tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34625670207046567492024-03-13T14:16:04.220-07:00Global Sociology, Live!A COLLABORATION OF THE GLOBAL SOCIOLOGY SEMINAR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY AND THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATIONglobalsociologylivehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16718209842231197109noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3462567020704656749.post-63013478414816401592011-09-09T18:00:00.000-07:002011-09-09T18:52:03.081-07:00<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> 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locked="false" priority="73" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="19" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Subtle Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="21" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="31" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Subtle Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="32" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="33" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Book Title"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="37" name="Bibliography"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p style="text-align: center;" class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="font-size:130%;"><b style=""><span style="mso-spacerun:yes;font-size:180%;"> </span><span style="font-size:180%;">GLOBAL SOCIOLOGY:</span><br /></b></span></p><p style="text-align: center;" class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="font-size:130%;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">REFLECTIONS ON AN EXPERIMENTAL COURSE</b></span></p> <p style="text-align: center;" class="MsoNoSpacing">Laleh Behbehanian & Michael Burawoy</p><br /> When sociology began as a positivist enterprise in the 19<sup>th</sup> century the goal was to develop laws of society that were universal in character, that applied everywhere and through all time. Such were Durkheim’s theories of the division of labor, of suicide, and of religion; such were Weber’s categories, classification and ideal types; and such was Marx’s theory of capitalism. A global sociology, on the other hand, is the culminating phase of a reaction against universal sociology, introducing geographical space as central to the formation of knowledge. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Global sociology directs attention to the particularity of many universal claims, but without dissolving everything into particularity, without abandoning the search for the universal. <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> We might say that global sociology is the third stage in the scaling up of sociological practice.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In the first phase, sociology began as very much concerned with communities. In the US, the Chicago School was really about one city, Chicago, even if it claimed to be about the world. The second phase – and the chronology is not linear – was about the nation state.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Here we get the classic studies of Weber and Durkheim, but also the research programs that drew on national data sets, focusing on national political systems and civil society of national dimensions.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Again this unit of analysis was often not thematized but rather presented as the universal.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The third phase is a global sociology, which while not discounting the local or the national, reaches for global forces, global connections, and global imaginations. The danger here is that global sociology once again becomes a universalization or extension of the experience of the North, in particular of the US. Global sociology, like community sociology and national sociology, must be continually on its guard against the particular masquerading as the universal.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> While global sociology may be a novel enterprise in the Global North, it might be said that sociologists in the South have always had to take a global perspective, insofar as they have long been acutely aware of how their societies are shaped by forces emanating from the North, whether through forms of violent subjugation or the more subtle forms of hegemony. Paradoxically, Northern approaches – with their universalizing mission – have nonetheless often dominated Southern sociology, if only for the reason that leading sociologists in the South have largely been trained in the North. There is a profound imbalance, therefore, between, on the one hand, the sociologies of the North backed up by enormous academic capital and, on the other hand, emergent, indigenous sociologies of the South, bereft of material and intellectual resources. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>For the most part, this imbalance has led to a struggle on the terrain of Northern sociology rather than a frontal assault against its universalizing tendencies.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> These are some of the dilemmas with which any global sociology must grapple, and which we sought to address in our experimental “Global Sociology Live!” course at the University of California, Berkeley. Most crucially, we aimed to include an internationally diverse array of scholars who contributed their varied perspectives to our discussions. Using video-conferencing and Skype we invited sociologists from different parts of the world – the Philippines, India, China, Colombia, South Africa, and Lebanon – as well as sociologists in the US studying different countries, to partake in a discussion of global capitalism and the counter-movements to which it has given rise. They each gave short 15 minute lectures, after which they engaged in a 45 minute discussion with our students, who themselves also came from a variety of different nations and backgrounds. Having studied and discussed the lecturer’s work prior to each lecture, the students were well prepared to ask informed questions and participate in a lively discussion. All of these sessions were recorded and posted on line at http://www.isa-sociology.org/global-sociology-live/, making them available to global audiences with internet access. The lecturers are well-known sociologists who, while based in the South, were all trained in the North and speak fluent English.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In this sense, we recognize that this project – rather than being counter-hegemonic – indeed took place on the contested terrain of global hegemony, seeking to develop a sociological understanding of global capitalism by exploring its instantiations in different parts of the world.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Sociology as the Standpoint of Civil Society?</i></b></span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"> What does it mean to develop a sociological understanding of global capitalism? In other words, what should we mean by global sociology? This requires answering the prior but difficult question: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">what is sociology</i>? Here, too, there is the danger of false universalization, but we will have to take that risk. We have to start somewhere. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>We approach sociology as the study of the world from the standpoint of society, understood as civil society – the institutions, organizations, and movements that are neither part of the state nor the market.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This does not mean that sociology only studies civil society and its components – family, parties, trade unions, churches, etc. -- but rather, that it studies the world from the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">standpoint of civil society</i>. This immediately differentiates sociology from economics which studies the world from the standpoint of markets and from political science which studies the world from the standpoint of the state and political order. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In a world where states and markets conspire to destroy society, sociology finds itself in a challenging position. It takes the standpoint of a civil society in which human survival is endangered by the destructiveness of unregulated markets and predatory states.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> Now we should not think that civil society is a holistic romantic entity, defending all that is good! Civil society is a divided entity, traversed by all manner of exploitations, oppressions, and divisions that are likewise reflected in sociology. Just as civil society is Janus faced, supporting the state but also potentially challenging it, so the same can be said of sociology. Just as civil society overlaps with the economy and state, their borders often blurred, so too are the borders between sociology, economics and political science. And where civil society is primordial and gelatinous, so too is sociology. In countries where civil society does not exist, sociology cannot emerge except as an underground network, and where civil society is weak and fragmented, as in Russia today, so is sociology. Where civil society is bifurcated, as it was for example in Apartheid South Africa, sociology too is bifurcated. Moreover, in places where civil society is colonized by external forces, rather than an indigenous civil society, there is instead only a “mass society” of “bare life” comprised of individuals without formal organizational presence.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> This vision of sociology as rooted in civil society derives from two theorists – Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi – who observed the transition to advanced capitalism at the critical time of the1930s, and from the critical location of the semi-periphery. From this standpoint they developed grand vistas of the global order, acutely sensitive to its different parts.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Gramsci saw civil society as providing new means for the dominant class of advanced capitalism to secure consent to its domination. However he did not examine where this civil society came from – it just happened to emerge toward the end of the 19<sup>th</sup> century in Europe, or what he called “the West.” <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Karl Polanyi, on the other hand, was more interested in its origins, arguing that civil society (he simply called it society) emerged as a reaction to the over-extension of the market, particularly the unregulated labor market.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>He largely focused on England, where industrial capitalism first took root and where reactions to the market took the form of cooperatives, trade unions, political parties, self-help organizations such as burial societies, as well as the factory and Chartist movements. Those reactions were built on the local organizing of society aspiring to the national level and seeking state regulation of the market. The next round of marketization, after World War I, was spurred on by open trade and exchange rates fixed by the gold standard. It led to the Great Depression and a subsequent counter-movement by states, impelled by the mobilization of civil society, to regulate their economies so as to insulate them from the ravages of international markets.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>State-society relations, as varied as the dictatorial regimes of Stalinism and Naziism and various forms of social democracy in Northern Europe or the New Deal in the US, set limits on the free play of markets. While Gramsci and Polanyi provide us with a conceptual framework for a sociology that studies the world from the standpoint of civil society, neither of them conceived of the possibility of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">global</i> civil society that could become the basis of a global sociology.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Global Capitalism as Neoliberalism</i></b></span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"> Polanyi did not expect another round of marketization, but this is just what happened in the 1970s with the rise of what we call neoliberalism. In this era state and economy collude in the promotion of a capitalism that involves, on the one hand, the deregulation of markets, privatization, and a broad offensive against labor, and on the other hand the expansion of markets to entities that were hitherto protected, in particular natural resources or the environment (water, air, land), associated with what David Harvey calls accumulation through dispossession.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> This third wave of marketization, characterized in particular by the development of finance capital, has a new global character in that it operates outside the control of nation states. This surely is the lesson of the denouement of the 2008 financial crisis where, in contrast to the 1930s, the US state has done little to regulate finance capital. The power of finance capital makes its presence felt across nation states, but in different ways as David Harvey explains in his book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">A Brief History of Neoliberalism</i>. Thus in Latin America and Africa it manifests as the consequence of defaulting on loans which result in the imposition of harsh structural adjustment programs by the IMF. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But markets play a very different role in post-Soviet Russia where they were introduced in an unregulated manner as compared to China where they are incubated under the direction of the party state.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Despite these variations, third wave marketization assumes a global character. Thus, our project is to explore its global dynamics, as well as its various manifestations in specific local and national contexts in order to identify the possibilities of a global civil society.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"></span> Thus, we began our course with David Harvey who provided a framework for approaching neoliberalism as a global class project aimed at capital accumulation through forms of dispossession. We then examined how neoliberalism implants itself differently in different places. Michael Watts discussed the consequences of the oil boom in the Niger Delta which has devastated the surrounding communities and given rise to insurgent groups. The oil industry in Nigeria results in national political structures that are fragile and unstable as they are dependent on oil revenues rather than being based on the social ties of robust social institutions. Ananya Roy then talked about micro finance loans, designed as development from below. In the case of Bangladesh, we see an example of the success of these loans administered by the Grameen Bank, especially when considered in combination with other organizations that have provided social protection. But precisely because the “beneficiaries” are poor women who can be relied on to pay back their loans, finance capital reaps enormous profit. In other places, such as Egypt, micro-finance has been underwritten by USAID and shaped by geopolitical goals of stabilization, making it less effective as a strategy of economic development.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> Whether it be the oil economy or micro-finance, global capitalism needs institutions that perform the regulatory function of the state at the international level. Walden Bello outlined the history and role of the IMF which orchestrates the world’s financial order, the World Bank which promotes specific development projects, and the World Trade Organizations which regulates international trade. These global institutions seek to prevent crises or contain them when they appear, but in doing so they impose austerity measures and harsh conditions on nations.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In an apparent shift away from strict neoliberal policies, the World Bank has sought to develop strategies to reduce poverty and to support projects that are less environmentally destructive – yet in reality, market fundamentalism still holds sway.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Arguing that these multilateral agencies cannot be reformed, Bello proposed that regions should develop their own regulatory instruments and follow the lead of China, for example, which makes loans that seem to impose fewer conditions upon borrowing nations.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> Of course, no attempt to understand global capitalism today can omit China. Ching Kwan Lee talked to us about the ways that China does not conform so easily to the model of neoliberalism, if only because the Chinese state has been such a central actor.