic
dominance over the rest of the world (Estes, Biggs and Phillipson 2003). For
example, the United States represents the most significant case of
privatisation as an element in the globalisation agenda, and a glimpse of what
may come to pass for the broader community of nations. Pressures for more and
more privatisation mount on the US state, as exemplified by the growth of the
highly profitable $1.2 Trillion dollar largely private medical industrial
complex, which more than tripled in size during Ronald Reagan’s two presidential
terms during the 1980s alone. Indeed, the medical industrial complex, comprise
nearly 15% of the American economy under the Bush Administration from 2000 -
2007 even though an alarming 16% (44 million) of US citizens are uninsured for
health care. The US federal government finances around 40% of US health care,
while the state limits its own activities to supporting and complementing the
market (Estes and Phillipson 2003). Multinational health enterprises are an
increasingly important component of the US medical industrial complex. As early
as 1990, 97 US companies reported ownership of 100 hospitals with 11,974 beds
in foreign countries. Pharmaceutical firms are also major global corporate
players, with the total value of exported and imported pharmaceuticals
estimated in excess of $110 billion in 1998 (Phillipson and Powell 2004). Added
to this:
After
three decades devoted to market rhetoric, cost containment, and stunning
organizational rationalization, the net result is the complete failure of any
of these efforts to stem the swelling tide of problems of access and cost.
Moreover, there are alarming increases in the uninsured populations among
ethnic minority groups.
(Held 2000: 183)
President Obama is currently seeking
to transform the provision of healthcare in the US, but the vested interests of
the privatised healthcare system are seeking to limit and oppose the main
thrust of his proposals, presenting these as being ‘socialist’ extensions of
state power. Paradoxically, however, the neo-liberal ideology of globalisation
further bolsters the more restrictive limitations on the role of the state with
respect to its citizens. David Held and his colleagues make the point that a
distinctive feature of the present period is the extent to which:
financial globalisation has imposed an external financial discipline on
governments that has contributed to both the emergence of a more
market-friendly state and a shift in the balance of power between the state and
financial markets.
(Held
2000: 232)
In this respect, the political agenda of
advanced capitalist states reflects in part the constraints of global finance,
even though the specific impact of financial globalisation will vary greatly
among states. A tangible consequence is the insertion of the operatives and
‘requisites’ of global finance into state policy-making in ways that frame, if
not dictate, the parameters of state power.
Contrary to this, Sibeon (2004)
suggests that national governments do ‘matter’, especially regarding globalisation
and its implications for governance. It is Sibeon’s (2004) contention that we
must recognise subnational governance in addition to transnational and policy
processes. The renewed emphasis upon locale and subnational governance is
reflected in work focusing on the significance of regions in the policy
process. Amin and Thrift (1995), for example, have outlined a focus upon
mezo-level governance/policy networks within European regions. Jenson (1995)
has suggested that, in the case of Canada, regional governance can be both
utilised as a way of asserting regional/ethnic autonomy (as in Quebec), or
exercised reluctantly (as in New Democrat-led Ontario) where subnational
governments have identified a tendency for central governments to neglect or even
abdicate responsibilities for maintaining standards of national economic
management.
These developments can be viewed as
part of a new global process of shaping the lives of present and future
generations of populations in western and non-western states. The change has
been variously analysed as a move from ‘organised’ to ‘disorganised
capitalism’, to a shift from ‘simple’ to ‘reflexive modernity’, and to the
transformation from ‘fordist’ to ‘post-fordist economies’. The final part of
this paper looks ahead and provides some reflective thoughts for questioning
the extent to which a ‘global social theory’ is warranted.
The Future of a Global Social
Theory?
At this point in the twenty first
century, an array of opportunities and challenges present themselves for the
study of social theory. There is a need to develop a clearer perspective on the
pressures facing social groups that impinge on ‘race’, class, age, gender,
disability and sexuality as a result of global change. A significant issue is
how globalisation and its impingement on local governance is
transforming the everyday texture of day to day living. In this context, the
need for a framework to respond to the challenge associated with globalisation
is warranted. The key dimensions here are the changing and contested form of
the nation state, citizenship and nationalism; the enhanced role of
supra-national bodies; the increased power of multi-national corporations; and
emergence and retrenching of social inequalities across the globe.
We argue that social theory should
not merely provide ‘critical questions’ about dynamics of social relations, but
rather, it is what one does with critical questions that is
the cornerstone for critical theorising. In concluding this final chapter the
book, we develop this theme by highlighting the main issue of globalisation
that a situated social theory will need to focus on in reflexive theorising in
looking ahead for the future.
A key aim of social theory is,
first, the examination of the social construction of reality and critical
debunking of such contingent realities. A central task for social theory
concerns the need to examine the structural inequalities and power dynamics
that perpetuate current understandings of social world. An analysis that
accepts enlightenment assumptions about, for example, ‘equality’, fails to ask
the key questions about why this state of affairs holds true for some rather
than for others. A critical social theory must move beyond appearances and seek
explanations that overturn conformist realities. Crucially, power relations,
social processes and structures must be examined as they appear in everyday
relations. Links must be made between the traditional and contemporary social
theories between macro, micro and meso levels of analysis, so that the pull of
social inequalities can be identified and the emotional experience and daily
interpretation of them explored.
