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The emergence of performance studies in the last three decades has been accompanied by an increasing dissatisfaction with the functional interpretation of ritual, and in this context Émile Durkheim's work on ritual and religion has been the target of much criticism. The paper argues that a closer consideration of Durkheim's interpretation of commemorative rites could be incorporated effectively into performance theory, as one of its neglected sources. The paper reviews current analytic approaches to ritual theory, and then analyses Durkheim's argument with regards to two themes: the social organization of time and memory, and the reenactment of the past as a source of aesthetic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an age of apparently endemic globalization and globality, any form of sociological theorizing centred on an understanding of the term 'society' which took the latter as being always located within the boundaries of a particular nation-state, would be indictable as being iniprisoned within the confines of a naïve and analytically unsatisfactory 'methodological nationalism'. A superficial assessment of Durkheim's work might lead one to believe that of all the thinkers of the classical period of sociology, Durkheim is the most methodologically nationalist, and thus the most unpromising resource for analyses of globalization processes in the present day. However, this paper shows that such a view is a serious oversimplification of a multi-stranded oeuvre which contains within it intriguing elements that point towards a Durkheimian account of globalization processes and conditions of globality. While there are indeed methodologically nationalist strains in Durkheim's work, these are more than counter-balanced by certain other, more globally oriented, concerns. First, there are tendencies towards the development of a 'cosmopolitan' political theory, a stance which has been fairly well remarked upon by other authors. Second, at a more explicitly 'sociological' level, there are also certain orientations towards an account of the genesis and nature of social and cultural globality. This account is scattered throughout various locations in Durkheim's writings, most notably The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and the paper reconstructs what it takes to be Durkheim's embryonic project in 'global sociology' to be found there and in sonic of his other works. Attention is drawn to the apparent debt Durkheim owed to Fustel de Coulanges in this regard. This paper concludes with the argument that Durkheim's endeavours to understand conditions of globality and planet-wide connectivity should be given serious attention in contemporary re-assessments of the capacities of classical sociologists to deal with globe-spanning processes and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advocates internationalising the sociology curriculum for both practical and theoretical reasons. Macro-sociology must drop the parochialism of implicitly confining itself to intra-state phenomena, based on Western historical experience, and develop a conceptual framework adequate to deal with the emergent transnational scene and transnational global structures and processes of change. Correspondingly, the sociology curriculum must be geared to increasing the international competency of students, both undergraduates and graduates. Doing so will attract better undergraduates seeking careers in the international field, and will for graduates provide training and research that will promote the number of sociologists actually engaged in international studies. Specific recommendations to internationalise the sociology curriculum include (1) an introductory course dealing with large-scale phenomena and their global interdependence and manifestations, including major attention to colonial situations, (2) a topical course on major international issues and problems, (3) a methodological training course in comparative analysis, and (4) a senior seminar regarding the international sphere and its impact or relation to the local national setting. To complement the course work, the curriculum should also provide field research and an internship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing accounts of American sociology’s founding years during the early twentieth century assume that the discipline was ‘metrocentric.’ They assume that it was only interested in processes occurring within the United States; that American sociologists fell prey to state-centrist thought; and that, therefore, contextualizing America sociology’s emergence necessitates understanding relations, events, and processes within the confines of US territorial boundaries. By contrast, this paper shows the imperial and hence global aspects of early American sociological thought. Early American sociologists were interested in imperialism and, therefore, in cross-societal, transnational, and global processes and relations. Implicitly or explicitly they approached imperialism as a process by which social groups, not least ‘races,’ interacted and conflicted. They also saw it as a route towards new global forms. Early American sociology thus articulated a sociological imagination that looked beyond American society and to the wider world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents abstracts on planning literature which include approaches to empirical work in regional economics, understanding the barriers to social adaptation, and management of large city regions.

The article presents an interview with Professor Les Back talking about class and community driving the path into sociology. Topics include task of the academic practice of sociology being a kind of lay making the familiar strange; and objects to stories of globalisation, supply chains, manufacturing in the global South as well as colonialism.