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Yet in the final analysis she argued that cheap migrant labor and the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">hukou</i> system that patrols it, has underpinned the staggering economic growth of China. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Insofar as neoliberalism refers to an economy entirely dominated by the market, China is not neoliberal even if it has moved in that direction. But if, as Harvey argues, neoliberalism refers to an underlying project of strengthening and enriching a dominant class with the aid of the market, China indeed fits the neoliberal model.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">The Global Logic of Nation States</i></b></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> Lee’s description of marketization in China brought the state to the forefront of our discussion. While it had become increasingly clear that states have in fact played a crucial role in imposing and managing the third wave of marketization, we then raised the question of whether states also sometimes operate according to their own logics of governance which can’t always be fully understood through the lens of neoliberalism or by reference to the economy. What are the logics of governance that characterize states, and particularly those seeking to extend their power beyond their national territorial boundaries? </p><br /> Sari Hanafi described the manner in which the Israeli state attempts to govern the Palestinian population through what he calls “spacio-cide”, a strategy of rendering Palestinian spaces unlivable and reducing Palestinians to “bare life.” He argued that Israeli state practices are characterized by the imposition of a “state of exception” that enables it to manipulate legal frameworks in a manner that ultimately denies Palestinians any rights. Furthermore, he argued that the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions could be similarly understood as responses to being governed under “states of exception” which also reduced these populations to “bare life”. In these contexts the NGOs that compose civil society, largely funded and directed from abroad, often operate in line with state agendas. Hanafi, therefore, argued that any effective forms of resistance – as in the cases of Egypt and Tunisia – must come from outside civil society, through the informal connections and alliances of the subaltern. <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> Laleh Behbehanian shifted our focus from the Middle East to the counter-terrorism practices of the US state, which she argued invokes a “state of exception” that enables it to bypass the rule of law in its pursuit of “terrorists”. The US’ “War on Terror” is a global project that involves extensive cooperation and collusion with the intelligence and security agencies of many other states throughout the world. She suggested that we are witnessing the emergence of a global security apparatus, one in which other nations act as proxies for the US, enabling it to expand the power of its global reach. In contrast to Hanafi, Behbehanian emphasized that the only significant challenge launched against the US’ “War on Terror” has emerged from the institutions of civil society, through an international effort by journalists and NGOs concerned with human rights and civil liberty violations.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span></p><span style="font-size:130%;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Counter-movements – Local, National, Global</i></b></span><br /><br /> Through these discussions, it became evident that insofar as sociology seeks to adopt the standpoint of civil society, it must be attentive to both the consequences of marketization in the age of global capital, as well as the increasingly global logics that shape the governance strategies of states. We then turned to the possibilities for counter-movements in the contemporary period, particularly those that might have global dimensions. Peter Evans began our discussion by presenting an optimistic panorama of what he calls “counter-hegemonic globalization.” He argued that neoliberalism inevitably fuels opposition by virtue of its destructive social and economic effects, and that generic globalization (the development of new means of communication and mobility) creates opportunities for globalizing this opposition by generating ties among subordinate classes in different nations. He argued that this would require a “braiding” together of broad social movements across national boundaries that would include labor, environmental, women’s and human rights organizations, and that these movements would have to operate at the multi-levels of the local, national and global scales. Evans characterized this approach as a form of Neo-Polanyian optimism. But has it any basis in reality? So we then turned to a number of scholars whose research focus on existing forms of social movements.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> Edward Webster, for example, discussed the responses to down-sizing and new offensives against labor in the white goods industries in South Korea, South Africa and Australia.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In the cases of South Korea and South Africa, rather than organized counter-movements, we find workers taking up defensive survival strategies and seeking new ways of sustaining themselves in the informal economy. Only in Orange, Australia were there signs of local organizing, involving collaboration with farmers to put pressure on the state to regulate capital and provide security for workers.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>While this is the sort of local national counter-movement found in reaction to the first and second waves of marketization, there were also some attempts to build alliances with workers from other white goods factories in the US and Sweden, but they came to naught. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It turned out that different nodes in this potential labor chain had incompatible interests, based on their different relations to capital.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>When talking about the defense of global labor standards, Webster stressed the importance of nationally based labor struggles, which he viewed as the crucial foundation of horizontal transnational linkages that could become the basis for a global movement.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <span style="font-size:100%;">We then turned to Amita Baviskar who spoke about environmental movements in rural and urban India.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> She suggested that environmental struggles, over deforestation, the construction of dams, and land appropriations for special economic zones, have witnessed more success among the rural poor. In contrast, urban</span><span class="MsoCommentReference" style="font-size:100%;"> “</span><span style="font-size:100%;">bourgeois environmentalism” seeks to clean up the city by targeting and dispossessing migrant populations living in slums, and closing down enterprises that pollute the air, while at the same time pouring resources into road and bridge constructions to facilitate</span> the movement of the greatest polluter of all – the automobile. In focusing on the class dynamics of these struggles, Baviskar shows how apparent counter-movements, such as environmentalism, may actually be the soft side of neoliberalism.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito then shared with us examples of struggles by indigenous communities in Latin America against the encroachment of global capital, and particularly extractive industries. He showed how these struggles are absorbed in a global socio-legal field that stretches from the communities themselves to include NGOs, the state, and global actors like transnational corporations, the United Nations and the ILO (International Labor Organization). While the terms of this global socio-legal field generally disadvantage indigenous communities, he argued that it nonetheless provided the best opportunity for these movements to contain, or at least delay, the devastation of their lands by attempting to hold the state and capital accountable to international legal conventions. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Rather than searching for horizontal connections of a transnational “counter-hegemonic” character, Rodriguez pointed us to the absorption of actors in a vertical field where their struggles necessarily occur on the terms of a global hegemony.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> Finally, Erik Wright proposed a different approach – one that looks for alternatives not in vertical global fields or horizontally linked transnational movements, but in emergent institutions that expand the power of civil society vis-à-vis the state and economy. Here the goal is to search for “real utopias” – actually existing institutions with a potential socialist or democratic character. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>He identified four such institutions: participatory budgeting, which advances the social vis-à-vis the local state; worker cooperatives, which advance the social vis-à-vis the economy; Wikipedia, which represents a direct collective self-organization of the economy; and unconditional basic income, which enables all manner of new forms of social empowerment. The project of “real utopias” is to take each case and examine its internal contradictions and conditions of possibility, and thus the possibilities for its dissemination. So for example, participatory budgeting, which initially emerges in Brazil, spreads throughout Latin America, and then comes to be discussed at the US World Social Forum, from where it is taken up by an Alderman in Chicago and becomes a model for other districts. The project of “real utopias” seeks to generalize locally based efforts, with the hope of making them globally accessible and thus nourishing a global imagination of alternative possibilities to the neoliberal order. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:130%;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Global Sociology without a Global Civil Society?</i></b></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> In our search for a global civil society that might launch an effective counter-movement against the collusion of global capital and nation states, we found only fragments and failed attempts. At best, we can say that there may be an embryonic form of a global civil society that has yet to fully develop. But if sociology studies the world from the standpoint of civil society, and if there is in fact no real global civil society to speak of – then what does this mean for the possibility of a global sociology? </p><br /> We concluded this course by identifying three possible approaches to developing a global sociology given the embryonic nature of global civil society. The first involves focusing on the forces, like global capital or states, which seek to fragment and contain civil society. Global sociology must identify those forces which obstruct the possibilities for developing a global civil society. A second approach would involve working with existing embryos, whether they be “real utopias” or ephemeral cross national alliances, and examining their conditions of existence, perpetuation, dissemination or destruction. Global sociology must work with the realities of a fragile civil society, seeking ways to develop and expand it. A final approach would involve sociology actively partaking in the construction of a global civil society. Rather than passively studying the world from the standpoint of civil society, the realities of the contemporary period necessitate a global sociology that actually contributes to building a global civil society. No longer standing outside of the world it studies, sociology develops a reflexivity about its role in constituting and shaping that world. Global sociology becomes a project of public sociology.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Laleh Behbehanianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04181669081726595086noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3462567020704656749.post-69097688435886571912011-09-09T16:59:00.000-07:002011-09-12T20:25:55.310-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;">THE WOUND AND THE KNIFE: </span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">FIVE THESES ON CRISIS, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">DEMOS</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">, AND COUNTER TERROR</span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Hsueh Han Lu</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The most original feature of this terror formation is its concatenation of biopower, the state of exception and the state of siege. Crucial to this concatenation is, once again, race.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;">—Achille Mbembe, <i>Necropolitics</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>I am both the wound and knife, both the blow and the cheek, limbs and the rack, victim and the torturer. / I am my heart’s own vampire ...</i></div><div style="text-align: center;">—Charles Baudelaire, “L'Héautontimorouménos”</div><br /><br />This short paper will examine preliminary materials for five theses situated in three conceptual categories : crisis, <i>demos</i>, terror/counter terror—categories visited with Professor Burawoy and Laleh Behbehanian throughout their seminar course, <i>Global Sociology</i>. While the structure of the paper builds from a somewhat unconventional scaffolding, it is bound by one larger claim: insofar that the “Janus faced”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#1" name="top1"><sup><b>1</b></sup></a> characterization of civil society is useful to differentiate civil society’s potential challenge (against the state and/or the economy) from its active collusion (with the state and/or the economy), the reverse is also true: the “Janus faced” characterization is reciprocally weak in its ability to conceptualize the potential challenge civil society <i>qua</i> civil society mounts as an already active collusion. That is to say, the terrain of potentially dynamic social, cultural, and political conflict provided by civil society is fundamental for the state and economy’s smooth reproduction—such potential conflict is ceremonial.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#2" name="top2"><sup><b>2</b></sup></a> Not a “blurring at its edges” with the modern state and economy, but instead a relationship of co-animating interdependence.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#3" name="top3"><sup><b>3</b></sup></a><br /><br />As Burawoy and Behbehanian acknowledge in "Global Sociology: Reflections on an Experimental Course": "In our search for a global civil society that might launch an effective counter-movement against the collusion of global capital and nation states, we found only fragments and failed attempts.” Perhaps then, we do not situate ourselves in—that is to say, we do not invest our optimism into or attempt to build as sociologists<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#4" name="top4"><sup><b>4</b></sup></a>—a fugitive global civil society; but instead look towards those spaces that appear to reproduce and proliferate as quickly as neoliberal capital: fragmented spaces of bare life—precisely those bits of space and territory “comprised of individuals without formal organizational presence”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#5" name="top5"><sup><b>5</b></sup></a> as our trench and vantage point. This paper essentially attempts to spatialize and expand this claim through the above mentioned conceptual categories. The challenges to this claim are immediate: looking at “bare life” for instance from the point of view of civil society as we have in our seminar, it appears “inchoate, disorderly, arbitrary”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#6" name="top6"><sup><b>6</b></sup></a>— indeed, these are words we have used to define "bare life" itself. And so—taking a cue from sociologist Saskia Sassen’s short article "The World’s Third Spaces"—this paper attempts to draw out a view from a space that is <i>neither global nor national</i>, but partial, fragmented, bare.<br /><br /><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">1.1 Crisis: Surplus Populations: Dispossession and War</span></b></i><br /><br />Our first, most basic thesis is one in which we’ve referenced time and again throughout the course, restated here: (1.1) that capital rallies (the production and regulation of) surplus populations—that is to say, the result of (in Harvey’s words) “accumulation by dispossession” or (in Marx’s words) “primitive accumulation”—in short, the main event of a globalizing/expanding capitalism or, in general, “the economy”.