M ODERNITY AND G LOBALIZATION Gurminder K. Bhambra

G LOBALIZATION AS C ONNECTIONS Week 14

S TEAMSHIP R OUTES,

T RADE R OUTES,

U NDERSEA C ABLES,

G LOBALIZATION AS C ONNECTIONS Mapping Globalization Holmwood, John ‘“Only Connect”: The Challenge of Globalization for the Social Sciences’, 21 st Century Society: Journal of the Academy of the Social Sciences 2 (1): Available online via the internet

T HE C HALLENGE OF G LOBALIZATION Holmwood asks: what is the challenge posed by globalization to sociology? He starts by asking what is the nature of sociology itself Sociology, he suggests, is an opportunity to make connections in a systematic way He uses Mills’ The Sociological Imagination in arguing that the ‘private troubles’ of individuals should be connected to ‘public issues’

P RIVATE T ROUBLES / P UBLIC I SSUES Public issues to be understood in terms of social structures and these to be understood historically we understand the direction of events in the rise and fall of social structures and the forces at work in them When we reconnect these forces to private troubles, we understand how events seemingly out of control are generated by our own actions and inactions From understanding, we can redirect our actions towards solving these problems, or at least ameliorating their effects

C ONNECTIONS In making these connections, we need to understand how our actions have consequences in the lives of other people who may be spatially or culturally remote from us except, that is, in the consequences of our actions for them and, increasingly, our fear that their actions may have consequences for us Mills believed that sociology had failed to make the necessary connections in addressing such problems

M ODERN C ONNECTIONS Globalization brings into being new problems and issues which require address The global character of transactions and flows of goods and people requires social inquiry to go beyond the boundaries of nation states and of disciplines tied to national agendas The mass media is more pervasive and is increasingly the main lens through which ‘public’ issues are presented Commercialization: the impact of tuition fees As students (or their parents) invest more in their own education, they become more concerned and anxious about the returns to this investment, thereby reinforcing a utilitarian conception of education

S INCE M ILLS More aware of the impact of social location on knowledge production From Marx on, scholars have been concerned about the dislocation of ways of living brought about by capitalism However, Marx wrote of the impact of British manufacture on Indian handicraft and the impoverishment that this was causing Current discussions of globalization stress the transfer of jobs, outsourcing, from the UK, Europe and the US to India or to China It is this shift in perspective – that ‘others’ might now be the cause of ‘our’ private troubles – which explains why globalization is seen as a new phenomenon by ‘us’, when it is a rather old phenomenon for ‘others’

R ETHINKING G LOBALIZATION The need for ‘connected’ histories and sociologies Not only about recognizing the ‘local’ in the ‘global’, but also that the ‘global’ is no more than the aggregation of some ‘local’ experiences ‘Private troubles’ are different in different locations, but these different locations also provide alternative perspectives on the nature of social structures, their mechanisms and their trends of development The identification of the global as something distinct from the local and as exhibiting its own ‘logic’ independent of local manifestations is necessarily the privileging of some perspectives over others

T HE ROLE OF THE MEDIA It is ‘our’ perspective that dominates both in social science and in the media The mass media have become more pervasive in the identification of public issues and as the ‘filter’ through which the social world and globalization is understood The impact of democratization on the media is less in terms of a dialogic relation and more in a tendency toward populism The Mumbai attacks – what was reported, what was not?

A C URRICULUM OF ‘C ONNECTIONS ’ This would be a means of engaging with students and encouraging their engagement with public issues The implication is that this will be a process of learning, where they will come to see the world differently There is no proper connection without the revision of previous knowledge and belief That must also include a process of learning within sociology

Q UESTIONS What does Holmwood (presenting Mills) mean when he suggests that we should connect ‘private troubles’ to ‘public issues’? Why does an ‘ethics’ of sociology become (more) important in a global context? What are some contemporary examples of connecting ‘private troubles’ to ‘public issues’? What might a ‘curriculum of connections’ look like? Come to the seminar with some examples.