The intensities of the contemporary moment continue to prompt reflections on the strengths and limitations of approaches typically used to study education policy reform. The central contention of this essay is that policy sociology and its application within education offers needed vantage points on contemporary pressing global policy problems. Future studies would do well to keep the footprint of existing frameworks, which emphasize policy networks and mobilities, power dynamics within these flows, and the focus on doing research that speaks to concerns of stakeholders. The next generation of policy sociologists can further strengthen the relevance and rigor of the analytic scheme by leaning into methodologies that further attend empirically and descriptively to power asymmetries within policy networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the issue of preponderance in the study of sociology. Preponderance, whether of thought, language, culture, economics, politics, region or gender, is seldom innocent or of no consequence. Yet, in sociology internationally, the study of preponderance by the discipline has far exceeded the study of sociology's own tendencies towards predominance. The article begins to redress that by examining contesting currents in internationalizing sociology in relation to existing and emerging international divisions of sociological labor. There are two broad contexts for themes brought forward here. First, there is the rapidly shifting context of globalization and emergent relations of ruling globalization entails, to borrow the evocative and widely applied construct of Canadian social theorist, Dorothy Smith. Both entail interrogations of power, of dominance, of justice, of the relations of region to center, and of agency to structures in varying forms. Contradictions abound as do reconfigurations of power and dominance. Second, there is the probing of knowledge and discourse in the context of global change and the rapidly shifting relations of ruling. The ways in which relations of ruling shape sociological discourses are as diverse as the discourses themselves and as conforming to the norms and mores that emanate from the sociological ruling centres. Capacity for deep international comparisons that range beyond empirical indicators into discovering different paths of social development, has been lost. Understanding of globalization need not mean homogenization has been lost.

In spite of its cosmopolitan origins, American sociology is widely regarded as parochial in its outlook and concerns. In this paper I outline factors contributing to the intellectual isolationism of American sociological research and pedagogy. Then I review recent social and intellectual trends toward internationalization. Finally, I offer concrete suggestions for sociologists interested in internationalizing their curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The act of decentring established Euro-North American sites and flows of knowledge as longstanding geopolitical anchors of epistemological authority presents déjà vu scenarios, involved in centre-staging processes. The very position of being a messenger from the 'North' of knowledge and theory from the 'South' can reproduce the same patterns the undertaking seeks to unsettle. The context in which academic performativity is shaped is integral to both the making and taking of space in intellectual circuits of production and circulation. This article considers how centre-staging in academia performatively involves particular features. As a case in point, the focus is on the centre-staging of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (epistemology of the South) and Raewyn Connell (Southern Theory), who have become globally known for insisting on bringing knowledge from the South to the North. The wider ecology of the global circuits of academia, as well as their own performative dramaturgy, constitutes points of observation. A self-enterprising ownership of big global conceptual programmes places them high in the decentring of knowledge. There is a leap frogging over former stocks of published academic knowledge, as well as a centre-staging of knowledge projects, whereby it is they who become the flag bearers of this enterprise. Within this process it is important to recognise who is illuminated. Bibliographic tracks become traced over, in the very ways in which fields are mapped in order to produce a point of intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the cultural experiences of subaltern migrants from Kerala, India to the Middle East. It draws upon the French pragmatic sociology with attention to convention theory to cast in sharp relief different interpretations of worth that influence subaltern migrants or vagabonds as Zygmunt Bauman has labelled them. This study shows that vagabonds use different regimes of worth and justification to resist domination and to shape their cultural encounters with host and home cultures. It explains how existing acculturation research lacks insights about worth and regimes of justification that hinder it from fully understanding the role of domination and cultural experiences of subalterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do investors enter and navigate markets where there is a general lack of access to information and where the law is open to interpretation? Drawing on interview data with 100 research subjects in Vietnam's real estate market, this article makes contributions to the literatures of economic sociology and development. First, looking at a diverse set of local, regional, and global investors, I theorize how market actors pursue different strategies to manage risky investments based on their proximity to state officials. Investors' proximity depends on four processes: legal/regulatory, social ties, cultural matching, and stage of investment. Second, I highlight how multiple state–market relations can coexist within the same state. Investors' varying levels of proximity to government officials shape their relationship with the state as one of patronage (predatory), mutual destruction (mutual hostage), or transparency (developmental). Heterogeneous state–market relations help account for the persistence of foreign direct investment in markets that display both a great deal of corruption and a great deal of legality and transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces a series of articles which appeared in the December 2004 issue of the "Global Social Policy". Contradiction between the domination of post-modernism and cultural relativism in debates around well-being on one hand and universalism and globalization in the real world of institutions and politics on the other; Contrasting ways in which the disciplines of economics, anthropology and sociology handle the tensions between the universal and local; Links between conceptions of well-being, the way these are operationalized in empirical research and their relation to policy processes.

