Lecture Five.

1. Lecture Five. Globalisation and the compression of time and space.

2. Focus of lecture-concept of globalisation. • increased economic, political and cultural 'integration' • engendered by technological, political and cultural developments. • impact of the forces of globalisation on human subjectivity and identity. • Are identities in the contemporary world radically different to those of our predecessors? • There are positive aspects of globalisation but it has a 'dark underbelly’. • Key theorists -La Touche and Mc Grew, Arun Appadurai, Marshall McLuhan, Anthony Giddens, Lash and Urry, Zygmunt Bauman, and Roland Robertson.

3. Introduction • Globalisation responsible for many changes we are currently experiencing. • Processes of globalisation -motor that drives economic, political and cultural changes we term post-modern. • Not a totally new concept and experience - a process that. • In many ways, started to occur with the first stirrings of modern societies • A crucial idea in modern sociology

4. Two essential concepts tied up with notions of globalisation: • Movement ofgoods, capital, people across nation-state boundaries, incorporating some sense of the world as a single place. • Cultural Hybridisation, new hybridised/ syncretic cultural forms, and a contingent sense of the world as a single, global society.

5. Post-Industrial Society • Postmodern, globalised societies often referred to as post-industrial • Daniel Bell, (1974) Kerr al (1960) Francis Fukayama (The End of History? 1989). • Economic, political, cultural - convergence. • Societies increasingly share common features • democratic, capitalist -cultural homogeneity (compare with postmodern theories of culture etc). • theory of convergence. • Motor of convergence- globalisation

6. Post-Capitalism • Two basic ideas here. 1 Post-modern societies -different forms of economic organisation to modern period. Retains the basic features of modern Capitalism – profit, private ownership of property etc -But shift from production to consumption. 2. Post-capitalism -a broader economic picture of global forms of economic organisation.

7. Questions. • Is the the ‘End of History? (Fukuyama?) • Can you link this to Lyotards questions about the end of Meta-narratives? • For Fukuyama- no viable metanarratives that will replace the capitalist paradigm.

8. Giddens on Globalisation and Late-Modernity. • Giddens an optimist. • Globalisation an equalising process - 'reverse colonialism'. • Globalisation- a set of processes. • Affects individuals - identities, subjectivities and material conditions of life. • Modernisation spawned Globalisation. • So no new era or epoch in human history as Postmodernists suggest • Globalisation and Postmodernity- a continuation of trends set in motion by the processes of modernity

9. Four main 'institutional complexes of modernity'. • Basis of modernisation process. • Administrative power; • Military power; • Capitalism • Industrialism.

10. Administrative power • Development of the secular nation-state • Rational and bureaucratic forms of administration • Law and order. • Surveillance of populations made possible. • Links to sharing of knowledge and technology. • Can you link this to Foucault ?

11. Capitalism and industrialism • New forms of production • Factory and industrial production. • New forms of economic calculation • Decline in non-waged labour and agriculture.

12. Militarism • Based upon technology and professional armies • industrialisation of warfare • Militaristic expansion of modern states. • Increasing uses of military alliance in warfare.

13. Time-space distanciation. • a) The historical movement from traditional societies to modern ones. • b) The part played by globalisation in speeding up the processes that were set in motion by the modernisation process.

14. Traditional Societies 1 • 'Traditional' or ‘pre-modern’ societies -social relations -embedded in time and space. • Time -embedded in a local context. • Identity ascribed at birth and more or less fixed . • Majority of the population living in small local village communities • sense of space, geographical and social narrow and fixed

15. Traditional Societies 2 • sense of time and space embedded in local communities. • 'traditional' notions of time- local and narrowly defined. • reduces the sense of social and cultural distance between communities. • Time in the modern era stretches across the world. • Produces feeling that the world is shrinking. • Distances shrink as communities calibrate their sense of time with other communities on the other side of the globe. • Processes of modernisation lift out the individuals and communities from narrow definitions of time, space and status. • Modernisation dis-embeds the feudal individual from his/her fixed identity in time and space.

16. For Giddens modernisation and modernity based upon a process whereby a fixed and narrow idea of 'space' as 'place' is gradually eroded by an increasingly dominant concept of universal 'time'.

17. Two types of dis-embedding mechanisms: 1 Symbolic Tokens 2 Expert Systems.

18. Symbolic Tokens • Peasant households in traditional societies largely produced own means of subsistence. • Tithe was often paid in kind- goods ,animals , labour. • Money was of limited value • Economic exchange -local and particularistic • Modernisationreplaced local exchange with universal exchange of money. • Exchange of money establishes social relations across time and space. • Globalisation a speeding up of this process.

19. Expert Systems • arise as a result of the scientific revolutions • increase in technical knowledge • increase in specialisation. • Claim to 'universal' and scientific forms of knowledge. • Establish social relations across vast expanses of time and space. • social distance is created between professionals and their clients. • Eg. modern medical model -based upon the universal claims of science. • dominates across the globe • local perspectives become devalued. • Modern societies reliant on Expert Systems. • Trust increasingly the key to the relationship between the individual and Expert Systems. • Trust the social glue which holds modern societies together. • Where trust is undermined individuals experience ontological insecurity and a sense of insecurity with regard to their social reality.