<br /><br />For instance we might begin by remembering that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#7" name="top7"><sup><b>7</b></sup></a> was a collaboration between actors within the economy and the territorialized violence of the nation state (in NAFTA’s case the United States, Canada and Mexico). Perhaps in variance to Marx, we haven’t developed a position where the state is purely superstructural—conceivably this is the case in its initial emergence (and it is always scarred deeply by this initial emergence). But instead it’s a tricky position we have inhabited throughout the semester: we do not say that the state is an empty vessel within which either capital or civil society imposes itself—this position would appear to turn a blind eye to the question of the historical failure of national campaigns (anticolonial, socialist, or otherwise) and the reality of transnational capital—but we say instead that the state has its own logic, its own desire for reproduction and relevance in governance.<br /><br />How then to understand NAFTA? On the one hand, for the economy, it is the smoothing of the space in which capital flows: the aligning of legitimated violence across territories to ensure the right of finance capital and commodities to move with ease; an alignment of violence to ensure the right to purchase that most useful commodity; a form of life as the object of labor power and to turn that object of labor power into further capital and further objects. Marx liked to say this was a <i>congealing</i> of life into dead capital and dead objects. Dead objects that flow from one territory to another. And while the <i>de jure</i> right of forms of life to do the same— that is to say, to <i>follow</i> those objects (and to follow not as labor power, but precisely as <i>forms of life</i>)—are denied. So on the other hand, in fact, the nation state mounts a “War on the Border” against these dispossessed populations. This war, like any war, is both a war of position and a war of maneuver. It uses many tactics: the state’s prison system<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#8" name="top8"><sup><b>8</b></sup></a> bolstered by new Federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities; federal ICE forces posted along the US-Mexican borderlands; Norteño-Sureño regulation throughout California; the camp biopolitics of body regulation through documentation/non-documentation; docile service labor in the cities and docile farm labor in the countryside; the reemergence of Bracero-era narratives about misogynistic, irreparably violent, disease-carrying hordes; the regulation of remittances; the banning and defunding of Spanish language courses and Ethnic Studies in schools and universities; the emergence of white militias (the “Minute Men”) whose sporadic, fragmented, extra-state racialized violences serve to make the state’s apparatus of racialized violence appear legalistic and procedural—that is to say, neutral; <i>ad nauseam</i>. And so <i>while capital produces surplus populations, it is—in the main—the state’s war that produces racialized surplus populations</i>. This of course is not to imply that civil society could some how end racialization through encounters with the state and legal challenges—civil society and the state in fact participate in governance together, a claim which will be explored in the next section. It is instead to say that capital’s production of surplus populations is <i>immediately</i> racialized with the regulation of race war being the primary mechanism of the state’s “War on the Border.”<br /><br /><b><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">2.1 Demos: The Space of Governance and Difference</span></i></b><br /><br /><i>Democracy designates both the form through which power is legitimated and the manner in which it is exercised.</i><br />—Giorgio Agamben, <i>Democracy in What State?</i><br /><br />That a population is first <i>dispossessed</i> and then <i>barred </i>from a means of flourishing is the real “double movement” of capital and governance—this is a condition we have lamented throughout our course. The metaphor we might allow ourselves is one of distance—that is to say, a spatialized governance. Our second thesis claims simply (2.1) that the gap of dispossession between forms of life and objects is filled; the process/apparatus of maintaining and managing the exclusions of these populations from control over means to survive/flourish is called “politics” or “governance”—a terrain which has in modern history been dominated by a collaborative assemblage of the “nation state” and “civil society.” Further, this assemblage is situated <i>within the distance</i> between the surplus population and its means of flourishing; governance is an assemblage that functions as a moving barricade, a blockage, “politics”—and, in our case, democracy.<br /><br /><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">2.2 Demos: Concealment and Civil Society</span></b></i><br /><br /><i>Hence the turn to a universalistic rhetoric of human rights, dignity, sustainable ecological practices, environmental rights, and the like, as the basis for a unified oppositional politics.</i><br />—David Harvey, <i>A Brief History of Neoliberalism</i><br /><br />The distance between a surplus population and its means of flourishing differ in scale population by population—a distance which is then made into a redistributive economy of identities, the apparatus of difference-making, the broad and coarse fragmentation of race, and the fine fragmentation of individuation—identities and subjectivities through which civil society mobilizes (the citizen, the consumer, the person of color, the woman, etc.) and which the state imbues rights (that the individuated subject is a rights bearing individual, and in rarer moments—typically in reparation for a defined event of harm—a member of a class which bears rights). Our third thesis claims (2.2) that these disparities of distance are produced as externalities (to capital’s initial and main event of dispossession) that are then cycled through subjects. It’s at this moment that the apparatus of governance becomes more than a barricade, it penetrates the <i>demos</i>, it vitalizes and constitutes the population: while capital produces dispossession—that is to say, the initial distance—governance produces various disparities of dispossession (through a “micro-physics” of power, discipline, and control). What democratic governance <i>produces and subsequently conceals</i> is precisely these disparities of distance. To manage this, a rights discourse/democracy (a discipline/control deployed by the state certainly but also by civil society within its social movements<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#9" name="top9"><sup><b>9</b></sup></a>) appear to level differences between individuals— the difference for instance between racialized subjects. Which is to say that while we may all be dispossessed of the means of <i>production </i>vis-a-vis capital, some are re-enfranchised as consumptive subjects vis-a-vis governance. Just as extra-state militias make the state appear reasonable and neutral, race disparities are deployed precisely in order for the state and civil society to remedy.<br /><br />And this compulsion to conceal partially succeeds: it is no longer, say, France 1848, where the symbol of nascent bourgeois democracy is the swift, painless leveling of the guillotine— partially because we do not know which class to guillotine. “Dispossession,” Harvey writes, “is fragmented and particular,” (178); rights, on the other hand, are levelers and total. When Harvey says a “unified oppositional politics,” he is looking for a unified oppositional subjectivity—and our lamentation for the fugitive “countermovement” is still for this antagonistic subjectivity. What this allows us to do—perhaps—is to consider that if <i>difference </i>is produced as an externality to the “double movement” of capital and the state, and if it is then surely concealed by the state and civil society, then perhaps thinking through the abolition of the state and civil society is just as tenable and meaningful as is thinking through the abolition of capital—especially in those spaces where the productive factory floor is largely removed.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#10" name="top10"><sup><b>10</b></sup></a><br /><br /><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">3.1 Terror and Counter Terror: Bare Life and State Deterritorialization</span></b></i><br /><br /><i>“Terrorism” retains part of the original double meaning of “territory,” in that it refers not only to violence, but to space too.</i><br />—Mark Neocleous, "Off the Map: On Violence and Cartography"<br /><br />If our third thesis argues that governance is a collusion between civil society and the state to produce and conceal difference, our fourth thesis regards a liberatory countermovement’s strategy and tactic—and this is in part a response to Erik Olin Wright’s ambivalence towards the “ruptural” and deference to the “symbiotic”—which is to simply say (3.1) that the tactics and strategies of “countermovements” are determined by to what extent the population (believes it) is included in / excluded from the negotiation of governance or “politics.” So, for instance, Sari Hanafi writes:<br /><br />"The uprooted body (bare life) it [spaciocide] creates is a body 'ready to blow.' The deracinated body is a subject without relationship to territory; it is a body in orbit, a satellite, the body becomes an uncontrollable and unsupervised object bound to exercise its revenge. Satellites are the objects 'in need' of control, but are difficult to control, and the result is 'ground zero(s),' be it the work of individual terrorists (World Trade Center), or state terrorism (Falujah or Jenin Refugee Camp); and ... we know Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are interconnected in American and the Muslim cognitive geography."<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#11" name="top11"><sup><b>11</b></sup></a><br /><br />Of particular interest is Hanafi’s parenthetical mention of two sites: the Jenin Refugee Camp and Falujah. First, Jenin Refugee Camp is under the administration of the Palestine Authority—not a sovereign state but an administrative entity similar to a county government. Its borders, airspace, and, importantly, <i>trade</i> are controlled in fact by the Israeli state. Second, when referencing Falujah, Hanafi cites the 2005 Falujah Massacre during which the US and UK indiscriminately deployed white phosphorous bombs into civilian areas. So what interests us here is that while Hanafi makes the claim that the deterritorialized body is a “body in orbit,” a body “ready to blow,” here he also—without being explicit—makes the claim that a <i>deterritorialized state is a state in orbit, a state ready to blow</i>. It’s an argument worth bearing out: Hanafi is clear in that the Israeli state manages its population through biopolitics<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#12" name="top12"><sup><b>12</b></sup></a> (that of admitting into “political life” one fragment of the population and reducing other fragments of the population to various states of “bare life”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#13" name="top13"><sup><b>13</b></sup></a>—that is to say, through this act of politics the state <i>produces terror in those reduced to bare life</i>:<br /><br />“Bio-politics renders possible the spaciocide and spaciocide creates deterritorialized bodies, for example, Palestinians without a place in this territory or refugees literally without land. Spaciocide leaves a body without space. This body, then, regains its subjectivity by blowing him or herself up together with an enemy who is also biologically and ethnically classified.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#14" name="top14"><sup><b>14</b></sup></a><br /><br />And again, certainly this is true: where exclusion from politics is total, the biological body is the only means by which one can struggle—“bare life”—perhaps, then, “suicide bombing” in Israel, or self immolation in Tunisia, or collective suicide by U’wa in Colombia or Apple/Foxconn factory workers in China. But here Hanafi also implies that a <i>deterritorialized state is a state without space, and must reassume its agency through self-abolition</i>. This is to say that two figures occur: first the political figure—the proceduralist, legal, ostensibly leveling but actually differentiating act of politics that produces terror in those reduced to bare life; and second the figure of state-terror itself, originating from the deterritorialized state—which itself produces more bare life, and thus more bodies without space. Thus there is a man from Leeds named Shezad Tanweer—who in 2005 weaponizes and detonates himself (killing seven others) on a London Underground train leaving Liverpool Street Station—and in the video communiqué he releases postmortem he directly cites the Falujah Massacre earlier in the year.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#15" name="top15"><sup><b>15</b></sup></a> This is to repose the possibility that Laleh Behbehanian opens for us, she:<br /><br />"conceptualizes 'terrorism' as a new statist 'regime of truth,' one that produces the 'truth' of 'terror' by naming it as such. The emergence of terror as a new regime of truth involves two simultaneous developments: the carving out of a new field of state intervention referred to as 'counterterrorism' and the constitution of a new disciplinary subject known as the 'terrorist.'"<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#16" name="top16"><sup><b>16</b></sup></a><br /><br />So for Behbehanian the state makes itself relevant to a population (i.e. manages, regulates bodies and the relationships between them) by deploying “counter terrorism”—a “regime of truth” which itself produces the terrorist subject (and thus, eventually, individual subjectivity). The state through “counter terrorism” produces a subject it—and conveniently, only it—can “solve.” Like Hanafi, Behbehanian references Foucault to allow us to do something Harvey (for instance) could not allow us to do: by thinking precisely through the practice of domination and fragmentation as a mechanism of state reconsolidation in the-face-of/in-collaboration-with (either works here, so well that the difference ceases to matter) capitalist globalization, we see a deterritorializing of state power. A global “legitimate violence” without a given territory. This is the way the state makes itself relevant again. If civil society’s response to economic globalization is (was) a barely visible “movement of movements,” an “anti-globalization” movement in the 1990s and early 2000s, then the state’s response is deterritorialization. Thirty years of an attempted “exit” from the US state’s 1970s crisis in governance gives us a hyper “counter terrorism” in 2001.<br /><br /><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">3.2 Terror and Counter Terror: In Democracy, Guillotines for Everyone</span></b></i><br /><br /><i>This is modern democracy’s strength and, at the same time, its inner contradiction: modern democracy does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and disseminates it into every individual body, making it into what is at stake in political conflict.</i><br />—Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer.<br /><br />Just as the production of bare life has two figures (one of which is state deterritorialization), state deterritorialization itself has two figures at work: first and more obviously, deterritorialization implies the state transcends its physical borders “just as” capitalist firms do; but, secondly, the state also escalates its production and management of subjectivities—that is to say, the state transcends past the border of the physical human body, and past, too, the “soul,” and focuses heavily on the relationships, connections, and networking between bodies (and this parallels Foucault’s reading of the history of state discipline in <i>Discipline and Punish</i>). We can perhaps see a response to this second figure—the state's management of connections and networks—in civil society via horizontal, rhizomatic network-based social movement organizing. Our fifth thesis argues (3.2) that the individuated, biological body is the material border of governance/capital’s primitive accumulation (value through identity production, governance through legal subjectivity, biopolitics, etc.)—a border that once transcended, power finds as its object relationships between bodies. Counter-terror is the management and production of these relationships on behalf of a state form that is both attempting to “make itself relevant” to a globalizing capital, but is also an attempt to remain on its own plane of coherence: as Behbehanian makes clear,<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#17" name="top17"><sup><b>17</b></sup></a> the “War on Terror” is a tactical extension of the “War on the Border,” the “War on Drugs,” and the “War on Gangs.” And in so far that these prior wars produce and manage race, the “war on terror” is an act of race-production and management—that is to say, race war—in an ostensibly politically post-racial US. Counter terror appears precisely because of the first thesis (1.1); in the past three decades of producing surplus populations, race anxiety is high. Behbehanian charts for instance the National Entry-Exit Registration Scheme program whereby nearly 300,000 US residents were coercively registered, and 13,000 of whom were deported. To a degree, we are tongue tied— not into silence, but over our own words. We stutter and fumble and are dissatisfied when looking for and attempting to describe a “global civil society” precisely because democracy as it turns out is not the raising of human life to the divine—it is not the secularizing force that reminds us the basic point of the Young Hegelian, Ludwig Feuerbach: the sacred is an alienated projection of our own power. Global sociology’s divine, global force—even clutching our lists of “real utopias” and models of democratic and “ethical” capitalism—(in this pithy way) is still missing. With democracy, dispossession of the divine and global. Agamben writes:<br /><br />"And the root of modern democracy’s secret biopolitical calling lies here: he who will appear later as the bearer of rights and, according to a curious oxymoron, as the new sovereign subject (subiectus superaneus, in other words, what is below and, at the same time, most elevated) can only be constituted as such through the repetition of the sovereign exception and the isolation of corpus, bare life, in himself. If it is true that law needs a body in order to be in force, and if one can speak, in this sense, of 'law’s desire to have a body,' democracy responds to this desire by compelling law to assume the care of this body."<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#18" name="top18"><sup><b>18</b></sup></a><br /><br />We do not solve this problem: that the production (and management) of race relations is a coarse fragmentation, the atomizing oblivion of individual bodies. Democracy in fact tells us that the sacred is political life itself, the remaining populations are congealed, dead objects, some of whom are deterritorialized<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#19" name="top19"><sup><b>19</b></sup></a> (as capital is, as the state is) and animated in various stages of bare life—a death necessary for governance. In democracy, the political subject is sacred yet earnestly prostrates, submits, and consents to the sovereign power of the state (and this is ostensibly some kind of delegating of sovereignty, a public ceremony of transfer)—the political subject is deeply distant, fragmented, and removed from wielding sovereign power precisely by being animated by that power. There is a move (that both Sari Hanafi and Michel Foucault highlight) by sovereign power away from the territory (deterritorializing) and to the population, to the body. The social war of the 21st century is democratic in this way—producing and reproducing fragmentary life horizontally—each body a partial wound; each body a partial knife.<br /><br /><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">4.1 Theses</span></b></i><br /><br />1.1 That capital rallies (the production and regulation of) surplus populations—that is to say, the result of (in Harvey’s words) “accumulation by dispossession” or (in Marx’s words) “primitive accumulation”—in short, the main event of a globalizing/expanding capitalism or, in general, “the economy.”<br /><br />2.1 That the gap of dispossession between forms of life and objects is filled; the process/apparatus of maintaining and managing the exclusions of these populations from control over means to survive/flourish is called “politics” or “governance”—a terrain that has in modern history been dominated by a collaborative assemblage of the “nation state” and “civil society”;<br /><br />2.2 That these disparities of distance are produced as externalities (to capital’s initial and main event of dispossession) that are then cycled through subjects;<br /><br />3.1 That the tactics and strategies of “countermovements” are determined by to what extent the population (believes it) is included in/excluded from the negotiation of governance or “politics”;<br /><br />3.2 That the individuated, biological body is the material border of governance/capital’s primitive accumulation (value through identity production, governance through legal subjectivity, biopolitics, etc.)—a border that once transcended, power finds as its object relationships between bodies.<br /><br /><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Notes</span></b><br /><br /><div><a name="1"><b>1. </b></a>Burawoy, Michael and Laleh Behbehanian, “Global Sociology: Reflections on an Experimental Course.” Accessed September 2, 2011. http://globalsociologylive.blogspot.com.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top1"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="2"><b>2. </b></a>The cautious optimism we might invest into the liberatory potential of civil society is an optimism invested into democracy itself—which then is a claim about citizenship and the nation state, or for Negri-ists among us (who also claim the nation state is obsolete) it is a claim about the liberatory (regulatory) potential of larger statist formations like the European Union or perhaps the United Nations. This optimism describes a reproductive mechanism like civil society as an innocuous “blurring” with the forces of the state and the economy.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top2"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="3"><b>3. </b></a>This is not to claim that social movements self-consciously embedded in civil society have not ever increased a “human flourishing” taken in the very general—indeed, the <i>flourishing of individual rights vis-a-vis the state and protected by the state</i> has certainly occurred in the history of the modern nation state. And, indeed, the state has in the past responded in part to civil society and in part to its own threatened reproduction and growth by mounting incursions and regulations onto the economy. But it is instead to ask if—given the increasing weightlessness of present-day capital—the nature of governance, the nation state and of civil society have not been deeply scarred and altered by this 1970s “unexpected round of marketization."<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top3"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="4"><b>4. </b></a>These are among Burawoy and Behbehanian’s three concluding prescriptions in "Global Sociology: Reflections on an Experimental Course."<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top4"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="5"><b>5. </b></a>Burawoy and Behbehanian, ibid.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top5"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="6"><b>6. </b></a>These are the words in which sociologist Saskia Sassen uses to describe what she calls the “new realities” of “proliferation of partial, often highly specialised, global assemblages of bits of territory, authority and rights” seen from the point of view of the nation state. Sassen, Saskia. "The World’s Third Spaces." Accessed September 3, 2011. http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/globalisation/world_third_spaces.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top6"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="7"><b>7. </b></a>Being children of the US “counter globalization” movement, NAFTA holds a special place in our hearts.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top7"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="8"><b>8. </b></a>By “governance,” as we explore in thesis 2.1, we mean a collaborative assemblage of the state and civil society.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top8"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="9"><b>9. </b></a>This is to say that whatever categorical identity is mobilized by a social movement to achieve state-recognition within a rights-discourse (that is to say, state-recognized <i>victimhood</i>) seeks to conceal differences (of distance from “power”) between its membership. Thus, the boundless, never-ending quality of “intersectional politics” within New Left movements that examine “intersecting oppressions”—and so the joke of “Oppression Olympics” or “You and I may be both Asian in the US but I am poor and thus you must ___”. Which is to say that once “difference” is summoned, a “___” is also summoned (the double movement of <i>producing and concealing</i>), and that empty space represents democracy, the mechanism of leveling difference, the reparation. In fact this will never be satisfactory to either the wealthier Asian or the poorer Asian because they are dissatisfactory categorical identities to begin with. They have only succeeded in dissecting and divvying power between already vanquished, powerless subjectivities.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top9"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="10"><b>10. </b></a>See Jasper Bernes” “The Double Barricade and the Glass Floor” in Reclamations Journal, 1:2. Accessed May 5, 2011. http://reclamationsjournal.org/issue02_jasper_bernes.html. Bernes writes on the “hidden abode of production”: “The project of the “seizure of the means of production” finds itself blocked or faced with the absurd prospect of collectivizing Wal-Mart or Apple, workplaces so penetrated to their very core by the commodity-form that they solicit nothing less than total destruction or total transformation.” Walter Benjamin also may be of some help here, he creates a latent potential for liberatory violence within his language of sovereignty. Through the breaking of the state’s laws in daily practice against disciplines and control, one at least begins to merely approach imagining the abolition of state/sovereign power—a power that by essence is within the unapproachable scale of “society” or “history.” In “Critique of Violence” in <i>Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings</i>, (New York: Schocken Press, 1986), 299, Benjamin writes: “The critique of violence is the philosophy of its history—the “philosophy” of this history, because only the idea of its development makes possible a critical, discriminating, and decisive approach to its temporal data. A gaze directed only at what is close at hand can at most perceive a dialectical rising and falling in the lawmaking and law-preserving formations of violence. The law governing their oscillation rests on the circumstance that all law-preserving violence, in its duration, indirectly weakens the lawmaking violence represented by it, through the suppression of hostile counterviolence. This lasts until either new forces or those earlier suppressed triumph over the hitherto lawmaking violence and thus found a new law, destined in its turn to decay. On the breaking of this cycle maintained by mythical forms of law, on the suspension of law with all the forces on which it depends as they depend on it, finally therefore on the abolition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded. If the rule of myth is broken occasionally in the present age, the coming age is not so unimaginably remote that an attack on law is altogether futile.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top10"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="11"><b>11. </b></a>Sari Hanafi, “Spaciocide: Colonial Politics, Invisibility and Rezoning in Palestinian Territory.” <i>Contemporary Arab Affairs</i>, 2:1 (2009): 118-119.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top11"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="12"><b>12. </b></a>Hanafi, “Spaciocide,” 114: “The sovereign power according to Agamben routinely distinguishes between those who are to be admitted to 'political life' and those who are to be excluded as the mute bearers of 'bare life.' It is a process of categorizing people and bodies in order to manage, control and keep them under surveillance and reducing them to a “bare life,” life which refers to the body’s mere 'vegetative' being, separated from the particular qualities, the social, political and historical attributes that constitute individual subjectivity. This is a new form of power which enables the colonial power to manage bodies according to colonial and humanitarian categories.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top12"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="13"><b>13. </b></a>Agamben writes in <i>Homo Sacer </i>(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press), 73: “This is modern democracy’s strength and, at the same time, its inner contradiction: modern democracy does not abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and disseminates it into every individual body, making it into what is at stake in political conflict.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top13"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="14"><b>14. </b></a>Hanafi, “Spaciocide,” 118.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top14"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="15"><b>15. </b></a>For excerpts from a transcript of the communiqué, see BBC News, “7/7 Pair visited al-Qaeda Camp.” Accessed May 9, 2011. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5161526.stm <a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top15"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="16"><b>16. </b></a>Emphasis original. Laleh Behbehanian, “Logics of Pre-Emption: The Tactics of US Counterterrorism,” (draft: 2011), 6.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top16"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="17"><b>17. </b></a>Behbehanian draws tactical links across these wars.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top18"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="18"><b>18. </b></a>Agamben, <i>Homo Sacer</i>, 73.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top18"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /></div><div><a name="19"><b>19. </b></a>Behbehanian, “Logics of Pre-emption,” (27): “Haggerty and Ericson argue that contemporary surveillance operates by 'abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings and separating them into a series of discrete flows.'”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=6909768843588657191&from=pencil#top19"><sup>↩</sup></a><br /><br /><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">References</span></b><br /><br /></div><div>Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. <i>Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life</i>. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.<br /><br />Agamben, Giorgio. 2011. “Introductory Note to the Concept of Democracy” in <i>Democracy in What State?</i> edited by Amy Allen: 1-5. New York: Columbia University Press.<br /><br />Baudelaire, Charles. 2008. “L'Héautontimorouménos” in <i>Les Fleurs du Mal</i>. New York: Oxford University Press USA.<br /><br />Behbehanian, Laleh. 2011“Logics of Pre-Emption: The Tactics of US Counterterrorism” (draft).<br /><br />Benjamin, Walter. 1986. “Critique of Violence” in <i>Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings</i>. New York: Schocken Press.<br /><br />Bernes, Jasper. 2010. “The Double Barricade and the Glass Floor.” <i>Reclamations Journa</i>l 1(2). Accessed May 5, 2011. http://reclamationsjournal.org/issue02_jasper_bernes.html.<br /><br />Burawoy, Michael and Laleh Behbehanian. 2011. “Global Sociology: Reflections on an Experimental Course.” Accessed September 2, 2011. http://globalsociologylive.blogspot.com.<br /><br />British Broadcasting Corporation. “7/7 Pair visited al-Qaeda Camp.” Accessed May 9, 2011. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5161526.stm<br /><br />Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Society Must be Defended” in <i>Lectures at the College de France</i>. New York: Picador.<br /><br />Foucault, Michel. 1995. <i>Discipline and Punish</i>. New York: Vintage Press.<br /><br />Hanafi, Sari. 2009. “Spaciocide: Colonial Politics, Invisibility and Rezoning in Palestinian Territory.” <i>Contemporary Arab Affairs </i>2(1):106-121.<br /><br />Harvey, David. 2005. <i>A Brief History of Neoliberalism</i>. New York: Oxford University Press.<br /><br />Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” <i>Public Culture</i> 15 (1):11-40.<br /><br />Neocleous, Mark. 2003. “Off the Map: On Violence and Cartography.” <i>European Journal of Social Theory</i> 6(4):409-425.<br /><br />Sassen, Saskia. "The World’s Third Spaces." Accessed September 3, 2011. http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/globalisation/world_third_spaces.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3462567020704656749.post-20007910657066003822011-09-09T16:58:00.001-07:002011-09-19T20:26:46.412-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;">GOING GLOBAL:</span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b></b><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">A NEW GLOBAL SOCIOLOGY AND </span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">A METHODOLOGY FOR TRANSNATIONAL INQUIRY</span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Aaron Benavidez</div><br />For Behbehanian and Burawoy, the inauguration of a new-fangled global sociology first requires a definition of sociology. In contrast to economics (which studies the market) and political science (which studies the state), they define sociology as the study from “the standpoint of civil society” (Burawoy 2010:25). Global sociology would then study “a global civil society, knitting together communities, organizations and movements across national boundaries” (Burawoy 2010:25). Like its father, sociology proper, global sociology would ultimately study global political economy and global states to determine their effects on the possibility and vitality of a civil society with world-wide influence. In short, Behbehaninan and Burawoy propose a scheme for a global sociology that catapults Gramsci’s conceptual framework from a national Italian stage to a global theatre.<br /><br /><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Who’s Afraid of Civil Society?</span></b></i><br /><br />As significant and productive as a Gramscian framework may be for inspiring contestation from, within, and between institutions, where a war of position finds articulation and negotiation, Bebehanian and Burawoy’s confident reliance on Gramsci to address contemporary transnational processes and global social inequalities comes with a few problems that deserve some comment here.<br /><br />First, Behbehanian and Burawoy’s definition of global sociology, relying on a Gramscian framework, is not formulated from an on-the-ground empirical imperative but through a theoretical, rhetorical, and reductionist gesture. Behbehanian and Burawoy reduce global sociology into two parts: sociology and global. Sociology is treated as the key linguistic foundation—a fundamental noun that takes as its constitution a definition of sociology fashioned from the discipline’s traditional inclination to halt a “sociological imagination” at state borders. This sociology that sees civil society as the supreme object of analysis, to be clear, issues from a methodological nationalism—which “assumes that the nation, state and society are the ‘natural’ social and political forms of the modern world”—that characterized Gramsci's work (Beck 10-11). What is more, the global in Bebehanian and Burawoy’s formulation simply denotes something beyond the nation-state. As a pure and stand-alone adjective, the global does not transform sociology—a stalwart and defensible noun. The global is simply a blown-up view from a standpoint of a civil society.<br /><br />Second, the formulation of global sociology as requiring a world-scale civil society presupposes that a healthy society needs a set of global institutions and congealed social movements. This advancement of a global civil society—including, particularly, various NGOs from regions with more material means—necessitates a more critical discussion of the faults and failures of existing global civil society organizations in alleviating social inequalities and delivering various resources and community needs. Given the anthropological critique of the “mana from heaven” delivered by transnational civil society organizations, we cannot simply assert that global organizations always, only benevolently respond to globalized market and coercive state forces without being muscularly critical. Even more, the preference for a civil society as the object of analysis par excellence for the entire subfield of global sociology is alarmingly dissatisfying given that some communities do not have vibrant or even extant global or local civil societies. How does one study the Thabo Mbeki settlement outside central Johannesburg, where global civil society is thin, while still studying how transnational economic forces have determined a precarious community? Do we simply study the absence or impossibility of a global civil society and, thereby, assume that a blown-up civil society (likely funded by Western transnational organizations) is the panacea for global-turned-local troubles?<br /><br />Third, the formulation of a global sociology from the standpoint of a global civil society potentially undercuts many feminist projects. Since sociologists rarely view the domestic sphere as part of the public sphere (despite the blurring of the public and private distinction by feminist scholars and sociologists of the family), the Gramsci-inspired definition of sociology harbors the insidious exclusion of the sociology of everyday life proposed by scholars like Dorothy Smith. Furthermore, since “girls and women around the world, especially in the Third World/South … bear the brunt of globalization,” a global sociology that turns its analytical gaze away from production and reproduction in the home (or with effects found most starkly in the home) effaces the communities most vulnerable to the onslaught of global economic restructuring (Mohanty 2002:514). Constructing a global sociology that does not explicitly extend feminist lessons dangerously brings us close to reproducing the masculinist assumption that the most significant global transformations and their egregious impacts occur outside the domestic sphere. To avoid this problematic and empirically inaccurate assumption, which so sharply excludes labor and life in the home, we must continue the search for a more flexible global sociology that either expands the meaning of “public” or explicitly incorporates the domestic sphere in an analysis of civil society.<br /><br /><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">A Global Sociology Revisited</span></b></i><br /><br />A global sociology must respond to contemporary—not early 20th Century—global social problems in order to examine and find solutions to deleterious global forces. Ulrich Beck provides a robust and thick account of our world-wide current crises:<br /><br />"Consider the following: global free trade and financializaton, corporate deterritorializatoon and transnationalized production, globalized labor use, competition and class conflicts, globalized policy consulting and formulation (coerced by the IMF, etc.), internet communication and cyberspace, globally orchestrated bioscientific manipulation of life forms (gradually including human bodies), global risks of all kinds (financial crisis, terrorism, AIDS, swine flu, SARS), transnational demographic realignments (the migration of labor, spouses, and children), cosmopolitized arts and entertainments, and, last but not least, globally financed and managed regional wars" (Beck 2010:11).<br /><br />While Beck offers a significant list, he leaves out climate change—another global transformation with significant transnational effects. Nevertheless, his sundry and significant enumeration offers an important cornucopia of empirically based transformations and crises. These are the conditions and the accompanying effects about which a global sociology can formulate its object of analysis and its definition.<br /><br />Given Beck’s global tableau of contemporary social problems, a newly minted global sociology should invert the reductionist relationship in Behbehanian and Burawoy’s definition. Rather than understand the noun, sociology, as fundamental while viewing the global as an adjective that simply attaches to the noun by enlarging its scope, a new definition of global sociology would privilege the global—the adjective as the transforming term. In other words, the global determines sociology rather than the sociology determining the global. This last point likely appears to be a rhetorical move to scholars skeptical of discourse and language, but the privileging of the global actually corresponds with the empirical list of contemporary problems that Beck enumerates. The importance of the adjective issues from concrete, on-the-ground social processes and problems rather than from a discursive ether or (even worse) from an infatuation with mere word play.<br /><br />We would be well served to correct Behbehanian and Burawoy’s definition and privilege the following definition of global sociology: a subfield of the discipline that examines global flows and new global imaginings. This alternative conceptualization of global sociology can embrace the analysis of a global civil society since transnational actors working with and within global institutions are not outside various global flows—be they financial, discursive, material, symbolic, socio-biological, or corporeal. This definition of global sociology also offers room for other forms of global analysis that resist or cannot be cartographically represented on a map—what I call global imaginings. An analysis that seeks to unearth global imaginings invites and opens new possibilities for conceptualizing global processes that cannot be easily represented by traditional global maps (for instance, the virtual world of digital communications or the fictitious world of financialization). These global imaginings will require new representations that can only be delineated by reference to more complex spatial depictions of global processes and flows.<br /><br /><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">In Search of a Global Methodology</span></b></i><br /><br />Therefore, global flows that may or may not be represented on a map would be the object of analysis for global sociology. Global sociology would study contemporary crises and their effects—be they in civil society or in other social fields or spaces. Given that global sociology would pursue transnational social currents and other global imaginings, the subfield will require a new methodology for complimenting and realizing these global inquiries. Already, contemporary scholars—who have studied global flows and problems with worldwide significance—have offered promising alternatives. They have inspired these three methodological tools for conducting and realizing a global sociology, particularly a transnational or metanational global sociology that searches for global flows and, thereby, moves beyond the clunky, 1950s international approach that simply compares nations or clusters of nations as a way of examining the global.<br /><br />First, a global sociology presupposes a geographical sociologist—a scholar who is familiar with not only the importance of space but also the terms and tools already inaugurated and fostered by the discipline of geography. Second, since globalized political economy involves powerful clusters of social actors “from above” who are often linked to powerful institutions like the IMF and World Bank, a global sociology that studies political economy would need to have a rigorous and unambiguous approach to “studying up,” a rare, under-practiced, and under-discussed research strategy within the discipline. Third, an empirically rich global sociology that can promptly produce knowledge to address social inequalities will need to relinquish the tacit cult of individuality that characterizes sociology and academia more generally. A global sociology will necessitates a methodological practice involving collaborative network of multiple scholars who come from different world regions and who study the same object of analysis with the same set of research questions and in multiple geographical sites.<br /><br />First, given that the subfield seeks to map global flows and other configurations of global processes, global sociology calls for a familiarity with the tools of cultural geography including but not limited to rich concepts like sites and situations, cultural landscapes, distribution, space-time compression, and the multiple typologies of diffusion. Even more, a global sociology will require not just a sociological imagination but also a geographical imagination that can connect local empirical findings to larger global flows and forces. Sari Hanafi has already offered a viable example of rethinking the relationship between space and social inequality. In “Spacio-cide: colonial politics, invisibility, and rezoning in Palestinian territory,” Hanafi argues that Israel is pursing a spacio-cidal project. Rather than directly exterminating a population, Israel’s policy targets Palestinian lands to make them uninhabitable—thereby producing conditions for a “bare life” that in the final hour encourages the “voluntary” removal of the Palestinian population (Hanafi 2009:107). He applies state governmentality (a term that analytically assembles “all the mechanisms and techniques that are used by the state to exercise ‘government’”) and states of exception (which refers to the power states exercise not just to delimit social order but to suspend that order for particular population at particular times) to highlight the mechanisms by which Israel renders a space so uninhabitable that it becomes a push factor that simultaneously obscures the coercion that precipitates migration in the first place (Hanafi 2010:152). Hanafi demonstrates the importance of both social and physical space to a promising global sociology.<br /><br />Second, sociologists have various methodological tools for “studying down” or researching marginalized and vulnerable populations. However, sociology as a discipline has not comprehensively considered the position of the researcher when “studying up” or researching extraordinarily powerful individuals, organization, and institutions that have Goliathian influence in mobilizing or hindering global flows. While some researchers speak of “going stealth” to “capture data,” a global sociology will need many more techniques and positions for studying the powerful. Ananya Roy and Walden Bello present two possibilities. A self-professed “double agent,” Roy interviewed “those professionals who research and manage poverty—people like myself” in <i>Poverty Capital</i> (Roy 2010:38) Aiming “to uncover the dynamics of poverty capital and to chart the historical moment that is millennial development,” Roy’s research demonstrates a way to “study across” or “study laterally” (Roy 2010:40, 34). In describing her position in the field, Roy offers that she researched from: “the impossible space between the hubris of benevolence and the paralysis of cynicism … a space marked by doubleness: by both complicities and subversions, by the familiar and the strange” (Roy 2010:40). While some critics might argue that Roy’s position in the field means that she must play both sides of the fence, Roy offers one option for studying groups with extraordinary decision-making influence. Bello similarly provides an orientation for studying powerful groups and institutions. Rather than working as a double agent, Bello conducts research as a strident critic. Bello’s articles take the IMF and World Bank to task, ardently sounding the death knell of their demise (Bello and Guttal 2005:11). Bello avers that the IMF caused the Asian Crisis of 1997 as well as financial failures in Russia in 1998 and Argentina in 2002 (Bello 2006:2; Bello 2009:2). Bello also reveals that the WB’s poverty alleviation and environmentally sensitive aims are empty fictions, an exposure that now places the Bank in crisis. Bello’s research and the route he has taken to procure data—including uninvited entry into the World Bank headquarters in Washington D.C and the extralegal borrowing of 3,000 pages of top-secret documents—presents a provocative alternative for a global sociologist without access to data and in the face of dominant multinational and transnational institutions.