To face an unequal world requires us to interpret and explain it, to be sure, but also to engage it, that is, to recognize that we are part of it and that we are partly responsible for it. In other words, inequality is not just something external to us, but also invades our own world. I begin, therefore, by examining the global community of sociology through the lens of inequality. I then consider two recent perspectives on our unequal world from outside sociology: the moral radicalism of Pope Francis that emphasizes exclusion from market society, and the innovative research of the economist Thomas Piketty that emphasizes unequal inclusion in market society. These two faces of global inequality mirror the social movements reverberating from the economic crisis of 2008 but which have their roots in a reaction to a broader wave of marketization, the third to engulf modern capitalism. To explore the meaning of third-wave marketization, otherwise known as neoliberalism, and the social movements it provokes I draw on two concepts from Karl Polanyi – ‘fictitious commodities’ and ‘countermovement’ – as well as a theory of the dynamics of capitalism. I conclude with three challenges facing a global sociology that centers social movements: to develop a theory that speaks to the globally diverse experiences of commodification; to develop a methodology that recognizes that we are unavoidably participants in the world we study; and to develop a politics that defends a particular vision of that world, a vision that has defined the sociological tradition from its beginning, namely one that upholds the centrality of civil society against the over-extension of market and state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an update on the "International Sociology" journal as of December 1998. The scholarly criteria of the journal are very high, as befits an official organ of the most significant international association of sociologists. "International Sociology" has, furthermore, become the membership journal for all subscribed members of the International Sociological Association. With this return to its roots, "International Sociology" has become perhaps the widely diffused sociological journal. It is now read in nearly 100 countries. The journal has now reached a level of maturity that is chosen by some of the most significant sociologists as a forum for discussion. The proposal that each issue should have a cover article has gained an interest which is attested to, by the high level of the cover articles submitted for publication. The portraits of sociologists have also elicited a positive response. The journal has approached a wide range of sociological topics, that is, clinical sociology, sociology of religion, globalization, the sociology of consumers and the emotions. Articles covering sociology from Eastern Europe, Russia, Greece, the Middle East, East Asia, among others have also been published. There has been a welcome increase in the number of subscribers to the journal in the last two years as well as a steady increase in the number of papers submitted for publication to the journal.

In its founding generations, sociology was greatly concerned with gender, as part of its theorizing of the world of colonialism and empire. Sociology then focused on the global metropole, so its analysis of gender in the decades since the Women’s Liberation movement has been developed in a Northern container. This can now change, if the extraversion of sociology around the global South can be overcome. The thematics of gender analyses in the periphery highlight historical processes of the formation and disruption of gender orders, dealing with issues of violence and land. The work of a number of gender theorists and researchers from the South is discussed. The material conditions of knowledge formation in developing countries have to be recognized, as well as the differing ways intellectuals in the South handle influences from the metropole. New issues have emerged in the sociology of gender as a neoliberal world order has taken shape, producing new patterns of masculinized power as well as pathways of change for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on an analysis of negotiations between the Colombian government and international donors over Colombia’s Poverty and Inequality Reduction Strategy, this article describes the normative, institutional and technical patterns that configure a political governance structure within the international cooperation and development system. The article argues that this structure works as an interface that integrates global governance processes aimed at the regulation of global risks (e.g. poverty and inequality) into national political systems in aid-receiving countries. This case study suggests that the shape of this governance structure leads to a form of ‘agreed violation’ of sovereignty that can be defined and analysed as an instance of the ‘emergent formations of multi-scalar globalization’, to which the sociology of globalization refers. However, this interpretation necessitates a fine-tuning of the sociology of globalization’s understanding of governance, which is discussed in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article introduces the Current Sociology monograph issue on Values and Culture. It discusses sociology’s renewed interest in values and the general approach on which the contributors converge despite diverse theoretical backgrounds, areas of focus and social settings. It explains how the studies in this publication contribute to the understanding of the formation and operation of values on micro, meso and macro levels in an increasingly globalized world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the position of the Southern sociologies within the discipline. The role and presence of local, national and regional scholarly communities has been widely reflected on in the context of the discussion around internationalization or globalization of the discipline. Thus, a variety of critiques of ‘Eurocentrism’, or more precisely, ‘North Atlantic domination’, have arisen in recent years that can be strengthened by empirical evidence of strong inequalities and distorted communication mechanisms within sociology at an international level. What has been largely missing so far is the demonstration of viable alternatives to North Atlantic domination, as well as enquiries into the conditions of their emergence. This article offers a different perspective by highlighting counterhegemonic currents emerging out of the South despite the peripheral position, i.e. by drawing attention towards challenging scholarly communities and their output that have not received much, if any, attention in the discussions so far. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents abstract on planning including a micro-level analysis of the Black voting during the civil rights movement, the influence of land-use planners on flood hazard mitigation and the use on public transport timetable data into health care accessibility modelling.

This article presents a systematic reconstruction of Georg Simmel's sociology of religion. Following the development of his sociology of religion, it successively analyses religion as a form of interaction, as a symbolic form and as a personal form. The main argument is that all of Simmel's writings are metaphysical and that religion is only one form among others that gathers the fragments of existence into a unified totality. Religiosity is the central category of Simmel's writings on religion. It 'detranscendentalizes' religion and locates its conditions of possibility within the aspirations of wholeness of the soul. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on city planning-related topics, including visions of waterfront development in postindustrial Philadelphia, the construction of a town planning perception of Colombo, and city planning and the U.S. census.

Copyright of International Sociology is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of International Sociology is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Current Sociology is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses European migrants to Spain's coastal areas. These 'residential tourists' make creative use of modern communication technologies and accessible air travel to construct fluid migration trajectories and employ transnational affective and instrumental networks. Research on British migrants to Spain has shown a high incidence of social, cultural, economic, and political exclusion. While these migrants dream of integration, an ambiguous status in Spanish society constrains assimilation and leads to marginalisation.

The future of macromarketing could be a bright one if the macromarketing community seizes the current opportunity to distinctively define macromarketing as a transdiscipline focused on societal development of all countries. As trans-disciplinary scholars, macromarketers would be versed in the paradigmatic assumptions of two or more fields with the goal of making a more fundamental contribution to core disciplines and the boundaries that separate them. Doing transdisciplinary work calls scholars to see ‘the whole picture’ and to holistically understand the ways many disciplines interconnect when one considers macro issues facing not only individual societies but the planet as well. Some examples of such macro issues that cut across disciplines would include globalization, environmental stewardship, and consumer sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization has attained a prominent place on the sociological agenda, and stratification scholars have implicated globalization in the increased income inequality observed in many advanced capitalist countries. But sociologists have given much less attention to a different yet increasingly prevalent form of internationalization: regional integration. Regional integration, or the construction of international economy and polity within negotiated regions, should matter for income inequality. Regional economic integration should raise income inequality, as workers are exposed to international competition and labor unions are weakened. Regional political integration should also raise income inequality, but through a different mechanism: political integration should drive welfare state retrenchment in market-oriented regional polities as states adopt liberal policies in a context of fiscal austerity. Evidence from random-effects and fixed-effects models of income inequality in Western Europe supports these arguments. The results show that regional integration explains nearly half of the increase in income inequality in the Western European countries analyzed in this article. The effects of regional integration on income inequality are net of several controls, including two established measures of globalization, suggesting that a sociological approach to regional integration adds to our understanding of rising income inequality in Western Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the evolution of sociological traditions within India in the context of colonization and assesses their continuation in its contemporary practices. It evaluates two new perspectives, indigenization and postcolonial studies, that have emerged to reorganize these traditions. The author argues that the divisions of knowledge and power represented within the disciplines of sociology and anthropology structure the ways in which distinct traditions of sociology have evolved and continue to play a major role in defining theories, perspectives and methods of doing sociologies in the world. How can these perspectives take the challenge of globalization that is reorganizing the distribution of world power, its knowledge and that of its institutions in new and seminal ways? The globalization of knowledge can have two possible effects. It can reconstruct earlier binaries in new ways, refashioning them to maintain the structure connecting knowledge with power. Alternatively, global processes can distil and uncouple these binaries, thereby allowing for the play of plural perspectives, so that all traditions of doing sociology are placed at equal levels and given equal significance. We have to decide the path that we travel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents abstracts of environmental planning research. They include "Integrating a performance-based approach into practice: A case study," "Local commitment to state-mandated planning in coastal North Carolina" and "Fiscal consequences of concentrated poverty in a metropolitan region."

