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Globalisation or Multiple Modernities: Reflexive Modernization and its alternatives

SOC207 Lecture 9

Dr Jordan McKenzie

What is Globalization?

While there is no single agreed upon definition, the different approaches can be distinguished over the matter of the When, What and Where of Globalization.

Today we will look at two specific approaches:

•Globalization from economics/capitalism (Wallerstein)

•Globalization from changes in culture, communication and the nation state. (Ritzer)

•In the first approach, globalization is a few centuries old, in the second it is a post-WW phenomenon.

But what do they have in common?

•Globalization can be defined as “the rapidly developing and ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependencies that characterize modern life” (Tomlinson 1999:2).

•A redefinition of time and space (what Giddens labels ‘Time-Space Distanciation 1981)

•A redefinition of the role of national borders/governments/economies.

•New forms of identity formation and community

•Macro theory and grand theory, but often contain micro elements

Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-)

The Modern World-System (1974, 1980, 1989)

“as a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence. Its life is made up of conflicting forces which hold it together by tension, and tear it apart as each group seeks eternally to re-mold it to its advantage. It has the characteristics of an organism, in that it has a life-span over which its characteristics change in some respects and remain stable in others.” (Wallerstein 1979: 229)

Img: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/qkud_IxTaHI/maxresdefault.jpg

Wallerstein

The Core:

•The developed world (United States, the wealthier European countries, Japan etc)

•These countries have highly levels of education and comparatively low levels of manufacturing.

•Control the majority of wealth

The Periphery:

•The developing world (Africa, parts of Asia)

•These nations produce the majority of natural resources, but the wealth is exported to foreign ownership.

•Poor working conditions, low levels of education.

The Semi-Periphery:

•The in-between countries (the less wealthy parts of Europe, South America)

George Ritzer (1940-)

The McDonaldization of Society (1993)

Globalization is not simply about capitalism and economics, but also Americanisation.

Glocalization: the merging of local and global culture.

Something (glocalizing) Vs Nothing (grobalizing)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/archive/8/80/20061027130331!Ritzer_001.jpg

Something and Nothing

Nothing: “a social form that is generally centrally conceived, controlled, and comparatively devoid of distinctive content”

•Homogenous

•Void of history, stable meaning etc

•Typically Americanised

Something: social forms that are “generally indigenously conceived, controlled, and comparatively rich in distinctive substantive content”

•Heterogeneous

•Values based on local, unique culture/tradition.

•New ways to value old things

Consumer Culture is the gradual substitution of something for nothing

Some key questions

Aside from Where, What and When:

•Does globalisation affect all places equally?

•Is globalization the same as westernization?

•Who benefits from globalization? Who are the winners and losers?

•Does globalization create homogeneity or heterogeneity?

For decades the debate focused on whether globalization was happening at all. This debate seems to be over, and the sceptics lost.

Civilization or Civilizations?

Modernity or Modernities?

“Civilizations refer to the cultural modes of interpretation that first arrive with the onset of writing and which interact with particular processes of state formation to produce distinct complexes that are more than national patterns but are also never contained within geopolitical units.” (Delanty 2010: 48).

“There is a further and crucial element to this. Civilizations develop not in isolation from each other but in interaction with others.” (Delanty 2010: 49)

Further reading, See: ‘The Many Americas’ (2010) Jeremy Smith & Japanese Civilization (1996) Eisenstadt

The Problem?

Arnason:

“a distinctive understanding of civilization in the singular can be reconstructed from classical sources: it centres on growing control over nature, the development of a broad spectrum of human abilities and ways of relating to the world, and the differentiation of socio-cultural frameworks for corresponding activities” (2006: 230)

Delanty:

“What we term globalization today is nothing more than a greatly accelerated scale and intensity of global interconnectivity that commenced with the emergence of the major civilizations. It may be the case, and it is Eisenstadt’s thesis, that this is leading to a new kind of civilization, which in his view is disproportionally influenced by western civilization and is global in that it is not rooted in any one civilization.” (2010: 50)

How can we think of the distinction between civilization in the singular vs the plural? What are the benefits?

Weber’s research can be seen as an early attempt at civilisational analysis.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)

To this day, capitalism has not developed the same way in all places.

Arnason: Civilisational analysis as a critique of evolutionary theories of modernity.

“The plurality of civilizational patterns, with their respective dynamics of internal differentiation and historical transformations, casts doubt on evolutionary conceptions of social change.” (2006: 232)

“The civilizational approach, as defined by Eisenstadt, takes a broader view of culture and its role in social life, but it is also designed to avoid cultural determinism: the interpretive dimension is an opening to indeterminacy. Eisenstadt goes on to argue that although this civilizational dimension is an integral aspect of human societies in general, it has throughout much of human history been ‘embedded in the concrete institutional organizations of collectivities without being the object of specific institutional formations or bearers thereof’ (ibid.: 35).” (2006: 232)

Johann Arnason

“But the cases that exemplify this privileged model also illustrates the difficulties faced by research programmes in this field: decisive progress could only be made through comparative inquiry on a scale that calls for extensive cooperation of historians, sociologists and area specialists. In other words, civilizational analysis needs interdisciplinary work of a hitherto unprecedented kind.” (233)

Antinomies: divergent and contradictory characteristics of modernity

Arnason, in reference to the antinomies as the cultural problematic of modernity,

“At its most radical, their mutual exclusion entails the negation or neutralization of the unrestrained reflexivity with which Eisenstadt equates the modern breakthrough: only thus can they achieve the closure needed to establish separate projects with ideological and institutional implications. Their antagonistic uses of shared cultural sources mark them as modern alternatives. But by the same token, the articulation and the interplay of antinomies define modernity as a new kind of civilizational formation.” (2006: 239)

Eisenstadt: Modernity as a New Civilisation

•Does late/post modernity mean the end of a shared concept of civilisation in the West?

•Can we get around the problems of labelling an era after modernity (such as ‘post’) by thinking of modernity as the formation of a new civilisation?

•What does this mean for the concept of civilization?

“the modern transformation can plausibly be described as a restructuring of the relationship between civilization in the singular and civilizations in the plural, but in such a way that the new openings to diversity have a more direct bearing on the common ground and are therefore more mutually contested than at comparable junctures in the past. This would seem to leave us with two possible interpretations. Modernity might represent a civilizational transition, with the structure of a new balance between unity and plurality still open to theoretical and practical dispute. But it could also – and this hypothesis seems more challenging – be seen as a civilizational paradox, in the sense that its cultural premises break through civilizational boundaries in a previously unknown fashion, yet remain too indeterminate and adaptable to conflicting interpretations for the idea of one distinctive civilization to be applicable. Modernity would thus be both more and less than a civilization.” (Arnason 2006: 240)

References

•Arnason, J. (2006) ‘Civilizational Analysis, Social Theory and Comparative History’ in Delanty, G. Handbook of Contemporary European Social Theory, Routledge, Oxon.

•Delanty, G. (2010) ‘Thesis Eleven: Civilizational Analysis and Critical Theory’ Thesis Eleven, 100:1 pp. 46-52.

•Eisenstadt, S. (2000) ‘The Civilizational Dimension of Sociological Analysis’ Thesis Eleven, 62:1 pp.1-21.

•Knöbl, W. (2011) ‘Contingency and Modernity in the thought of J.P. Arnason’ in European Journal of Social Theory, 14(1) pp.9-22.

•Weber, M (1905) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism