996001 The Global, the Glocal, the Local, and the Mixed: Investigating the Mulitfarious Faces of the Contemporary World (BS) (SoSe 2011)

Contents

Spurred by the increasing volume and rapidity of transnational flows of money, goods, people, information, technology, and images, and by the quickly densifying networks of international organizations that service and monitor these transfers, the compression of the world into a global figuration that affects people’s everyday lives in the most distant regions of earth, has reached unprecedented scope and intensity. Although the grid and grip of globalization are not uniform everywhere in the world and the terms of incorporation significantly vary among the globe’s component parts (dominant, equal, subordinate), it has become almost impossible today to understand any specific place or any particular human experience without locating it in the world and the world within it.

At the same time, however, these global influences encounter regional and local traditions of representing and acting upon the world. Usually, as the result of this interaction, glocal phenomena emerge in the realms of economic practices, political arrangements, and cultural tastes and representations that mix and blend global and regional/local elements in different configurations.

All these transformations do not annihilate, however, the local dimensions and meanings of our everyday lives. In fact, the invasion of global influences may actually mobilize the affected people and institutions to resistance on behalf of the local: in social relations, symbolic identities and commitments, preservation of cultural traditions, in political pursuits and economic activities.

In this seminar we examine the main macro- and micro-level mechanisms of (i) globalization, (ii) glocalization, and (iii) (re-)localization processes occurring in the contemporary world, different areas and trajectories of each of these processes, and their most tangible outcomes. The empirical material to illustrate the examined issues will come primarily from the field of international migration, and also from a sample of studies dealing with the political, economic, and socio-cultural dimensions of these three simultaneous processes.

The explanatory approach informing lectures and class discussions—to be introduced at the first meeting--will be that of the historical-sociological analysis. It is premised on five related assumptions. First, it holds the general subject matter of historical-sociological investigation to be the shaping of human actors by society and, conversely, the shaping of society by human actors. The second premise is the conception of both human actors and (large and small) societal structures as processes of “becoming” rather than as fixed in time and place entities. The third assumption is the inherent diversity of outcomes of the negotiations by human actors of the societal structures which does not, however, make it impossible for a researcher to construct historical, that is, time- and place-bound generalizations regarding common patterns and trajectories in this relationship. Fourth, in order to explain why things happen, a historical sociologist demonstrates how they do it by identifying a constellation of circumstances responsible for a particular form or trajectory of the examined issue. And fifth, although they by no means discard single-case studies, historical sociologists agree that both the interactive engagements of human actors and their social environment and the diversity of societal arrangements they produces are best captured through comparative investigations.

Bibliography

Mandatory
-Paul Kennedy, Local Lives and Global Transformations. Palgrave Macmillan 2010 (copies of selected chapters are available in K4-107);
- David Held and Anthony McGrew, Globalization/Anti-Globalization. Polity 2002 (copies of selected chapters are available in K4-107), and
-Course Reader (available via Stud.IP)

Please contact Hye-Young Haubner (hhaubner@uni-bielefeld) to obtain the password for Stud.IP.

Recommended
-Peter Berger and Samuel Huntington, Many Globalizations. Oxford U. Press, 2004;
-Frederic Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds. The Cultures of Globalization. Duke U. Press, 2000, and
-Saskia Sassen, ed. Deciphering the Global. Routledge, 2007.