U.S. environmental sociology has gone through a very different development path compared with its European counterpart. U.S. environmental sociology was dominant in establishing the field and setting the terms for the development and identity of this subdiscipline. Whereas U.S. environmental sociology still sets the tone in terms of internal organization, structure, and interaction, arguably Northwest European environmental sociology has been more innovative in the last decade of the former millennium with respect to theoretical and conceptual contributions. Although we can still witness significant differences between the environmental sociologies of the two continents, these differences are diminishing. During the past decade, a remarkable degree of interaction, exchange, and social learning has taken place between the two academic communities, facilitated by various aspects of globalization. The question of whether we are moving to one environmental sociology should, however, also take other—and especially the emerging Asian—environmental sociologies into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents abstracts of several studies on environment and planning. "Explaining the Growth of British Multiple Retailing During the Golden Age," by Carlo Morelli; "Cities in the Shade: Urban Geography and the Uses of Noir," by Matthew Farish; "Geographers and the Tennessee Valley Authority," by Ronald Reed Boyce.

World culture, while a core issue for comparative sociology and an influential institution worldwide, is an illusive notion: it is difficult to imagine what norms, values and symbols unite us the world over. Still, some international organizational sites offer a glimpse into world culture; one such site is that of the United Nations' dedication work. Since 1949, the United Nations has expressed commitment to some 125 issues by making formal dedications of decades, years, weeks and days as celebrations, commemorations and focal points for work on the promotion of certain issues; through this work the UN declares these issues to be important for us to promote, protect and cherish. This article (1) traces the bureaucratic history of this UN work and (2) lists the issues that are marked as worthy of international appreciation. In so doing, the article (1) traces the institutionalization of this international cultural site and (2) draws a picture of world culture since 1949. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that studies of counter-hegemony and resistance in International Political Economy (IPE) have often ignored the cultural dimensions of anti-globalisation. We argue that a greater understanding of the elements needed for the articulation of counter-hegemony within IPE can be achieved through an engagement with the traditions inherent in the Birmingham School, and with the elements of Situationism contained within the anti-consumerist movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a particular social movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Marathwada subregion of Maharashtra state in India. The article further analyses the multiple ways in which the terrain of development in India was mapped by the social movement Marathwada Janata Vikas Aandolan (MJVA). Sociology of social movements has increasingly acquired a centre-stage status in the sociology of the 21st century. This is an indication of two things, the first, there is a growing need to identify sources of collective agency in the scenario currently being altered by processes of globalization. The second, it underscores the urgent need to reconsider the relationship between social movements, the state and political power. The author argues that MJVA brought to the fore the contradictions unleashed by capitalist modernity in a peripheral postcolonial society like India. The nationalist struggles both in British India and the Princely States were aimed at securing capitalist modernity. Even the movements for development and economic prosperity of the of modernity.

This article explores the global and local context in which practitioners are studying sociology' within Aotearoa , New Zealand, assesses new structures that are emerging to enable the practice and explores challenges these pose to sociology as both a discipline and as a set of research practices. Globalization and its attendant processes have been the dominant frame through which change and transformations, in both the object of sociology and its research activities, have been viewed since the late 1980's. For some it has led to reduction in differences and variations across nations to give increased homogeneity. Globalization thus, was seen as the triumph of modernity as it enabled greater rationalization and standardization of ideas and social and economic processes. However, for others it represents a series of transformations leading to increased diversity, fluidity and local difference thus privileging a more fine grained and contextual form of analysis, leading away from the grand narratives and structural explanations. The experience of tertiary and research reform over the past 20 years and its impacts upon the development of sociology in Aotearoa has been discussed. From the mid-1980's to the 1990's, neo-liberal reforms to both the tertiary sector and research environment resulted in extensive change to how both were done. The increased competitiveness and the creation of a less integrated system resulted in a shift to a more commercialized model of research funding, driven much more strongly by end user interests and a more consumer-centred tertiary education system. The challenge for the discipline in this new environment is to maintain its theoretical content while contributing constructively to multidisciplinary development and policy debates and refusing to accept a marginal or add-on role in research development.

