Sociology of Globalisation

This chapter discusses alternatives to current globalisation. It argues that a regulatory global governance is unlikely because of conflicting material interests and ideologies. Sub-global internationalism is more viable politically; a global left rather than global government. The chapter outlines alternatives to existing globalisation at the levels of national and local government and in local civil society. It argues that alternative globalisation can be pursued at a global level in the free movement of people. This is defended on philosophical and principled grounds and in terms of its economic and social benefits. It is argued that despite widespread opposition to immigration there are bases for support for open borders. Keywords: Anti-globalisation. Alter-globalisation. Global governance. Local alternatives. Open borders. Free movement.

In the past decade, urban regeneration policy makers and practitioners have faced a number of difficult challenges, such as sustainability, budgetary constraints, demands for community involvement and rapid urbanization in the Global South. Urban regeneration remains a high profile and important field of government-led intervention, and policy and practice continue to adapt to the fresh challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century, as well as confronting long-standing intractable urban problems and dilemmas. This Companion provides cutting-edge critical review and synthesis of recent conceptual, policy and practical developments within the field. With contributions from 72 international experts within the field, it explores the meaning of ‘urban regeneration’ in differing national contexts, asking questions and providing informed discussion and analyses to illuminate how an apparently disparate field of research, policy and practice can be rendered coherent, drawing out common themes and significant differences. The Companion is divided into six parts, exploring: globalization and neo-liberal perspectives on urban regeneration; emerging econceptualizations of regeneration; public infrastructure and public space;
housing and cosmopolitan communities; community centred regeneration; and culture-led regeneration. The concluding chapter considers the future of urban regeneration and proposes a nine-point research agenda. This Companion assembles a diversity of approaches and insights in one comprehensive volume to provide a state-of-the-art review of the field. It is a valuable resource for both advanced undergraduate
and postgraduate students in Urban Planning, Built Environment, Urban Studies and Urban Regeneration, as well as academics, practitioners and politicians.

This article reviews conventional theories about various aspects of labor migration: Its origins, stability over time, and patterns of migrant settlement. For each of these aspects, we provide alternative explanatory hypotheses derived from the notions of increasing articulation of the international system and the social embeddedness of its various subprocesses, including labor flows. A typology of sources and outcomes of contemporary immigration is presented as an heuristic device to organize the diversity of such movements as described in the empirical literature.

Edited version of published paper presented at 'Is Black and Red Dead?' Conference, Centre for the Study of Social and Global and Justice (CSSGJ) University of Nottingham, 7-8 September, 2009

https://socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/110943

This article is a critical analysis of the definition of globalisation in sociological studies. It argues that sociologists, unlike economists, have not succeeded in coming to a commonly accepted definition of globalisation. This seriously hinders the development of empirical studies. The ambiguity of the concept of globalisation is seen as rooted in three dialectics: globalisation-as-a-process versus globalisation-as-a-condition; globalisation-as-reality versus globalisation-as-futurology and one-dimensional-globalisation versus multi-dimensional-globalisation. These dialectics are rarely made explicit in the different studies on globalisation, which contributes to an accumulation of confusion rather than an accumulation of knowledge. The article aims to provide a theoretical framework in which concepts of globalisation can be positioned through the formal analysis of a commonly used definition. Conceptual limitations that arise as the result of the choice of a specific concept are highlighted, such as the underestimation of the present when globalisation is considered a process, the neglect of internal contradictions when globalisation is seen as a multi-dimensional concept; and the dangers of determinism and ignorance of unique features when the processes of globalisation are defined by their sole destination. It challenges the sociological community to position research on globalisation within this proposed framework.

This document presents an analysis of the nascent global or world society. It starts from an analytical treatment of the concept and theory of globalisation and then follows the contemporary conflict- and crisis-ridden transition from the national to the ‘postnational constellation’ (Jürgen Habermas) at the economic, political, legal, civil societal and cultural levels in terms of the theoretical distinction between functional and communicative globalisation. Together with the competition and conflict between the economic, political and legal actors, on the one hand, and citizens and social movements, on the other, over the direction of the process, both the negative fallout of globalisation and its positive potentials are considered in some detail. Rather than simply an external description, however, the focus is more specifically on a critical examination of the process from the inside out, as it were – that is, of the different sociologically relevant learning processes associated with cosmopolitanism which are a significant factor driving and shaping globalisation.

This article discusses the impact of Pierre Bourdieu's social theorising on two related fields of debate, namely research about the evaluative practices of cultural critics, and research about the artistic legitimation of popular culture. More specifically, the article argues that the concept of field (Bourdieu 1993, 1996) makes it possible to investigate the ways in which criticism, as a cultural category, is struggled over by competing groups of experts and audiences. In this respect, field theory helps addressing criticism as a field in itself, rather than as an uncontested and uniform cultural institution.
The article will first contend that Bourdieu's attention to struggles over practices and classifications remains underappreciated in the sociological literature on critics. It will then argue that a field perspective may enhance the study of the institutional diversification of criticism within popular culture. This claim will be substantiated discussing some findings of the author's research about the rise of popular music criticism in 1970s Italy. The discussion will conclude considering the possibilities that field theory may open up for future research, particularly in relation to the impact of digital media on the institutions and practices of criticism.

This paper decomposes global inequality in redistribution, using data from the World Development Indicators data set of the World Bank. It finds that per capita income has a modest, yet persistent effect on redistribution. More provocatively, the paper also demonstrates that, over and beyond the impact of per capita GDP, global inequalities in redistribution over the last generation or so strongly reflect the double legacies of colonialism (improving the likelihood of redistribution in former-colonizer societies and sharply reducing it in erstwhile-colonized, recently independent societies). In addition, it also finds that the history of recent exposure to state socialism increases the presence of redistributive institutions, partly counterbalancing the effects of lower national incomes. The data have been obtained from the World Bank's online open-access data site World Development Indicators, http://data.worldbank.org.

Over the past decades, the idea that national sovereignty and the authority of the state have been increasingly challenged or even substantially eroded has been a dominant one. Economic globalization advancing a neo-liberal dis-embedding of the economy is seen as the major reason for this erosion. Concerns have increased about the negative consequences for the social fabric of societies, deprived of the strong shock absorption capacity that the welfare states had established in the time of the embedded liberalism to use a term John Ruggie coined. The concerns have also helped nationalistic movements to gain power in many high-income countries, not at least in the United States, calling for putting their economy first. Accordingly, a number of commentators have announced a return of the nation state. In this special issue, we will show that the retreat-of-the-state thesis as well as the return-of-the-state thesis shares the same shortcomings. They conflate state and authority. As a consequence, both theses underestimate important transformations of authority that have taken place since the end of the “short 20TH century,” to use Eric Hobsbawm's periodization.
With this special issue, we seek to contribute to a more nuanced analysis of the transformation of authority. The issue is the outcome of a conference that took place at the Copenhagen Business School in 2015, hosted by the research project ‘Institutional Transformation in European Political Economy: A Socio-Legal Approach’ and funded by the European Research Council.

Conveners: Antje Vetterlein and Poul F. Kjaer

Concept
Great transformations are unfolding within contemporary society due to developments related to, among other things, the financial crisis, increased globalisation, rapid technological developments, ecological challenges and new types of political conflict. Common for these otherwise very diverse developments is a consistent demand for regulation. Whereas de-regulation, although de facto serving a re-regulatory rather than a de-regulatory purpose, was a buzzword from the 1980s onwards the tide seems to have shifted towards a new demand for governance driven regulation. Accordingly, a multitude of new governance frameworks aimed at stabilising, orchestrating and indeed regulating increasingly globalised social processes has emerged in recent decades.
In most cases great hopes and demands are attached to the potential of regulatory governance. The notion of regulation is however a contested term which has multiple meanings and which is deployed in a large range of different institutional and social settings characterised by different intentions, objectives and normative underpinnings. In addition, the reference to new types of governance in many instances remains elusive and difficult to pin down in practise.
Against this backdrop, this workshop sets out to explore and reassess the notions of regulation and governance and their relation as well as the wider social phenomenon of regulatory governance and especially the potential of governance-driven regulation as a driver of societal change. It does so by raising a number of questions such as: Can the hopes and demands attached to the notion of regulatory governance possibly be fulfilled? What is the functional and normative content of regulatory governance? And to what extent can regulatory governance measures serve as tools for the realisation of normative endeavours?
In order to pin down the notion of regulatory governance and to explore its multifaceted meaning, potential and impact as well as the social praxis of regulatory governance the workshop will approach the phenomenon from three different angles: rules, resistance and responsibility.
Referring to rules, the objective is to explore the functional and normative nucleus of regulatory governance. What is the purpose and mechanisms of regulatory governance and what can regulatory governance actually “do”? How have the praxis, form and content of regulations changed over time? And what implications does this entail for governance? Increased globalisation, for example, has implied an increased focus on the regulation of horizontal governance networks and processes of transfer between different societal contexts, due to expanded supply chains and intensified knowledge transfers. In other words, what we expect in this part are theoretical and empirical contributions that examine regulations in specific policy, their functioning, change and impact on governance structures.
Resistance, as the second dimension, refers to the potential of regulatory governance as a mode of reacting to structural pressures and the general volatility and contingency emerging from “the market” and other developments in relation to, for example, technological developments. Resistance can take many forms insofar as it can be observed within formalised political processes, within governance networks, in civil society. Yet, resistance also takes place in less organised ways, for instance within firms or other types of organisations and in local contexts on the micro-level. This dimension therefore starts from the assumption that rules and regulations are constantly contested and invites contributions that shed light on a variety of such instances of contestation and thus the transformative power of regulatory governance.
Finally, responsibility highlights the normative foundation of regulations and thus addresses questions of legitimacy within regulatory governance. Regulations always relate to broader, more fundamental values that function as their justifications. The way in which social problems are defined and framed has implications for what policy solutions can be perceived and thus also what rules and regulations are possible. This in turn implies that things could be different when societal values change, which will also affect the allocation of authorities and consequently responsibilities. We can observe how responsibility shifts from state actors to the private sector for instance or from global levels to local contexts. In this part we therefore invite contributions that investigate such changes and answer more general questions such as: To what extent can regulatory governance serve as an instrument for developing frameworks of increased reflexivity, justification and legitimation? And to what extent can regulatory governance be understood as a central tool for societal development and the construction of new sites responsibility?
Papers focusing on both private and public regulation and their interaction as well as local, regional, national and transnational sites of regulatory governance are most welcome. The call is furthermore open to papers with a more theoretical and conceptual take as well a more empirically oriented approaches.

This article evaluates Ulrich Beck’s cosmopolitan global politics. I argue that areas where Beck sees bases for communal and cosmopolitan politics are structured by power, inequality and conflict. Beck has a conflict perspective on local responses to globalization but this is not carried through to his global politics. There are issues that need to be tackled at a global level but this will have to be done on the basis of conflicting interests, power and nation- states as much as through global cosmopolitanism and co-operation.

Offshoring and outsourcing have become the buzzwords of the IT community and the popular media discourse about the current era of globalization in services. Acknowledging the geographic perspective expressed in these dominant terms, in this article I examine the processes and activities that are oriented in the opposite direction. Capturing this inversion, I develop the concept of ‘onshoring’ and use research material from fieldwork conducted with IT firms in St Petersburg, Russia and their affiliates, agents and clients in the USA to provide an empirical case study. Onshoring encompasses the corporeal, representational, material and legal practices of offshore firms developing a presence onshore, with Russia as offshore and the USA as onshore in this case. The lack of an established Russian professional diaspora in the USA created a context in which developing a recognizable onshore presence was necessary for firms based in Russia. By explicitly recognizing that the efforts, risk-taking and experimental strategies of offshore firms to create connections, networks and contacts onshore in the USA are a constitutive part of offshore outsourcing, I document and examine the less acknowledged complex flows and practices of onshoring. I argue that although these actors and processes may seem marginal to the widely recognized narrative of offshore outsourcing, in fact, they are creative and strategic compensations that reveal how the globalization of services is enacted at the micro-level.

This paper uses qualitative analysis for assessing the impact of the globalization on distribution of income, poverty and inequality in India and arrives as different conclusions. It has been concluded that the absolute poverty in India with the increasing globalization has fallen significantly by at the same time inequity has increased. To measure globalization KOF Index has been used and for inequality Gini Index has been used. JEL Classification: D63, I30, F60, F63

This paper is analysing and summarising the impact of globalisation on social and cultural values of India. For this, a number of research papers have been reviewed, presented and corroborated in this paper. In this paper social and cultural issues like gender inequality, equal opportunities, family structure and values, social security net, life style, administration, education, technology, healthcare system, festivals, language, music, literature, cinema, television and drugs and trafficking been discussed on the basis of prior research works. The findings from those works have been summarized and presented in this paper.

