How can we best explain globalization? This question has no easy answer because, as we suggested in our General Introduction, globalization has many layers and dimensions. A good explanation must come to grips with this complexity. In addition, the world society that is still under formation presents a moving target, so any theory must be adaptable in dealing with new dimensions and characteristics of globalization. Explanation is all the more difficult because, as globalization refashions the world, theoretical tools once used to make sense of earlier historical periods may no longer be adequate. The “global age,” Martin Albrow argued in his book by that title, calls for new theory, new thinking, and new departures in social science, especially if the discontinuity between old and new is as profound as many observers claim. In this part, we illustrate the new forms of theorizing that have emerged in recent decades by presenting selections from four major perspectives on globalization.
These perspectives propose quite varied accounts of globalization. We can illustrate the differences between them by comparing their answers to a hypothetical question (taken from the excerpt by John W. Meyer et al.): how would a newly discovered island society be incorporated into world society? One perspective’s proponents would reply that transnational corporations would stake a claim to the island’s natural resources, send engineers to create infrastructure, and build plants to take advantage of cheap labor. Another perspective’s proponents would argue that agents of powerful countries would assist the society in building a functioning but limited state and tempt it to form alliances with them; international organizations would provide support and advice so that the society could become a stable participant in global politics. From a third perspective, the answer would involve the wholesale refashioning of the island society – it would be invaded by experts of many sorts who would help build not only a state but also the full range of modern institutions that any proper country is expected to develop. A final group would focus on the way the society would balance its own heritage against the intrusions of world culture, aided by outside organizations concerned about preserving its unique culture. Incorporation into world society can thus take the form of economic exploitation, state building and alliances, broad institutional restructuring according to global models, or self‐reflexive cultural identification. The selections show that such answers derive from different views of the motive forces and characteristic features of globalization.
To scholars inspired by Marx, globalization is essentially the expansion of the capitalist system around the globe. At the time Marx was writing in the mid‐nineteenth century, the world was becoming unified via thickening networks of communication and economic exchange. A world economy, guided by liberal philosophy with global aspirations, provided the framework for a single world that since has grown more integrated and standardized. Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, author of the multivolume landmark study The Modern World‐System, puts this historical claim in context. What happened in the mid‐nineteenth century, he suggests, was a phase in a centuries‐old process. The capitalist world‐system originated in the sixteenth century, when European traders established enduring connections with Asia, Africa, and the Americas. From the outset, this system consisted of a single economy – a market and a regional division of labor – but many states, and no one power was strong enough to gain control and stifle dynamic competition. In the “core” of the system, the dominant classes were supported by strong states as they exploited labor, resources, and trade opportunities, most notably in “peripheral” areas. Buffer countries in the “semiperiphery” helped mitigate tensions between core and periphery, and a set of political and economic norms that favored core countries helped to keep the system remarkably stable. The central purpose of the world‐system is capital accumulation by competing firms, which go through cycles of growth and decline.
Leslie Sklair, a British sociologist, complements this long‐term perspective by stressing the role of transnational corporations and classes as the prime movers in the contemporary global system. He argues that a global consumerist ideology supports the exploitative structure commanded by transnational corporations and helps the dominant transnational class get ever stronger. This class‐based view is reinforced by British‐American geographer David Harvey in his discussion of neoliberalism, which he characterizes as an economic ideology devoted above all to property rights, free trade, and free markets. This prominent ideology, Harvey insists, is primarily a means for upper classes around the world to increase their economic supremacy at the expense of the middle and lower classes.
In this third theoretical perspective, states remain an important component of world society, but primary attention goes to the global cultural and organizational environment in which states are embedded. What is new in world society, from this perspective, is the all‐encompassing “world polity” and its associated world culture, which supplies a set of cultural rules or scripts that specify how institutions around the world should deal with common problems. Globalization is the formation and enactment of this world polity and culture. One of the world polity’s key elements, as American sociologist John W. Meyer and colleagues explain, is a general, globally legitimated model of how to form a state. Guided by this model, particular states in widely varying circumstances organize their affairs in surprisingly similar fashion. Because world society is structured as a polity with an intensifying global culture, new organizations – business enterprises, educational institutions, social movements, leisure and hobby groups, and so on – spring up in all sorts of countries to enact its precepts. As carriers of global principles, these organizations then help to build and elaborate world culture and world society further.
This perspective agrees that world culture is indeed new and important, but it is less homogeneous than world‐polity scholars imply. Globalization is a process of relativization, as Roland Robertson puts it. Societies must make sense of themselves in relation to a larger system of societies, while individuals make sense of themselves in relation to a sense of humanity as a larger whole. World society thus consists of a complex set of relationships among multiple units in the “global field.” In this model, world society is governed not by a particular set of values but by the confrontation of different ways of organizing these relationships. Globalization compresses the world into a single entity, and people necessarily become more and more aware of their relationship to this global presence. Of central importance to this process is the problem of “globality”: how to make living together in one global system meaningful or even possible. Not surprisingly, religious traditions take on new significance insofar as they address the new global predicament that compels societies and individuals to “identify” themselves in new ways. Robertson concludes that a “search for fundamentals” is inherent in globalization.
Arjun Appadurai, an American anthropologist of Indian origin, analyzes the cultural compression of the globe by showing how ideas, money, and people flow through disjoint “scapes.” These flows intersect in different ways in particular societies, where identity construction becomes a matter of making local sense of their collisions. While the flows homogenize the world to some extent, the disjunctures in globalization also produce heterogeneity. Sameness and difference “cannibalize” each other.
As even this brief sketch makes clear, scholars offer varied understandings of the key dimensions, sources, and consequences of globalization. These theories have made substantial advances in accounting for transformations of the world. They all express a distinctly global point of view, even though they also still rely on ideas familiar from earlier social theory. As orienting perspectives, they guide much current research. But explaining globalization is necessarily work in progress, a collective effort to clarify the problems posed by the rise of a new world society as much as an attempt to produce satisfying accounts of how the world has become a global whole.