The analysis of globalization requires attention to the social and political units that are being variously undermined, restructured or facilitated by this process. Sociology has often assumed that the unit of analysis is society, in which economic, political and cultural processes are coterminous, and that this concept maps onto that of nation-state. This article argues that the nation-state is more mythical than real. This is for four reasons: first, there are more nations than states; second, several key examples of presumed nation-states are actually empires; third, there are diverse and significant polities in addition to states, including the European Union and some organized religions; fourth, polities overlap and rarely politically saturate the territory where they are located. An implication of acknowledging the wider range and overlapping nature of polities is to open greater conceptual space for the analysis of gender and ethnicity in analyses of globalization. Finally the article re-conceptualizes 'polities' and 'society'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Current Sociology is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

I sketch aspects of a critical theory of globalization that will discuss the fundamental transformations in the world economy, politics, and culture in a dialectical framework that distinguishes between progressive and emancipatory features and oppressive and negative attributes. This requires articulations of the contradictions and ambiguities of globalization and the ways that globalization both is imposed from above and yet can be contested and reconfigured from below. I argue that the key to understanding globalization is theorizing it as at once a product of technological revolution and the global restructuring of capitalism in which economic, technological, political, and cultural features are intertwined. From this perspective, one should avoid both technological and economic determinism and all one–sided optics of globalization in favor of a view that theorizes globalization as a highly complex, contradictory, and thus ambiguous set of institutions and social relations, as well as one involving flows of goods, services, ideas, technologies, cultural forms, and people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article distinguishes between civilization and culture in the tradition of Alfred Weber and Robert Merton. Civilization denotes the human control of nature and is used in the singular; culture indicates the social construction of meaning and is used in the plural. Civilization is also the term for the social-natural whole, and culture for the local parts of the whole. The renewed distinction between civilization and culture aims to correct the underattention in the social sciences and humanities to technoscientific developments. Furthermore, it is unsatisfactory to view contemporary history from the points of view of local cultures only. The author argues that a revised understanding of civilization is necessary to deal with the globalization of technoscience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The convergence argument in the debate on globalization regards globalization as a structural change. Globalization, however, is as much a structural change as a social construction - an imagined order of the future that involves value judgment and an ideological stand. Through an analysis of the ideological conflicts in the politics of Japan's national response to the challenge of globalization, the article shows that the convergence argument is being challenged on four specific issues in Japan: the universal model of market economy conflicts with the search for national identity; the big bang strategy that asserts a radical turnover of the national economic system is discredited by the holistic view of the economy that emphasizes the social embeddedness of the economic system; the new interpretation of the Japanese economic system as a product of wartime control contradicts the widely held image of postwar Japan as a democratic country; and the efficiency principle for future economic governance is challenged by the established norms concerning equality. This study indicates that the convergence argument in the debate on globalization faces strong resistance from the deeply institutionalized beliefs in the national economic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization is a plural phenomenon. There are at least five major discourses on it that usually ignore each other: competitive economics, social criticism, state (im)potence, culture and planetary ecology. The dimensions of globalization include a number of substantial social processes as well as two different kinds of dynamics: systemic and interacting exogenous actors. Globalizations are not new phenomena. At least six historical waves, beginning with the spread of world religions, may be identified. An attempt is made to systematize the effects of globalizations on different world regions and social actors. Issues of governance are raised, focusing on states and norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals primarily with international trade and with the flow and stock of foreign direct investments as indicators of economic globalization. Both recent developments and a historical perspective back to 1830 are presented. The focus is on the rich dominant economies, but a global overview is also given. Recent tendencies do not stand out as unique or radically new when considered in historical light. On the basis of the negative economic and social tendencies of the world economy, the author launches 'an Appeal from Stockholm' for a new, global 'New Deal'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization tendencies have fundamentally transformed the nature and organization of business communities in Southeast Asia. Chinese business communities in East and Southeast Asia have been playing a leading role in the regional economy through the extensive interpenetration of capital flows and business networks. Through their cross-border investments and global trade networks, these Chinese business communities have also facilitated the rearticulation of mainland China into the global economy. The recent Asian economic crisis, however, has seriously undermined the social and institutional foundations of Chinese business communities in Southeast Asia. At the discursive level, Chinese business communities are beginning to come to terms with a much more realistic conception of globalization as a set of contested