<br /><br />Third, a global sociology will need to break free from the cult of individuality that assumes research should be an individualized project. If global sociology hopes to examine global flows or other global dynamics from multiple sites and in a timely manner (to more quickly address social inequality), then the subfield should work in teams of scholars who study the same set of research questions. The collaboration among Webster, Lambert, and Bezuidenhout (WLB) offers a viable and encouraging example. They conducted research among workers in the white goods industry in Ezakheni (in South Africa), Orange (in Australia), and Changwon (in South Korea), and found that neoliberalism “consciously manufactures insecurity” to extinguish collective contestation among civil society actors and movements (emphasis in the original; WLB 2008:17-18, vii). Despite limitations for contestation, they further propose that “spaces of hope” harnessing a networking strategy will produce a new liberatory subjectivity and an “attempt to protect society against the unbridled power of the multinational corporation” (WLB 2008:202-203, 156). While WLB do not thickly describe the research relationship and dynamics required to produce <i>Grounding Globalization</i>, their book exemplifies and inaugurates an approach for global sociology that generates knowledge from research teams. Even more, one might imagine that a global sociology project that involves multiple sociologists from many parts of the world—that is, from the periphery as well as from the metropole—would increase the likelihood that social theory from the “South” would enter and/or gain authority within the global sociological academy. In this way, a team model for crafting and carrying out global sociology would soften and perhaps even mollify the critique that “Northern” sociology enables a project of Western intellectual domination (Connell 2010).<br /><br /><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Conclusion: Promises and Possibilities</span></b></i><div><br />Burawoy and Behbehanian’s invitation to formulate a new subfield called global sociology comes with overwhelming excitement but also a serious demand to critically reflect upon a best formulation for this “embryonic” field. This response expands the definition of global sociology beyond the limitations and problems that issue from a civil-society-centric definition. Instead, this response inaugurates a more empirically muscular definition: Global sociology is a subfield of sociology that maps global flows and new global imaginings. To promote this novel definition, global sociology would benefit from considering new methodological tools for studying complex and transnational global flows and dynamics. Thinking geographically, alternatives to “studying up,” and collaborative research teams are but a few possibilities for an emerging and encouraging global project.<br /><br /><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">References</span></b></div><div><b><br /></b>Beck, Ulrich. 2010. “Kissing the Frog: The Cosmopolitan Turn in Sociology.” <i>Global Dialogue</i> 1(2):1-<br />2, 10-11, 13.<br /><br /></div><div>Bello, Walden. 2006. “The Crisis of Multilateralism.” <i>Foreign Policy In Focus</i>, September 13,<br />pp. 1-4. Handout.<br /><br /></div><div>Bello, Walden. 2009. “U-20: Will the Global Economy Resurface?” <i>Foreign Policy In Focus</i>,<br />March 30. Handout.<br /><br /></div><div>Bello, Walden and Shalmali Guttal. 2005. “Programmed to Fail: The World Bank Clings to a<br />Bankrupt Development Model.” <i>Multinational Monitor</i>, July/August. Handout.<br /><br /></div><div>Burawoy, Michael. 2010. “Facing an Unequal World: Challenges for Global Sociology.” Pp. 3-<br />27 in <i>Facing an Unequal World: Challenges for a Global Sociology</i>. Vol. 1: Introduction,<br />Latin America and Africa. Taipei, Taiwan: Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica and the<br />Council of National Associations of the International Sociological Association.<br /><br /></div><div>Connell, Raewyn. 2010. “How Can We Weave a World Sociology.” <i>Global Dialogue </i>1(2):1, 5,<br />12.<br /><br /></div><div>Hanafi, Sari. 2009. “Spacio-cide: colonial politics, invisibility, and rezoning in Palestinian<br />territory.” <i>Contemporary Arab Affairs </i>2(1):106-121.<br /><br /></div><div>Hanafi, Sari. 2010. “Framing Arab socio-political space: state governmentality, governance, and<br />non-institutional protestation.” <i>Contemporary Arab Affairs</i> 3(2):148-162.<br /><br /></div><div>Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2002. “ ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity<br />through Anticapitalist Struggles.” <i>Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society</i> 28(2):499-<br />535.<br /><br /></div><div>Roy, Ananya. 2010. <i>Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Developmen</i>t. New York:<br />Routledge.<br /><br /></div><div>Webster, Edward, Rob Lambert, and Andries Beziudenhout. 2008. <i>Grounding Globalization:<br />Labour in the Age of Insecurity</i>. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.</div>Aaron Benavidezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05117485526670551613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3462567020704656749.post-24761678540081551342011-09-09T10:52:00.000-07:002011-09-22T01:49:28.628-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;">REFLECTIONS ON CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM AND A GLOBAL SOCIOLOGY</span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Pil Christensen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark</div><div><br />As a student of the global sociology course, I feel a strong inclination to continue the discussion that we began on the first day of the course and that carried us through to the last day. Along with the different topics, theorists, and cases that we discussed to locate and shape a global sociology, we continued to consider the most basic elements of our analysis: what is sociology, what is society, how should we conceptualize it, and what does it mean that we want to understand it in a global perspective. These questions kept leading us back to a fundamental discussion of the structures and actors of society, the economy, the meaning of organization, and governance, just to mention a few.</div><div><br />Even though Behbehanian and Burawoy offered a clear framework on the first day of the course, the same one that they presented in the article under discussion, we all remained open towards questioning this framework. The many different perspectives and analyses presented to us in the course kept pushing us to reflect, to criticize, and to return to this basic framework. A fundamental openness characterized our discussions and I definitely felt I was a part of the common project to investigate and develop new ways of understanding sociology and our global world.<br /><br /></div><div>Science—and especially social science—is always a common project and the development of new ideas, models, and theories never happens in solitude. The idea of a single theoretical genius is one we need to get rid of and instead focus to the collective process of creating new knowledge. Therefore I am very delighted to be able to continue to participate in the collective process of developing a framework of a global sociology—especially as I now write this response, sitting on the other side of the world.</div><div><br /></div><div>First, I want to question the basic model on which Behbehanian and Burawoy built their analysis. Is it possible and desirable today to analyze our society by compartmentalizing it into three main spheres—the economy, the state/politics, and civil society? And what problems do we create for the rest of our analysis by using this model?</div><div><br /></div><div>Secondly, I will reflect upon the question of whether contemporary capitalism can be understood solely as neoliberalism or whether we forget some important aspects of capitalism by understanding it only within this frame.<br /><br /></div><div>Lastly, I will discuss the perspectives of counter-movements on the background of my own analysis as well as the one made by Behbehanian and Burawoy. Furthermore, I will criticize what role the state gets in the basic framework presented by Behbehanian and Burawoy.<br /><br /><b><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Sociology as the Standpoint of Civil Society?</span></i></b><br /><br />Behbehanian and Burawoy base their sociological analysis of the contemporary world on a tripartition of society into an economic, a political, and civil society sphere. As they write they “approach sociology as the study of the world from the standpoint of society, understood as civil society” (Behbehanian and Burawoy 2011). This model is based on mainly two important sociological theorists—Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi. As Behbehanian and Burawoy acknowledge, the two theorists developed their analysis of civil society and capitalism in first half of the last century. The two theorists both focus on the “transition to advanced capitalism” (ibid) in the 1930s and, therefore, industrial capitalism and the concomitant industrial society. It is under the hegemony of industrial capitalism that the analysis of society as comprising three main spheres makes sense and, therefore, also here it makes sense to understand sociology as the study of society from the perspective of civil society. My argument is that capitalism has changed radically and can no longer be characterized as an industrial capitalism. In my view, the form of the industrial and Fordist capitalism was the one that made the foundation for dividing society into an economic, a political, and a civil society sphere.<br /><br /></div><div>So how does capitalism look today? And why does it break down the boundaries between the different spheres? With inspiration from a different theoretical standpoint than the one adopted by Behbehanian and Burawoy, broadly represented in the autonomist Marxist tradition and, especially, in the common work between Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (2001, 2004 and 2009), it is possible to identify a transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism from the beginning of the 1970s onward. This transition can be characterized as a paradigm shift. A paradigm establishes the frames for how society is structured in a certain historical period and history can, in this way, be said to consist of a range of different paradigms. The structures in a certain paradigm are generally seen determined by the hegemonic forms of production, and different paradigms are structured by different hegemonic tendencies. Fordism and Post-Fordism represent two different paradigms. The industrial production constituted the dominating and hegemonic form of production in the Fordist era and, therefore, pervaded all other forms of work, production, and social organization in general. Concretely this meant that all social institutions, for example, the school, the hospital, and the military base had the factory as its respective model (Hardt and Negri 2004:140-142). The society under industrial capitalism was, hence, organized by the sharp divisions between work life and other forms of life <i>and</i> between the directly productive work conducted in the factory and the reproductive work done in other spheres of society. This helps us to understand why civil society by Gramsci and Polanyi was sharply separated from both the economic and the political sphere. And why it made sense to understand society this way and, therefore, to base the sociological analysis on this foundation.<br /><br /></div><div>Because the paradigm shift in the capitalist production has changed society radically, approaching society in this way becomes problematic. Important to state though is that my analysis should not be understood as structuralist determinist one—the paradigm shift in the capitalist production happens due to many different factors, among others the technological development and the various struggles against capitalism. Changes must, therefore, be seen as an interaction between many different forces and actors and not as a route determined by internal mechanisms in the capitalist production. At the same time, I want to stress that the capitalist relations of production, in general, does not determine the structures of all other social phenomena. The power relations between sex, race, and gender, just to mention a few, are related, but not subordinated to capitalism.<br /><br /></div><div>The important point is that we today live in a fundamentally new form of society and abide by a new form of capitalism. The Post-Fordist paradigm is characterized by what we could call <i>biopolitical production</i> or immaterial labor—that is, the production of knowledge, communication, emotions, communality, and relations or the things we as humans produce in common. Now it is important to stress that we should see this new form of production as hegemonic in a qualitative sense, not a quantitative sense. This means that immaterial labor or biopolitical production is not the form of labor that, necessarily in terms of numbers, dominates our society today (after all, most people still work in traditional forms of production or in the agricultural sectors). What it instead means is that the characteristics from immaterial and biopolitical labor permeates all other forms of production and the structuring of society more generally. Thus, all forms of labor tend to become informationalized, intellectualized, and characterized by communication and sentiments (ibid: 109). This applies both to the American service worker who must smile and be polite, the Northern European caretaker or nurse who must create solicitude, or the Eastern European factory worker who must communicate with her team. In fact, even the Latin American textile worker or the Asian customer service assistant uses communication or creates relations. Thus, the changes in capitalism must be seen as global, and although people around the world still live very different lives and have diverse working conditions, we are all subsumed to the new forms that capitalism has taken.<br /><br /></div><div>So how does this new production paradigm break down the boundaries between the three spheres? The essential change from industrial capitalism to Post-Fordist production is that the human life itself has become the main productive element. When production is based on and structured by things as communication, knowledge, sentiments, and communality, the common human life and interactions between humans come to the core of production—this is what mainly creates value (ibid: 107-115). Capitalism as an economic system is not the main creator of value anymore by structuring and organizing the production. It is, instead, human interaction itself.<br /><br /></div><div>At the same time, our lives cannot be separated from the political. Politics understood as the praxis, which concerns the change, organization, and management of society, has become immanent in social life since Post-Fordist production is characterized by the human ability to organize, mange, and change society. The production process is no longer structured by the assembly line, but by the human ability to cooperate (Hardt and Negri 2009: 174-175). Hence, politics become immanent in social life. Politics is ubiquitous, in our love life, in the culture, in our identities, in our work, and, generally, in our social relations. Through our social and common life, we produce both value and politics.<br /><br /></div><div>When our social and cultural lives are productive and, at the same time, always characterized by the political, it makes little sense to understand society as divided into three different spheres. We must as sociologist investigate society from the perspective of the new conditions created by a Post-Fordist capitalism. If we keep on studying society as if it had not changed since Gramsci or Polanyi wrote their theoretical cannons, then we miss the possibility of understanding our world and creating bases for resistance. The activities that Behbehanian and Burawoy associate with civil society must, in the contemporary capitalist society, be understood as a part of the economic and political sphere since human interactions are basically of what civil society consists.</div><div><br />Unpaid reproductive work must be seen as productive together with different forms of human activity located outside the sphere of traditional and paid forms of work. On an abstract level, the distinctions between productive and reproductive, between paid and unpaid work disappears since our social relations, community, and communication is what produces the value in society. The traditional forms of leisure connected to the forms of industrial production have withered, and we are always working and producing. Social production does not happen in a delimited room as the factory or within a certain time frame associated with the supposedly traditional 9-to-5 job. This must be understood as a theoretical and abstract model since we of course experience multiple and many boundaries in our lives. It is important, though, that the basic frames of society must be understood as different from the Fordist mode of production.