Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T20:13:08.309Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What makes globalization really new? Sociological views on our current globalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2019

Romain Lecler
Romain Lecler*
Affiliation:
Université du Québec à Montréal, Political Science Department, Case postale 8888, succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal (Québec) H3C 3P8, Canada
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Reducing globalization to transnational movements and exchanges prevents us from understanding the specificity of our contemporary globalization, which was preceded by earlier waves of globalization. In particular, in the middle of the nineteenth century, many of the dimensions of our globalization had already been identified: the mobility of people, the expansion of trade, financial and cultural flows worldwide, and international cooperation. For example, as early as the 1850s, Marx diagnosed a ‘global’ expansion of capitalism bringing together many of the features of our contemporary globalization. In this article, I thus raise the question of the specificity of our globalization. What makes it new when compared to previous globalization processes? The main sociological theories of globalization in the 1990s relied on the thesis of a transition from a national to a global era. Many sociologists have therefore identified new aspects of our contemporary globalization. I explore six of those in turn: the invention of the terms ‘global’ and ‘globalization’ themselves; the rise of ‘transmigrations’; the rise of value chains, logistics, and ‘emerging’ countries in international trade; global cities and informational capitalism as new geographies of transnational financial flows; the threat to cultural diversity posed by a globalizing culture; and a sociology of globalization that is less and less monopolized by privileged or specific actors, becoming, on the contrary, increasingly ordinary and widespread.

Keywords

capitalismglobalglobalizationmarketssociologytransnational
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 14 , Special Issue 3: Historicizing the global: an interdisciplinary perspective , November 2019 , pp. 355 - 373
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Levitt, Ted, ‘The globalization of markets’, Harvard Business Review, 61, 3, 1983, pp. 91–102 Google Scholar.

2 WTO, International trade statistics 2015, Geneva: World Trade Organization, 2015 Google Scholar.

3 Beaujard, Philippe, Berger, Laurent, and Norel, Philippe, Histoire globale, mondialisations et capitalisme, Paris: La Découverte, 2009 Google Scholar; Wallerstein, Immanuel, The modern world-system, New York: Academic Press, 1974 Google Scholar.

4 Paul, Q. Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in question: the international economy and the possibilities of governance, Cambridge: Polity, 1999 Google Scholar.

5 Liu, X., Hong, S., and Liu, Y., ‘A bibliometric analysis of 20 years of globalization research: 1990–2009’, Globalizations, 9, 2, 2012, p. 198 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Guillen, Mauro F., ‘Is globalization civilizing, destructive or feeble? A critique of five key debates in the social science literature’, Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 2001, p. 240 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Babones, Salvatore J., ‘Conducting global social research’, in Chase Dunn, Christopher K. and Babones, Salvatore J., eds., Global social change: historical and comparative perspectives, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, p. 9 Google Scholar.

8 Guillen, ‘Is globalization civilizing, destructive or feeble?’, p. 241.

9 Lecler, Romain, Sociologie de la mondialisation, Paris: La Découverte, 2013 Google Scholar; Lecler, Romain, ‘Mondialisation’, in Hay, Colin and Smith, Andy, eds., Dictionnaire d’économie politique, Paris: Presses de Sciences-Po, 2018, pp. 307–18Google Scholar.

10 Babones, ‘Conducting global social research’, pp. 8–30.

11 Durkheim, Emile, Les règles de la methode sociologique, Paris: Félix Alcan, 1895 Google Scholar.

12 Durkheim, Emile, Le suicide, Paris: G. Baillière, 1897 Google Scholar.

13 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The communist manifesto, London: Vintage, 2018 (first published as Manifest der kommunistischen Partei, 1848), p. 27 Google Scholar.

14 Steger, Manfred B., Globalism: the new market ideology, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002, p. 195 Google Scholar.

15 Fligstein, Neil, ‘Rhétorique et réalités de la “mondialisation”’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 119, 1997, pp. 36–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Lebaron, Frédéric, Le savant, le politique et la mondialisation, Bellecombe-en-Bauges: Croquant, 2003, p. 186 Google Scholar.

17 Fiss, Peer and Hirsch, Paul, ‘The discourse of globalization: framing and sensemaking of an emerging concept’, American Sociological Review, 70, 1, 2005, pp. 29–52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Strange, Susan, ‘States, firms and diplomacy’, International Affairs, 68, 1, 1992, pp. 2 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Friedman, Thomas L., The Lexus and the olive tree, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999 Google Scholar; Friedman, Thomas L., The world is flat: a brief history of the twenty-first century, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005 Google Scholar.