A central assumption in much contemporary scholarship is that a central shift has taken place over the course of the last four decades: a shift from a world largely centered on public authority to a world that is increasingly dominated by private authority. The central expression of this shift is seen to be a concurring move from public to private law and thus from legislation to contract as the central legal instrument structuring economic as well as other social processes. While developments in this direction can certainly be observed, this article provides a more nuanced perspective. Outlining a long-term historical perspective, this article reconstructs the manifold and volatile dynamic between institutionalized forms of public and private authority. It does soon the basis of the argument that, in the course of this evolutionary process, the very function and meaning of both public and private authority has been fundamentally altered. This alteration implies the transformation of both dimensions into functionally limited and more specific phenomena. With this background, it becomes possible to argue that societal evolution is characterized by a dual expansion of both public and private forms of authority. The starting point is an understanding of authority as condensed power. Asymmetric relations implying either direct or indirect forms of domination are observable throughout society and are as such an intrinsic element of all social relations and processes. Authority is, however, based on a particular institutionalization of power, typically delineated and condensed with the help of legal instruments. Under radical modern conditions, law becomes constitutive for authority to the extent that one might argue that no form of authority exists outside its legal form. With this background, the article argues that the pre-1945 world at the local, national, and transnational level of world society was characterized by a relative dominance of private forms of authority. The process leading to state-based modern public law gaining not only a formal but also a factual capacity to structure societal processes was a century-long process: a process which implied an epic struggle aimed at undermining and eradicating alternative centers of public and private authority in society. It was, however, a first in the mid-twentieth century that an outright breakthrough of this claim and aspiration could be observed. The implied a respecification of public and private authority that remains central to our understanding of authority to this day.

"This book develops a sociologically informed theory of constitutionalism in the global realm, addressing both national and transnational forms of constitutional ordering. The book begins with the argument that current approaches to constitutionalism remain tied to a state-based conception of constitutions, and overlooks underlying structural transformations that trigger the emergence of constitutional forms of ordering. Poul F. Kjaer aims to address this shortcoming by offering a sociological and historically informed analysis of the evolution of constitutionalism in the face of globalisation. The analysis contextualises on-going constitutional developments through the use of a long-term historical perspective, which is capable of highlighting the impact of deeper structural transformations unfolding within society.
The book looks at the ways in which national and transnational legal forms have evolved alongside one another. It demonstrates that the formation of global constitutions has not resulted in a corresponding decrease in the power of nation states, but instead, legal and political aspects of both the nation state and the transnational have been reconfigured and intensified in a mutually supportive manner.
In combining insights from a range of fields, this interdisciplinary book will be of great interest to students and scholars of constitutional law, sociology, global governance studies, and legal, social and political theory.

List of Content
1. Introduction: The Metamorphosis of Constitutionalism
Part 1: Structural Transformations
2. The Implosion of the Euro-Centric World
3. The Multiplicity of Normative Orders in World Society
Part 2: Re-configurations of Law and the Political
4. The Law within and in-between Normative Orders
5. The Political within and in-between Normative Orders
Part 3: Constitutional Stabilisation
6. The Breakdown of Constitutional Ordering through Globalisation-induced Crises
7.The Transmutation of Constitutional Ordering
8.Re-calibrating the Constitutional Concept
9. Conclusion

Reviews and Review essays:
- Aldo Mascareño: Revista de Ciencia Política, 36, 2, 587 – 592, 2016.
- Gregory Shaffer: ‘Law, Constitutionalism and World Society: Kjaer, Kratochwil,
and global (dis)order’, International Journal of Constitutional Law, 13, 4, 1063–1077, 2015.
-    Alfons Bora: Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie, 35, 1, 152-156, 2015.
- Grahame Thompson: ‘Socializing the Constitution?’, Economy and Society, 44, 3, 480 – 93, 2015.

This book, based on extensive original research, explores the lives and the social, economic and emotional activities of Chinese migrant women during their migrations and mobilities in China, from China to Taiwan, from Taiwan to China and in between the two countries. It illustrates how women on the move experience social contempt, misrecognition and economic marginalization; how women migrants seek autonomy, economic independence, upward social mobility and modernity, but discover the Chinese inegalitarian social order and labour regimes which produce obstacles and impede their ambitions; and how old and new forms of subalternity are re-produced. Overall, the book emphasises what it feels like for the women migrants as they negotiate their way between subalternity and resistance, between subordinated labour and independent entrepreneurship, and between an inegalitarian labour market and new opportunities for business and commerce.