</div><div><br /></div><div>As Behbehanian and Burawoy note, Polanyi was: “arguing that civil society (he simply called it society) emerged as a reaction to the over-extension of the market, particularly the unregulated labor market," and "[h]e largely focused on England, where industrial capitalism first took root and where reactions to the market took the form of cooperatives, trade unions, political parties, self-help organizations such as burial societies, as well as the factory and Chartist movements” (Behbehanian and Burawoy 2011). It is not because these reactions to a capitalist market economy do not exist anymore—capitalism is still destroying the human being, nature, and society and, therefore, it still meets resistance. But resistance takes and can take other forms, and resistance must not be analyzed as separated from productive and economic aspects of society.<br /><br /><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Global Capitalism as Neoliberalism?</span></b></i><br /><br /></div><div>The first theorist we discussed in the global sociology course was David Harvey, who presented his conceptualization of contemporary capitalism as neoliberalism. Harvey gave us a range of different tools and very useful insights to understand neoliberalism and the conditions it exacerbates. But when we understand global capitalism solely as neoliberalism—as Behbehanian and Burawoy do—it creates at least one important problem in my opinion: We forget the progress within capitalism that has been made during the last 30-40 years as well. When contemporary capitalism is understood as neoliberalism, it is often interpreted only as a setback and retrogression. The idea is that the conditions for humans, nature, and society only have become worse during the neoliberalization of capitalism. Therefore, a nostalgic longing after a never existed past often follows from this idea.<br /><br /></div><div>Without discarding the theory of neoliberalism, we need to understand capitalism as Janus faced. Contemporary capitalism needs to be seen both as progress and as regress, something that is reflected in the new possibilities for emancipation and alienation. If one of the main productive forces is social life and human interaction, then the means of production must exactly become humans and human life (Hardt and Negri 2000:46). In this sense the human being “owns” the most important means of production in the form of the body and mind, and, therefore, the abilities to create communality, emotions, relations, communication, etc. This, at least in some ways, moves us closer to a society controlled by human needs and self-determination. The very concrete working conditions, mostly in Western societies and in more immaterial sectors though, are characterized by more flexibility in terms of working time, place, and content. More autonomy, creativity, and cooperation are often part of the working conditions as well. In addition, more mobility between jobs is a reality. There should be no doubt that these things all have significant negative implications and consequences, but they still contain potentials for self-determined production and emancipation.<br /><br /></div><div>Again, however, contemporary capitalism must be perceived as double-sided, and besides what we could call the neoliberalization of capitalism, the drawback can be understood by a current and deeper form of alienation (Hardt and Negri 2000: 406, 2004: 66, 2009: 137-140). The new forms of production induce, too a much greater extent, control and absolute subjection under the domain of capital. Social life itself becomes the productive factor and therefore production seeks to commodify human capability, and our social and emotional relations become objects for and on the market. When our communities, passions, communication, and cogitation become central parts of the way we work and produce, becoming subsequently a product for sale, the possibility of alienation from exactly these abilities becomes more likely and, therefore, we become fundamentally alien to ourselves.</div><div><br /></div><div>Neoliberalism is in many ways a good way to diagnose capitalism, but it needs this second perspective, this other side to be aligned with the conditions created by contemporary capitalism.</div><div><br /><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Counter-Movements in a New World</span></b></i><br /><br />The perception of contemporary capitalism and its global forms is important for our analysis of resistance, the possibilities of resistance, and all forms of counter-movements. Peter Evens was the first scholar to confront the question of counter-movements in his very optimistic analysis. Evans (2008) writes about the possibilities of a transnational union movement and how the current globalization actual enforces the necessities of a global labor movement. Evans definitely offers good points, but a complete transformation of the union movement as well as our basic understanding of value production is necessary to deliver on Evan's optimism. It is not enough to transgress national borders; borders within society itself have to be dissolved as well. As I have argued, work is being transformed all over the globe and social production, cooperation, and immaterial products have become more important. Furthermore, a substantial production of wealth occurs outside a traditional labor market. Women’s unpaid labor at home or people’s traditional knowledge about nature are just two examples. This general transformation of production needs new and different forms of organizations that correspond to the contemporary forms of production. Therefore, it becomes important that the traditional labor movement include not only workers, but also people without work, students, undocumented workers, precarious workers, people who do unpaid labor, etc. A similar critique can be made of another scholar featured in the course, Eddie Webster (2008), concerning his ideas about the necessary strategic changes the labor movements will have to undergo to be able to fight the neoliberal restructuring process. He and his co-authors provide strong ideas in terms of strategies for the unions, suggesting cooperation between unions and the community and arguing for a dissolution of the distinction between productive and reproductive work (ibid: 188-211). But we must ask the question: Why does Webster et al not take a fuller step and suggest organizing around social production, in general, by letting the unions, not only cooperate with other civil society and community organizations but actually organize together with them and, thus, recognize the value produced in the reproductive and unpaid labor sphere.<br /><br />But it is not only some of the presenters in the course that we can criticize for a lack of suggestions for resistance corresponding with the conditions created by contemporary capitalism. The critic can be directed at our class as well, since we, in some ways, had a hard time when it came to resistance. As Behbehanian and Burawoy argue (and what, furthermore, became evident during the course), new forms of sovereignty characterizes the global world today. Power is to a greater extent located on a global level and the traditional sovereignty of the nation state can be questioned. For example, Behbehanian, “suggested that we are witnessing the emergence of a global security apparatus, one in which other nations act as proxies for the US, enabling it to expand the power of its global reach.” Other examples of global power include the great influence many international corporations and international institutions have compared to nation-states (for example, the Nigerian oil industry that Michael Watts (2006, 2007) investigated). In spite of these insights and our collective discussion, we often did not apply the insights regarding power to the question of resistance. Most of our solutions to neoliberalism and destructive capitalism ended up being an appeal to the state and more regulation and control for a frothing and raging capitalism. Some times the appeal was directed toward an imaginary global state apparatus and many times the focus was on the nation-state.<br /><br />I think our inability to transgress the state is connected to the general framework of the course, which I have all ready discussed. If we understand economy, civil society, and the state as three different spheres and as separated categories, we cannot move beyond a demand for state regulation. We are not able to develop ideas that exceed the boundaries made by the three spheres, if they become our fundamental way of conceptualizing society. To create and contribute to resistance and counter-movements that aim to take back power in our lives, nature, and society, we need to see the possibilities of using our basic productiveness and our political powers as something immanent in social live. Framing resistance as something that comes from a civil society—which is separated from both economy and politics—produces a passive appeal to the state since we do not see ourselves as capable of yielding significant power.<br /><br /></div><div>Furthermore, the division of the economy from what we call civil society, which renders them into separate spheres, reproduces a capitalist discourse and way of generating value because the distinction does not recognize that the actual value in our society is created immanent in human activity and not by a capitalist economy. The idea of civil society as detached from the economy does not recognize the fundamental productive value of human activity in a Post-Fordist era, and, therefore, the possibility of a transformation of the productive relations in society. Thus, the division of society into the three spheres thwarts, in my view, the basis for transcending society organized around capitalist production. It can restrict capitalism as we see in social democracies, for example, but such a framework does not offer a sustainable solution.<br /><br /></div><div>A Polanyian vision, where civil society control the market and the state—one that both Evans and Webster, to some extend, adopt—seems to ultimately be a variation on the regulated market, a social democratic, Keynesian idea, which doesn’t decisively break with the commodification and marketization of labor. Even more, although social democracies have created more equal societies within their borders, the societies are build on protectionism and foreign resource extraction, which is based on an absolutely unequal distribution of wealth on a global scale.</div><div><br />Therefore, it must be absolutely necessary to find permanent alternatives to capitalism, which Behbehanian and Burawoy underscore when they assert that “human survival is endangered by the destructiveness of unregulated markets and predatory states.”<br /><br /><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">A Global Sociology?</span></b></i></div><div><br />There is no doubt in my mind that a global sociology is necessary and that we should continue our discussion on this emerging field. The global condition of capitalism makes it absolutely necessary that we, as sociologist, find ways to investigate the contemporary world. On what basis we do investigate, with what theoretical lenses, and from what perspective are topics we should constantly discuss.</div><div><br /></div><div>A global sociology should, in my opinion, not necessarily be the study of society from the perspective of a global civil society, as Behbehanian and Burawoy argue. Still I find the conclusions from our course as presented by Behbehanian and Burawoy very prudent. It is absolutely possible to use all three approaches (Behbehanian and Burawoy 2011), without having to accept that Gramscian tripartition of society since it make sense to look at different parts of society with simultaneously not understanding them as spheres containing a certain area of society, for example, <i>the economy</i>. Furthermore, we need to use all approaches to get a diverse conception of our global society.<br /><br />Finally, Behbehanian and Burawoy's suggestion that global sociology should become “a project of public sociology” is very important. Instead of framing the project as one that “contributes to building a global civil society,” a public sociology should contribute to the shaping of resistance and counter-movements against a neoliberal capitalism while developing alternatives to the society dominated by contemporary capitalism. We have to formulate a vision of a non-capitalist society. A society build on another form of economy is absolutely necessary if we want to care for both people and nature <i>and</i> if we want to create equality, freedom, and democracy on a global level. We must make these goals part of the common conception. We must use our sociological imagination to shape ideas of a society beyond capitalism.<br /><br /><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">References</span></b><br /><br />Behbehanian and Burawoy. 2011. Global Sociology: Reflections on an Experimental Course. globalsociologylive.blogspot.com.</div><div><br />Evans, Peter. 2008. "Is an Alternative Globalization Possible?" <i>Politics & Society</i> 36 (2): 271-305.<br /><br /></div><div>Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. <i>Empire</i>. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.</div><div><br /></div><div>Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2004. <i>Multitude – War and Democracy in the age of Empire</i>. New York: The Penguin Press.</div><div><br /></div><div>Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2009. <i>Commonwealth. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press.</span></i></div><div><br /></div><div>Watts, Michael. 2006. "Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa." <i>Monthly Review </i>58 (4).<br /><br /></div><div>Watts, Michael. 2007. "Petro-Insurgency or Criminal Syndicate? Conflict & Violence in the Niger Delta." <i>Review of African Political Economy</i> 114: 635-658.<br /><br /></div><div>Webster, Edward, Rob Lambert, and Andries Bezuidenhout. 2008. <i>Grounding Globalization, Labour in the Age of Insecurity</i>. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing.</div>Pil Christensenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16556623043895931114noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3462567020704656749.post-9718850397884609052011-09-08T08:29:00.000-07:002011-09-11T22:10:59.204-07:00<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;">TAKING GLOBAL SOCIOLOGY GLOBAL:</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">WHAT IS GLOBAL SOCIOLOGY AND DO NORWEGIAN SOCIOLOGISTS REALLY NEED IT?</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">Ida Kjeøy, University of Oslo, Norway</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i>“Take the ideas of this course to the furthest corners of the planet.”</i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">—Behbehanian and Burawoy, "Global Sociology: Reflections on an Experimental Course"</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Globalization is without doubt the most overused concept of the 21st Century. Without properly defining the term, everyone seems to be adding the prefix “global” to their work, and based on the number of textbooks in “Global Sociology” produced in the last decades,<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#1" name="top1"><sup><b>1</b></sup></a> it may be safe to say that the trend has inevitably also reached the sociological community. In cooperation with the International Sociological Association (ISA), Laleh Behbehanian and Michael Burawoy launched <i>their </i>contribution in the Spring of 2011, through the undergraduate course and online lecture series “Global Sociology Live!” at UC Berkeley.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#2" name="top2"><sup><b>2</b></sup></a> As a contrast to the prefix-seekers however, they developed a thorough framework by which "global sociology" can be understood and studied. This paper looks at their approach and asks whether it is one sociologists in Norway should strive to adopt.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">By discussing a small sample of research on what could be called global sociology in Norway, I join those who have concluded that Norwegian sociology lacks a global perspective, and I add that this clearly limits Norwegian sociologists in most terrains of study. I go on to identify a set of critiques to the approach taken by Behbehanian and Burawoy and to consider the challenges this approach might meet when adopted outside of its Anglo-American context.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#3" name="top3"><sup><b>3</b></sup></a>-<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#4" name="top4"><sup><b>4</b></sup></a> I conclude by presenting what I believe are the most valuable parts of global sociology, and what aspects Norwegian sociologists and others should take away from this course.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">What is Global Sociology?