20 Liu, Hong, and Liu, ‘Bibliometric analysis’, pp. 195–210.

21 Marcus, George E., ‘Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 1995, pp. 95–117 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Gille, Zsuzsa and Riain, Sean O., ‘Global ethnography’, Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 2002, pp. 271–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 McKeown, Adam, ‘Global migration, 1846–1940’, Journal of World History, 15, 2, 2004, pp. 155–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Schiller, Nina Glick, Basch, Linda G., and Blanc, Cristina Szanton, ‘Transnationalism: a new analytic framework for understanding migration’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 645, 1992, pp. 1–24 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

25 Levitt, Peggy, The transnational villagers, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001Google Scholar.

26 Wimmer, Andreas and Schiller, Nina Glick, ‘Methodological nationalism, the social sciences, and the study of migration: an essay in historical epistemology’, International Migration Review, 37, 3, 2003, pp. 217–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Schiller, Nina Glick, ‘A global perspective on migration and development’, Social Analysis, 53, 3, 2009, pp. 14–37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Chase-Dunn, Christopher, Kawano, Yukio, and Brewer, Benjamin D., ‘Trade globalization since 1795: waves of integration in the world-system’, American Sociological Review, 65, 1, 2000, pp. 77–95 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 WTO, International trade statistics 2015.

30 Gereffi, Gary, ‘The governance of global value chains’, Review of International Political Economy, 12, 1, 2005, pp. 78–104 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 WTO, International trade statistics 2015.

32 Cowen, Deborah, The deadly life of logistics: mapping violence in global trade, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Chase-Dunn, Christopher K., Global formation: structures of the world-economy, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998 Google Scholar.

34 Quark, Amy and Slez, Adam, ‘Interstate competition and Chinese ascendancy: the political construction of the global cotton market, 1973–2012’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 55, 4, 2014, pp. 1–25 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Chase-Dunn, Kawano, and Brewer, ‘Trade globalization’.

36 Fouilleux, Eve and Jobert, Bruno, ‘Le cheminement des controverses dans la globalization néo-libérale’, Gouvernement et Action Publique, 3, 2017, pp. 9–36 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Fairbrother, Malcolm, ‘Economists, capitalists, and the making of globalization: North American free trade in comparative-historical perspective’, American Journal of Sociology, 119, 5, 2014, pp. 1324–79CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Fourcade-Gourinchas, Marion and Babb, Sarah L., ‘The rebirth of the liberal creed: paths to neoliberalism in four countries’, American Journal of Sociology, 108, 3, 2002, pp. 533–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Chorev, Nisan, ‘The institutional project of neo-liberal globalism: the case of the WTO’, Theory and Society, 34, 3, 2005, pp. 317–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Evans, Rhonda and Kay, Tamara, ‘How environmentalists “greened” trade policy: strategic action and the architecture of field overlap’, American Sociological Review, 73, 6, 2008, pp. 970–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Kay, Tamara, NAFTA and the politics of labor transnationalism, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Bartley, Tim, ‘Institutional emergence in an era of globalization: the rise of transnational private regulation of labor and environmental conditions’, American Journal of Sociology, 113, 2, 2007, pp. 297–351 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fouilleux, Eve and Loconto, Allison, ‘Dans les coulisses des labels: régulation tripartite et marchés imbriqués: de l’européanisation à la globalisation de l’agriculture biologique’, Revue Française de Sociologie, 58, 3, 2017, pp. 501–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Sassen, Saskia, The global city: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991 Google Scholar.

43 Sassen, Saskia, Sociology of globalization, New York: W. W. Norton, 2007 Google Scholar.

44 Castells, Manuel, The rise of the network society, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996 Google Scholar.

45 Ibid. , p. 77, emphasis in original.

46 Ibid. , p. 101.

47 Ibid. , p. 147.

48 Ibid. , p. 442, emphasis in original.

49 Ibid. , p. 443.

50 Ibid. , p. 444.

51 Sassen, Saskia, Territory, authority, rights: from medieval to global assemblages, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006 Google Scholar.

52 Marx and Engels, Communist manifesto, p. 28.

53 Fligstein, ‘Rhétorique et réalités de la “mondialisation”’, p. 37.

54 Viallet-Thévenin, Scott, ‘Du champion national au champion international’, Revue Française de Science Politique, 65, 5, 2016, pp. 761–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lorrain, Dominique, ‘Capitalismes urbains: la montée des firmes d’infrastructures’, Entreprises et Histoire, 30, 2002, pp. 7–31 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Le Galès, Patrick, ‘Du gouvernement des villes à la gouvernance urbaine’, Revue Française de Science Politique, 45, 1, 1995, pp. 57–95 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Le Galès, Patrick, Le retour des villes européennes: sociétés urbaines, mondialisation gouvernement et gouvernance, Paris: Presses de Sciences-Po, 2003, pp. 401, 153Google Scholar.