processes creating both threats and opportunities. In material terms, Chinese business communities increasingly recognize the limits to their 'home' country-based accumulation strategies and turn to globalization as an alternative growth strategy. The emergence of Chinese business communities in Southeast Asia cannot therefore be conceived as an indigenous evolutionary process of social and institutional change. Rather, it should always be seen as contingent upon such critical external processes as globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization is a misleading concept, since what is described as globalization has been happening for 500 years. Rather what is new is that we are entering an 'age of transition'. We can usefully analyze the current world situation using two time frames: 1945 to the present and circa 1450 to the present. The period since 1945 has been one long Kondratieff cycle, with an A-phase that ran through 1967-76 and a B-phase ever since. The economic and political developments of the last 50 years are easy to place within this framework. The period from 1450 to the present is the long history of the capitalist world-economy, with its secular trends all reaching critical points. This article analyzes the long-term rise in real wage levels, in costs of material inputs of production and of levels of taxation, the combination of which has been creating constraints on the possibilities of capital accumulation. The long history of the antisystemic movements and their structural failures has led to a serious decline in the legitimacy of state structures which is threatening to subvert the political pillars of the existing world-system. For all these reasons, the modern world-system is in structural crisis and has entered into a period of chaotic behavior which will cause a systemic bifurcation and a transition to a new structure whose nature is as yet undetermined and, in principle, impossible to predetermine, but one that is open to human intervention and creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world polity and cultural system are relatively stateless, but they legitimate strong nation-state identities as the dominant actors. This produces very strong tendencies for the adoption of common models of modernity, despite extraordinary differences in resources and local culture. Local distinctiveness is also legitimated, so long as it is not inconsistent with homogeneity on the main dimensions of stratification and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main premise of this article is that globalization is both a universal phenomenon with common characteristic tendencies and a condition of plurality defined by the historical and geographical specificities of particular localities. This paradoxical point is explained in the theoretical context of the spatial configuration of globalization. The main concepts used to that end are Robertson's notion of glocalization, Castells' notion of polarization, Sassen's notion of global city and Appadurai's conception of imaginary worlds. The main objective is to elucidate, both in theory and in practice, a series of contradictions, ambiguities and irregularities that result from particular articulations of global and local developments. Turkey is used as a case study in order to analyze the practical implications of globalization(s) at both the national and local levels and at the level of neighborhoods. Borrowing from Appadurai's distinction between a locality and a neighborhood, the article argues that an empirical analysis of globalization(s) in neighborhoods helps us problematize the unsettling consequences of practical modes of glocalizations. Such problematization is necessary to understand the universal condition of globalization as an open-ended process that shapes and is shaped by particular cultural, political and spatial patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how some current transnational relations between global agents and indigenous peoples' organizations in Latin America impress the representations of identities and associated ideas of these organizations in combination with being useful in the achievement of these organizations' goals for their peoples. Such a discussion serves two main purposes: (1) to contribute to the development of a theory of social change in the current age of globalization through criticizing the established scholarly practice of studying 'local' cases as if they actually exist, or as if they may at least be detached from the world orders in which they take part without any significant consequence; and (2) to criticize the colonial legacy of area studies, anthropology and other academic disciplines of studying 'the Other' - very often indigenous peoples - which, independently of researchers' intentions, contribute to informing agents of the colonial or post-colonial powers and trying instead to produce knowledge that is potentially useful to 'local' agents about 'global' agents, their practices and the impact they may have on 'local' agents' practices. A few illustrative examples taken from the author's field and documentary research about some current experiences in Latin America are used to show how transnational networks of 'local' grassroots organizations and diverse kinds of 'local' intermediary non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and 'global agents' (i.e. international agencies, bilateral cooperation agencies, the multilateral banks, transnational foundations, as well as transnational social movements and NGOs) play significant roles in the social making of representations of indigenous peoples' identities and associated ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to contribute to feminist theorizing, to globalization studies and to theories of social movements by discussing a new organizational form and a new form of women's collective action in an era of globalization: transnational feminist networks (TFNs). The article's empirical section focuses on the origins, objectives and activities of four TFNs, each of which links women across national borders around a common agenda that includes economic, political and foreign policy concerns. It is argued that the women's movement should be understood not only in terms of its local manifestations but as a global phenomenon, characterized by supra-national constituencies, objectives, strategies and organizations. As such it is an integral part of the growing family of global social movements and organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]