Sociology And Globalisation

Contemporary Review, Summer, 2008 by Joaquina Pires-O'Brien

Globalization and Everyday Life. Larry Ray. Routledge. [pounds sterling]65.00. xviii 238 pages. ISBN 978-0-415-34095-3.

There is a widespread view of globalization as an emergent sinister process that is destroying society and the state. A more objective view is that of Larry Ray, a professor of sociology in the University of Kent, to whom globalization is a process and the word 'globalization' is just a metaphor for unsettling changes in everyday lives. He argues why it is pointless to be either 'for' or 'against' it, or to judge it as 'good' or 'bad'. While defending the view that globalization is simply the outcome of complex socio-economic developments, he also shows an understanding of why people could think of globalization as an emergent process in its own right, specially when the pace of change is greater than our ability to act according to the values we know and trust.

As part of 'The New Sociology' series, which deals with various issues and themes in the social sciences, this book provides a comprehensive review of what other social scientists have written about globalization. The globalization under scrutiny is that associated with the post-Cold War years, when a state-based political landscape of the world was replaced by an entirely new one based on cities, regions and fluid transnational bodies. One of the questions raised is whether or not globalization downgraded the nation state, and, if so, did sociology lose its relevance among other academic disciplines. To Prof. Ray, neither the nation state nor sociology has lost its relevance in contemporaneous society. Just as traditional societies were replaced by the new networks or 'socialities', a new sociology encompassing them replaced classical sociology. Indeed, the parallel between classical sociology and the new sociology is that while classical sociology arose in response to localized modernity, seen through the phenomena of industrialization and urbanization, the new sociology arose in response to global modernity.

Prof. Ray skilfully lifts and sifts the current academic ideas related to globalization and how it relates to ordinary social agents in everyday life. Whether globalization, through the market economy, is creating a global culture of visual homogeneity or, on the contrary, is bringing increased differentiation involving winners, losers and eclectic cultural hybrids, is another question examined in this book. Although it is thought that the logic of the market tends to generate homogeneity, all markets depend on social, cultural and institutional underpinning. In other words, the globalized spaces of communication exist precisely because of pre-existing social meaning produced in specific social, geographic and cultural contexts. This leads to the conclusion that 'globalisation is an accomplishment of everyday life involving human agents engaged in the construction of the global forms of sociality.'

Although this latest globalization started with great optimism and enormous expectations after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, by the end of the 1990s there was a worldwide anti-globalization movement with great power to mobilize 'global consciousness and solidarities'. The antipathy to globalization appeared to have increased by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. According to Prof. Ray, the activists were not necessarily against globalization but an economic neo-liberal globalization and a corporatist agenda aimed at constricting individual freedom and local lifestyles in the name of profit. An example he gives is that of La Confederation Paysanne, the French movement founded in 1999 in defence of French agriculture and rural lifestyles. However, the author fails to point out that the anti-globalization movement was also an example of our inability to rationalize events that happen too fast. He also fails to see that due to their agenda of keeping subsidies, to defend the French farmers' lifestyle is tantamount to a lack of solidarity with third-world farmers, and that the greatest problem of globalization is rich countries that only pay lip service to free trade.

Prof. Ray disagrees with the view that globalization has put an end to 'the social' and therefore to sociology. As the experiment of modernity becomes worldwide, new social structures, cultures and forms of power have come into the arena of sociology. He is also opposed to the view that the nation state has lost its importance in a globalized world dominated by other socialities such as transnational organizations, trade blocks and international non-government organizations. To him the state is an even more significant actor in the global arena since it holds the power to counter the socially destructive consequences of global neo-liberalism. There is a certain amount of socialist ideology underpinning his view on neo-liberalism. In spite of that, this book is a positive contribution to the critical awareness that global citizens need to develop in order to deal intelligently with the difficult issues of our time.