A key issue in theoretical
interpretation concerns the place and nature of ‘society’. The ideas of society
as a bounded self-sufficient entity most associated with the recent
neo-functionalism of Alexander (2004) had become taken for granted within
mainstream theorising. Such a formulation assumes there is a coherent and
bounded society into which social integration is attainable. This view has
become prominent by a small group of western societies, especially those
associated with recent ‘War on Terror’ who aggressively promote nation statehood and democratic freedom (Walklate
and Mythen 2007). Nevertheless, the notion of society as a sovereign entity is
changing profoundly with the intensifying social forces of globalisation:
there
are exceptional levels of global interdependence, unpredictable shock waves
spill out ‘chaotically’ from one part to the system as a whole; there are not
just societies but massively powerful empires roaming around the globe; and
there is a mass mobility of people, objects and dangerous human wastes. (Urry 2000:13)
This critical questioning of the modernist
basis to society is a challenging one to social theory. In a sense the
traditional formulation of ‘society’ is being challenged from global forces
that impinges on new technology that transforms the experience of social
relations (Whyte 2007). Indeed, in a networked world, everyday life is becoming
detached from the protective nation state seen to be at the core of occidental
modernity. Steering a path between Giddens’s (1991) ‘global optimists’ and
‘global pessimists’, it may be suggested that a new formulation is required
that recognises diverse and unequal networks in and through the way people
interact throughout their lives across national, transnational and sub-cultural
contexts. A major dimension of inequities impinges on debates on issues such as
climate change, power of multinational corporations, and third world countries
of debt repayment (Mythen 2007; Phillipson 2006). The phenomenon of
globalisation has transformed debates within social theory to the extent that
it has re-ordered concepts typically used by social theorists across micro-macro
continuum (Bauman 1998).
Ideas associated with the idea of
modernity, the state, gender, class relations, ageing and ethnicity have
retained their importance but their collective and individualised meaning is
different and fragmented in the context of the influence of global actors and
institutions (Mythen 2007).
A contentious point is that
accepting the importance of globalisation also strengthens the case for
rethinking social theory through re-assertion of macro analysis. Hagestad and
Dannefer (2001: 66) note that the costs of micro analysis has
been significant in ‘‘hampering’ our ability to address what we mean by society
in the context of global economic and technological change’. Given the
explanatory role of social theory, globalisation is setting major new
challenges in terms of interaction between individuals, communities and nation
states and the global structure within which these are constructed, contested
and nested. Analysing the interpretation of daily life may be more appropriately
assessed in the contexts of networks and flows characteristic of global
society, these producing a loosening in those attachments which have
traditionally embedded people to locative settings: for Marxists in social
class and for Feminists in gendered configurations. With globalisation, these
attachments are maintained but recontextualised and re-embedded with the
influence of transnational communities, corporations and international
governmental organisations producing new agendas and challenges for how we
understand ‘modern society’ (Turner 2006). Further, the nature of ‘citizenship’
and ‘rights’ so heavily influenced by Enlightenment philosophy are both heavily
contested under the lead of the complex and commanding influences of powerful
non-democratic intergovernmental structures such as the World Bank and
International Monatory Fund (IMF), private multinational corporations such as
banks and western states that are under new pressures associated with
accelerating demography and migration. This contrasts sharply with the
Enlightenment period which saw rights arguably independently defined and
negotiated through various manifestations of British, European and American
nation building and sovereign state-based power.
It may also be suggested that democratic
rights have become more fragmented as well as individualised. What has changed
is the duty and necessity to cope with these risks that are being increasingly
transferred to families (Bauman 2000). The new social construction of everyday
life may be defined as a global problem and issue but the social reconstruction
of how experience globalisation is being cast as a personal rather than a
collective responsibility. This development also implies an important role for
social theory in interconnecting macro and micro perspectives with new
approaches in order to understand how global processes contribute to the
reshaping of the institutions in which the experiences of social groups are
embedded.
A further task must be to construct
new social theories about the nature of individualisation in light of more
fluid borders surrounding nation states. Important questions concern whether
and how people, socially differentiated, are facilitated or constrained by the
spread of mobile communities along with more varied forms of belonging and
citizenship. Social theory will be profoundly influenced by the ‘development of
a common consciousness of human society on a world scale and an increased
awareness of the totality of human social relations as the largest constitutive
framework of all relations’ (Shaw 2002:12).
A further issue concerns the extent
to which social theory may challenge the dominant institutions that reproduce
and perpetuate social divisions in society. Applications of the policy sciences
take for granted existing systems of capitalism as scholars work largely within
‘definitions of the situation’ that are framed by classical economic theories,
assumptions and models of cost-effectiveness and individual level outcomes. The
end result is that only a limited array of potentially viable policy options
assuring the serious consideration of only incremental changes that will do
little to alter the underlying structural economic problems facing social
groups such as, for example, older people (Powell 2006).
In challenging this, there is a need
for theorising that examines the structural forces and social processes that
profoundly shape individual and group experience in the global community of the
first, second and third worlds. Theoretical development from a critical
perspective seeks to illuminate alternative understandings and a vision to
‘what is possible’. It is a requisite to lifting the ideological veil of
scientific objectivity that obscures and mystifies inequality and social
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