56 Le Galès, Le retour des villes européennes, p. 268.

57 Chan, Cheris, ‘Culture, state, and varieties of capitalism: a comparative study of life insurance markets in Hong Kong and Taiwan’, British Journal of Sociology, 63, 1, 2012, pp. 97–122 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Lemoine, Benjamin, L’ordre de la dette, Paris: La Découverte, 2016 Google Scholar.

59 Castel, Robert, La montée des incertitudes: travail, protections, statut de l’individu, Paris: Le Seuil, 2009 Google Scholar.

60 Brady, David, Beckfield, Jason, and Zhao, Wei, ‘The consequences of economic globalization for affluent democracies’, Annual Review of Sociology, 33, 1, 2007, pp. 313–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Appadurai, Arjun, ‘Disjunction and difference in the global cultural economy’, Theory, Culture and Society, 7, 1990, pp. 295–310 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Crane, Diana, ‘Culture and globalization: theoretical models and emerging trends’, in Crane, Diana and Kawashima, Nobuko, Global culture: media, arts, policy, and globalization, London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 1–26 Google Scholar.

63 Tomlinson, John, Cultural imperialism: a critical introduction, London: Pinter Publishers, 1991 Google Scholar.

64 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, ‘Globalization as hybridization’, in Featherstone, Mike, Lash, Scott, and Robertson, Roland, Global modernities, London: Sage Publications Ltd, 1995, pp. 45–68 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 Robertson, Roland, ‘Globalisation or glocalisation?’, Journal of International Communication, 1, 1, 1994, pp. 35–52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Sinclair, John, Jacka, Elizabeth, and Cunningham, Stuart, New patterns in global television: peripheral vision, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002 Google Scholar; Kuipers, Giselinde, ‘How national institutions mediate the global: screen translation, institutional interdependencies, and the production of national difference in four European countries’, American Sociological Review, 80, 5, 2015, pp. 985–1013 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Sapiro, Gisèle, ‘Le champ est-il national?’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 200, 5, 2013, pp. 70–85 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Lecler, Romain, ‘Nouvelles vagues: Cannes, la fabrique française d’un universel cinématographique’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 206–7, 2015, pp. 14–33 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Lecler, Romain, Une contre-mondialisation audiovisuelle: ou comment la France exporte la diversité culturelle, Paris: Sorbonne Université Presses, 2019 Google Scholar.

70 Duru-bellat, Marie, Pour une planète equitable: l’urgence d’une justice globale, Paris: Le Seuil, 2014 Google Scholar.

71 Marx and Engels, Communist manifesto, p. 28.

72 Sklair, Leslie, The transnational capitalist class, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001 Google Scholar.

73 Carroll, William K., ‘Transnationalists and national networkers in the global corporate elite’, Global Networks, 9, 3, 2009, pp. 289–314 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heemskerk, Eelke M., Fennema, Meindert, and Carroll, William K., ‘The global corporate elite after the financial crisis: evidence from the transnational network of interlocking directorates’, Global Networks, 16, 1, 2016, pp. 68–88 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 Wagner, Anne-Catherine, ‘Les classes dominantes à l’épreuve de la mondialisation’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 190, 2011, pp. 4–9 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 Tarrius, Alain, La mondialisation par le bas: les nouveaux nomades de l’économie souterraine, Paris: Balland, 2002 Google Scholar; Choplin, Armelle and Pliez, Olivier, La mondialisation des pauvres, Paris: Le Seuil, 2018 Google Scholar.

76 Tarrius, Alain, Étrangers de passage: la mondialisation entre pauvres, La Tour-d’Aigues: Editions de l’Aube, 2015 Google Scholar.

77 Paul, Anju Mary, ‘Stepwise international migration: a multistage migration pattern for the aspiring migrant’, American Journal of Sociology, 116, 6, 2011, pp. 1842–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eder, Mine and Öz, Özlem, ‘From cross-border exchange networks to transnational trading practices? The case of shuttle traders in Laleli, Istanbul’, in Djelic, Marie-Laure and Quack, Sigrid, eds., Transnational communities: shaping global economic governance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 82–104 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Lecler, Romain, Morival, Yohann, and Bouagga, Yasmine, ‘Pour une ethnographie des professionnels de l’international’, Critique Internationale, 81, 2018, pp. 9–20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 Bayart, Jean-François, Global subjects: a political critique of globalization, Cambridge: Polity, 2008 Google Scholar.

80 Rosenberg, Justin, ‘Globalization theory: a post mortem’, International Politics, 42, 2005, pp. 2–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.