Globalisation has been a fiercely contested term since it first came into common academic usage, from about the early 1980s onwards.
But what exactly is globalisation, and why is it important for sociologists to engage with globalisation
in order to better understand contemporary social life?
Globalisation is a term used in several different disciplines,
but very broadly it refers to: the intensification and integration of linkages between localities, economies, and cultures,
due to increasing flows of people, capital, labour, ideas and information across national borders.
The growth of communications technology means that globalisation also involves the increased awareness of individuals
about the interconnectedness of their world, and about their own role and involvement in global networks.
The impact of globalisation on individuals’ lives are as varied and complex as the processes themselves,
which are sometimes in conflict and contradiction with one another.
This means that it would be incorrect to talk about globalisation as something that “happens” to people.
Instead, it involves processes that individuals are often intricately involved in producing and reproducing themselves,
with various levels of influence.
For example, the same global processes which allow transnational corporations to exploit the labour of people in poorer nations,
also enable activists to disseminate information and images about those exploitative labour practices worldwide.
So, globalisation is not a set of simple top-down processes.
It can also operate “from below,” including through the formation of transnational communities on the internet.
While the growing connectedness between people and places across the world has been occurring for centuries,
the rapid acceleration of the processes of globalisation over the last few decades has drawn great interest from
several academic disciplines, including, of course, sociology.
Indeed, globalisation is central to sociology, because it’s virtually impossible to study contemporary societies
without first understanding the impact of globalisation on those societies.
This idea needs explanation, because in the past sociologists have mostly been concerned with the local and the national.
Historically, sociologists and other social scientists have centred their analyses of social, political and economic processes
on the nation state.
Classical sociology treated the nation state as analogous to ‘society’,
because it viewed the nation state as the natural and final manifestation of society in modernity,
and thus the ideal organising unit for society.
Nation states were also perceived to be relatively isolated and self-sufficient,
and thus the best ‘container’ for social scientists to study social processes through.
However, the assumption that the nation state is analogous to society was challenged by sociologists from the early 1970s onwards.
British sociologist Herminio Martins was the first to coin the term “methodological nationalism” in 1974,
to describe what he viewed as an over-reliance on the nation as the boundary marker for what constitutes a ‘society’ in the social sciences.
Martins suggested that methodological nationalism constrains the potential of the social sciences to examine and analyse social phenomena,
because of its limited and often inward-looking focus on the nation state.
The term once again became popularised in the early 2000s by German sociologist Ulrich Beck.
Beck argued that
The critique of methodological nationalism offered by Beck has been spurred on by globalisation itself,
and the growing consciousness that nation states are no longer the isolated containers of political activity and social change
that they were once seen to be.
While nation states and their governments do continue to have an impact on social relationships and social processes
at an individual or community level, global institutions, events and processes play just as influential a role
on micro-level social experiences and interactions.
For example, the proliferation of free market capitalism, due to freer and faster movement of goods and capital across national borders,
has significant wide-ranging impacts at a local level.
It just doesn’t make sense to study contemporary class relations in Sydney without also understanding
how the deindustrialisation of labour in Australia, and the emergence of new service-based economies,
was brought about by the ability to outsource manufacturing to countries where labour is cheaper.
Similarly, studying the lived experiences of refugees and migrants to Australia cannot only be understood through
national policies on immigration.
It’s important to acknowledge that events that influence people’s decisions to emigrate or seek asylum
such as war and conflict, economic devastation and environmental degradation, are themselves affected of by global processes.
On the other hand, technological advances in telecommunications means that many migrants and refugees in Australia are
better able to communicate with family and friends from their homelands,
deepening their social connections and improving their quality of life.
I should emphasise that this does not mean that the nation state is no longer relevant to understanding social life and social change.
National policies regarding trade and immigration, for example, continue to have a strong impact on how people experience aspects of social life,
including class and ethnicity.
However, the point is that these national policies don’t exist in isolation from processes of globalisation.
In addition, the nation state is no longer the only organisational structure through which contemporary societies can be analysed through,
and hasn’t been for some time.
In some circumstances, the primary function of the nation state, as far as sociologists are concerned,
is largely as an intermediary for global processes.
The proliferation of free market economies, the rapid development of new technologies,
the compression of time and space, the diffusion of ideas, information, values and beliefs:
all of these aspects of globalisation have wide- reaching repercussions for the way people live and practice sociality across the globe.
It’s for these reasons that understanding globalisation is an essential part of the sociological understanding of social life today.