20. Bauman on subjectivity. • The disembedding of time and space has profound consequences for human subjectivity. • This is an age of radical uncertainty with radical consequences for human morality. • Bauman's globalised world is not as harmonious a place as Giddens’.

21. Lash and Urry- The dark side of Globalisation. • An emptying out of subjects and objects. • Objects for Lash and Urry progressively emptied out of meaning. • This emptying out began to intensify when exchange value was reduced simply to money value- when the 'gift' element of symbolic exchange in pre­modern times was eroded. • Today sign value takes primacy- this is created through the advertising, media and the dissemination of commodities. • Value symbolic -but in a Baudrillardian sense. • Symbolic aspect attached to objects is illusionary. • Objects disembedded from original context and re-embedded in a new unreal context. • Baudrillardian simulacrum- a symbolic dimension- laden with meaning but paradoxically emptied of it to the extreme. • A realm of falsity, deception and simulation.

22. An emptying out of subjects. • Human subjects become disembedded also. • deterritorialization, decontextualizion of the subject • Individuals lose attachment to people and places in the process of a disembedding of time and space. • Postmodern, globalised relationships -ephemeral, fleeting and diverse. • More durable uniform relations in modern society • We are detached from the processes of production and from our fellow humans • Time a disposable, pliable, manipulable thing • Time no longer a concrete frame of reference that roots us in a particular context or milieu. • Multiple worlds, spaces and milieu that we can inhabit simultaneously. • Time and space a fragmented order that we are constantly creating and recreating.

23. From Modernity to globalisation. • For Lash and Urry a dark, sinister new world order • For Giddens a more positive thing. • Giddens divides modernity into Two phases: early modernity and ‘high’ or ‘late’ modernity. • Late-modernity based upon globalization, social reflexivity and detraditionalisation.

24. Globalisation • A contradictory and uneven process. • Pulls away from local communities and nation-states • Pushes down on those same communities and nation-states. • supra-national political organisations weaken powers of nation-states • Local communities' beliefs and cultural values may be globalised and universalised • Individuals and groups may experience this universalisation as a 'dilution' and 'corruption' of their cultural beliefs • Resististance to this process, sometimes with violence • rise of fundamentalism, nationalism and terrorism could be seen as a response to this

25. Giddens - "Globalisation...is not just 'out there' - to do with very large-scale influences. It is also an 'in here' phenomenon, directly bound up with the circumstances of local life." (Giddens1994: 80-1). • Roland Robertson - Globalisation is the: ‘universalisation of the particular and the particularisation of the universal’. The universal is the global and the particular is the local.

26. Reflexivity and Globalisation • Modernity and late modernity based upon human reflexivity. • Individuals have to make choices and decisions in a 'rational' and secular manner • All of our social activity needs to be revised in the light of new information • Increased notions of risk and uncertainty. • Globalisation appears as a threat to certain social groups and to their traditions and cultures. • Resentment and resistance to processes of globalization. • Resistance to 'global culture'. • Also hybrid cultural forms emerge ‘Glocalisation’.

27. De-traditionalisation • Reflexivity- individuals question the validity ideologies, opinions and belief-systems • Dissolution of traditional left- right politics

28. Questions. • Is globalisation an equalising process? • Cultural forms and forms of economic and political organization are more standardised • BUT some economic, cultural and political forms privileged over others • Question of why certain economic, political and cultural models come to dominate over others? • Does Giddens address this?

29. The Irresistible Rise of the West 1. • Latouche examines Western economic and cultural expansionism. • Traces the development of Western global domination. • Certain type of social organisation have been imposed on the world. • This has come to be accepted as a common sense, universally appropriate model for global development. • Global society for Latouche, the harbinger of new forms of domination and social, cultural, political and economic control. • Colonization of mind body and soul replaces physical and coercive power of the empire. Globalization, for Latouche, a new form of colonialism. • West dominates in a symbolic sense.

30. The Irresistible Rise of the West 2 • Values of progress, technological scientificism and liberal economic model- powerful mechanisms for the colonization of bodies and minds. • Technical superiority the ‘trump card of domination’ • Modernism synonymous with 'technologism', Westernism and industrialism. • Also a normative dimension -'the whole of society must be fired with.a desire for limitless accumulation’. • Colonization, and Globalization two sides of the same coin. • The domination of the rest by the West. • Processes of C & G create a single world market, ‘drawing in even the most primitive of communities and imprisoning all participants’ • Destiny of diverse societies determined by world market. • This modifies means of production but also transforms whole social systems.

31. Conclusions and Questions • Can societies be divided as Giddens suggest into 'traditional', 'early modern' and 'late modern'. This model fails to account uneven development within and between societies • Giddens theory is one of a reasonably harmonious process. Emphasises integration, social order, unification, trust;

32. Bryan Turner • The notion of self as reflexive has a long history • The early 17th century witnessed an era of high levels of reflexivity. (Historians also point to the high degree of 'economic globalization' in this period. • Little evidence to support a secularisation thesis.