In the development of creativity, innovation, patenting, and licensing in technology-based economies, different environments affect significantly the success of the new startups at the universities. Therefore, interactive ecosystems, where need assessments, ethnographic field studies, observations, and focus groups are strategically used, have significantly transformed and transcended the mindset of the participants, especially for those who have great potential in life sciences. In this study, what the effects of different interactive ecosystems are on improving creativity, innovation, patenting, and licensing is critically transferred by showing different real examples in life
sciences. Additionally, how ethnographic studies affects the participants in the process of the creating innovative products is given in the interactive ecosystem in which the target participants have become more active by developing empathy. By developing a new interactive ecosystem, specifically in the hospitals, participants’ behaviors and attitudes have changed and they have become more engaged to the problems and the needs of the patients.
Hence, in this workshop, the translational research environment is taken as an interactive environment
to show the sustainable circles from the patients’ bed to the laboratories, from the laboratories to the
TTOs to have their patents, and from the attorney to the startups and to corporates, in which the
licensing period is critically short comparing to the other systems.
In order to understand the reliability and validity of the system, the phenomenological interpretive
analysis is used to investigate, in a new interactive ecosystem, which is the translational research
center. In that way, mainly the graduate level students’ and the experienced researchers’ behaviors
and attitudes are analyzed by training them ethnographic studies tools in order to improve empathy.
The results show that, those who have more empathy comparatively than those who do not have, have
better results in developing creativity, innovation, patenting, and licensing since their products are
directly related to the touchable and urgent needs. It is no doubt that, the participants have learned
how to make marketing research and developing business models in order to be profitable for themselves and for their universities by means of royalties. The four different studies show that only 6 weeks is enough to become more active, engaged, and empathetic in order to develop new and technologically innovative products and services. The
interactive ecosystems help them to be more aware about the needs, especially in life sciences due to
the fact that all the stakeholders, doctors, patients, nurses, other medical people, and patients’ close relatives and friends are close each other to share their thoughts, ideas, and needs. Additionally, new ICT gadgets help them to be much closer in terms of the knowledge transfer. Hence, the awareness of the participants help to collect right data to transform to the new products and services which can be
licensed easily.
In this workshop, the real cases will be given in der to help the audience to develop new interactive ecosystems. The behaviors and attitudes of the participants change because their selected attention and awareness are improved. The interactive communication and teamwork capacity have increased to developed innovative products and services, which have high market values.

[Full article online.]

Extract:

The English language is a monster bent on devouring weaker language cultures, this is the thesis of the editors of English Language As Hydra.

Rapatahana and Bunce’s book offers a trenchant critique through wide-ranging analyses, drawing on a mixture of years of experience and detailed case study. The writers collected here are a mixture of language teachers, writers and theorists from diverse cultural backgrounds including notable figures such as Malaysian National Laureate Muhammad Haji Salleh, and world-renowned Kenyan playwright, novelist and academic Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

Rapatahana and Bunce’s anthology explores how the global dominance of English serves to create and maintain a system where English can be seen as the international language of cultural access to those who already have access to it, through teaching policy, economic policies, private and public institutions, creating a line of social division to those from other language cultures. In the process of describing and analysing the various manifestations of this hierarchy in English language culture, from policy to unconscious privilege, and its alarmingly negative effects on indigenous cultures, the book charts a map of mutually supportive linkages between prejudice and bureaucracy from Australia to Singapore, New Zealand to Kenya and beyond. This book explores both the systematic and structural ways in which parts of this system ensure their own survival in the ecology of language.  Its varied insights into the cultural politics of language teaching alone are fascinating.  It is valuable for budding scholars and educators who wish to understand the networks which define their potential job horizons internationally, and for those seeking to engage critically with the interlaced structures of language and economic stratification under globalisation.

Full detailed review at http://books.scoop.co.nz/2012/09/18/the-medium-is-the-message/

Paper presented at 'Practicing Theory - ASCA International Workshop and Conference 2011', Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, 2nd-4th March 2011 https://asca.uva.nl/programme/archive-conferences/asca-international-workshop-2011-practicing-theory/asca-international-workshop-2011-practicing-theory.html?1583659550967

Departing from the paradox that globalisation has implied an increase, rather than a decrease, in contextual diversity, this paper reassesses the function, normative purpose and location of Regulatory Governance Frameworks in world society. Drawing on insights from sociology of law and world society studies, the argument advanced is that Regulatory Governance Frameworks are oriented towards facilitating transfers of condensed social components, such as economic capital and products, legal acts, political decisions and scientific knowledge, from one legally-constituted normative order, i.e., contextual setting, to another. Against this background, it is suggested that Regulatory Governance Frameworks can be understood as schemes which act as " rites of passage " aimed at providing legal stabilisation to social processes characterised by liminality, i.e ambiguity, hybridity and in-betweenness.