<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#5" name="top5"><sup><b>5</b></sup></a></span></span></span></span></b></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In their final lecture in "Global Sociology Live!" and in the paper to which this is a response, Behbehanian and Burawoy stated that there are several possible ways of defining global sociology and that this is still an experiment, an ongoing process. However, Burawoy did provide a tentative definition, one that has served as the starting point for the course. Based on the notion that sociology is the study of the world from the standpoint of what Gramsci termed <i>civil society</i>, global sociology must ultimately be pursued from the standpoint of <i>global civil society</i>, but a problem emerges when we are not able to identify such a constellation. Without a civil society, there is no sociology (Burawoy and Behbehanian 2011a).<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Still, Burawoy concludes that there are three ways in which global sociology can be approached. The first is by studying the very institutions that prevent or undermine global civil society from forming. This is the approach taken by Walden Bello, who claims that global sociology, “among other things, [is] the study of international power structures […] of hegemony” (Bello 2011). A second approach is to work with the embryonic forms of a global civil society that do exist, for example, by taking the perspective of the emerging global labour movement. The third, and perhaps most interesting approach, is for sociologists to work to <i>produce </i>a global civil society, constituting their very own object of study through engaging in conversations of transnational character. This last approach presupposes that sociologists strive to be reflexive, and also that the sociology they pursue has a public dimension, in the Burawoyian sense of the term (Behbehanian and Burawoy 2011b).<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Global sociology, as pursued in this lecture series does not strive to be a universal sociology nor yet another projection of American or Western views, but rather a sociology rooted in a number of national contexts, done from different points on the planet. This course, Behbehanian and Burawoy say, is global sociology because they have brought forward a variety of voices, and sought diversity in the classroom and in lecturers presented. It is globally accessible, with a global perspective, and with case studies from different parts of the globe.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Global Approaches from a Far Corner of the Planet</span></b></i><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Burawoy calls for global sociology to come from different points of the planet, and one question that emerges is clearly whether such global approaches are already emerging. Research done mainly by master's students on the degree to which Norwegian sociologists engage in global questions, shows that the discourse prevalent in this far northern corner of the planet, overlooks most aspects of what Behbehanian and Burawoy call "global sociology."<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Through her analysis of ethnocentrism in course material assigned to bachelor's and master's students at the University of Oslo, Ida Hjelde (2006) started a still ongoing debate in Norwegian sociology of the discipline's tendencies to, while speaking increasingly about globalization, continuously reproduce narrow western views of society without taking into consideration how this world is shaped by transnational institutions and global processes (Khazaleh 2006). Her thesis created strong discussion amongst students and faculty, more than thirty years after Said published <i>Orientalism</i>, a clear indication that such a voice had not previously been heard in the discipline. Hans Erik Næss (2007, 2008) continued the discussion Hjelde started, by studying the syllabi given to sociology students in the whole of Norway. He concludes that Norwegian sociology is suffering under a “transnational deficit”since only 5 out of 155 available bachelor's and master's courses in sociology offered in Norwegian institutions successfully incorporated a transnational approach.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Although it is a salient indicator, one can certainly not say that global sociology is lacking in Norway based only on courses provided to students. There are, however, indicators that also sociologists that are no longer students, participate in a discourse in which Norwegian society is seen as disconnected from the rest of the world. Based on preliminary study of the work done by the country's leading sociologists,<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#6" name="top6"><sup><b>6</b></sup></a> Neumann concludes that Norwegian sociology is blind to the internationalisation and globalization of sociology seen elsewhere in the world. He points out that although some Norwegian sociologists do study globalization (Mjøset), global processes (Brockmann) and social life outside of Norway (Prieur), it is the study of isolated Norway that dominates, treated as a separate unit rather than a part of a global network. This is a clear paradox according to Neumann, as neoliberalism increasingly permeates all aspects of Norwegian society (Neumann 2007: 277).<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#7" name="top7"><sup><b>7</b></sup></a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Norwegian sociology has experienced a sharp decline both in the number of students applying for positions, but also in funding and overall standing relative to other social sciences. The reluctance to admit that a global focus must permeate Norwegian sociological studies has lead to the weakening of the entire discipline, according to Neumann, especially as other fields are successfully adopting such an approach. “International Studies” is currently the most popular bachelor's program in social sciences at the University of Oslo, and the social anthropologist Thomas Hylland-Eriksen has had great success with his transnational research network Culcom, which had as one of its aims to reframe of the question of migration from one of immigration to one of transnational migration. Up until funding was cut by the university in 2011, Culcom served as an arena of what one could call public social science, with research projects funded by the university rather than by state or outside donors. Sociologists were totally lacking from the program with the exception of a small group of master's students, amongst them the above-mentioned Næss. Based on the little research that has been done, one is lead to conclude, at least preliminarily, that some kind of global sociology is indeed needed in Norway. There are arenas in Norway where these questions are being debated, but they seem to be dominated by non-sociologists, a trend which can arguably be seen as a threat to the entire discipline of Norwegian sociology.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">(Why) Do We Need Global Sociology at All?</span></i></b><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">As was shown in the previous section, Norwegian sociology is in need of a global perspective and one could say that the framework presented by Behbehanian and Burawoy (2011a) would be a fruitful approach. Still, there are some reasons why one could argue that global sociology as it has currently been presented is not an approach that should be adopted by sociologists worldwide, at least not without slight modification.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Firstly, as it stands now, Behbehanian and Burawoy's global sociology is strongly biased towards northern perspectives. Although they claim that their approach should not be yet another attempt at exporting a Western or American framework upon scholars in the rest of the world, the effort to present this course as more global than it really is, is striking, and does not live up to the goal of the reflexive sociologist. To say that Gramsci and Polanyi are not Western thinkers because they are from the European periphery, is in my opinion not a valid claim, especially as Polanyi wrote <i>The Great Transformations</i> in English from London. The frameworks presented are built largely on the thoughts of white, old men from the West, and with the exception of Webster,<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#8" name="top8"><sup><b>8</b></sup></a> all the lecturers involved in this course have the majority of their higher education from Western elite educational institutions.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#9" name="top9"><sup><b>9</b></sup></a> Rather than attempting to “globalize” this by speaking of the periphery of Europe and the dynamic backgrounds of the students, one should adopt a reflexive enough position to acknowledge this discrepancy. One could even go so far as to argue that calling a sociology developed in elite universities in the West “global” is an attempt by scholars to strengthen and legitimize their own positions in the field of sociology (certainly, in addition to, not instead of contributing to a better understanding of global processes). To add the positively clinging “global sociology” label to a scholar's work is certainly legitimizing, but may be seen as an attempt to divert attention away from the clear discrepancy between the attention given to sociology produced in the global South and sociology produced in the global North. If global sociology can not be part of removing these barriers, it should not attempt at legitimizing them. For Norwegian scholars and others aimed at adopting a more global perspective, more caution and openness about existing biases can not be emphasized enough. If we do not succeed in overcoming this barrier, global sociology may leave us stuck in the corner where we invented the term, rather than taking us to the far corners of the planet.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Secondly, as is made very clear by the Norwegian case, global sociology intersects with existing academic fields, and one argument against it may be that such an approach already exists in the vast number of emerging scholarly disciplines: international studies, international relations, development studies, global studies, etc. One could, for example, argue that certain International Relations scholars pursue the goals of this course's “global sociologist." Having historically been a discipline that studies global processes through the lens of the state, IR scholars are increasingly also examining aspects we may like to call global sociology, from the perspective of civil society. This is not necessarily an argument against the emergence of global sociology, but it is one that scholars approaching this field should be aware of and responsive to. Rather than limiting the potential for the framework developed here, it can be said to increase its possibilities, as also non-sociologists will be interested in seeing a strong global sociology emerging. To be aware of and acknowledge that others are working on similar projects, is however still important.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Within the framework: An Alternative Approach</span></b></i><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Within the framework presented by Behbehanian and Burawoy, there lies immense potential, despite the weaknesses pointed out in the section above. Most specifically, it lies in what Burawoy names the pluralisation of conversation, a call which is not new to the discipline of sociology. Bourdieu asks of scholars that they form an international of intellectuals and Ulrich Beck calls for global cosmopolitanism, but as Burawoy (2010: 4) points out, it is unclear how all our divisions are to evaporate as we together meet global challenges, be they of neoliberalism, world system crisis, or deepening global inequality. In the spirit of this class, I believe it must start not within each national context, but rather, or in addition, within each global sociologist. As a generation of students are brought up in what is increasingly being referred to as the era of globalization, it is through increasing diversity in institutions of education all over the world, that the real possibility for a global sociology lies. It is through our education in sociology that our sociological habitus is formed.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">When Burawoy (2010: 14), Bourdieu (1997) and others state that in order to understand a thinker, he must be situated in his national context, they are overlooking the important factor that national sociologies, such as in the Norwegian case, are taking the standpoint of a national(istic) civil society. Burawoy stresses that global sociology must be grounded in the national context, ergo, Norway should also seek to ground a sociology of its own. I would argue to the contrary. The house of global sociology can have national walls, but the foundation must ultimately be of a transnational character, where scholars see themselves as belonging to more than one national discipline. Having worked, lived and done research in and around the world, and in the process learned a variety of languages and cultures, is what allows the lecturers in this class to think in global terms. This is the thought that strikes me when reading Burawoy's (2009) self reflection, in discussion with Behbehanian or with any of my classmates. Perhaps this is also a reason for why many of the scholars from the global south invited to lecture in this course on global sociology, are educated in Western institutions. It is precisely this sense of having a foot in each camp that make them proper global sociologists. Increasingly providing opportunities for sociology students to travel and work outside of their national arenas and including language training in the requirements of a trained sociologist, is ultimately where the possibilities for global sociology most clearly lie. Graduate students should be encouraged to do parts of their research abroad, we should work towards increasing the number of international students and faculty in our universities and most importantly join our efforts in securing that universities stay or become public. This is perhaps the best way sociologists can contribute to the making of a global civil society. At least, this is is how we produce “global sociologists” of the future.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Conclusion</span></b></i><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">This paper has shown that Norwegian sociology is in strong need of a framework that may allow for a shift towards a more global approach to sociology. Further, I have shown that the approach taken by Behbehanian and Burawoy (2011) holds great promise for Norwegian sociologists, but that it also has some pitfalls. Most importantly, it is not as reflexive and internationally based as it claims to be, and thus scholars adopting a similar model may find themselves legitimizing their own work by adding a nice label, the cost being paid by the voices not present, those that are not educated in Anglo-American elite universities.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">One solution to this problem is to increasingly adopt global networks of scholars, such as is being done through the International Sociology Association (ISA). Global Sociology should also increasingly cooperate with existing scholarly fields, such as that of International Relations. But more importantly, one should move away from the rigid view that a global sociology must be grounded in national sociologies. Rather, it may be grounded in the many emerging global sociologists. To produce students with such a habitus, not only through dialogue, but with international experience, is needed, and the only way to do so is by providing possibilities and opportunities for sociology students to experience the world outside of their national setting. Sociologists can contribute to this by engaging in the fight for free public universities all around the world, and we might end up adding to the embryos of a global civil society in the process.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">A search in Norwegian google for “global sociology”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#10" name="top10"><sup><b>10</b></sup></a> leaves us on both a pessimistic and optimistic note. It proves what this paper has attempted to show, global sociology is not alive and striving in this cold corner of northern Europe. However, it also shows that small attempts of global sociology in one part of the world, can have certain impact elsewhere, and although I encourage caution in attempting to spread the framework discussed here, it does hold some promise for the future. The first hit on Norwegian google is the blog for Behbehanian and Burawoy's class Global Sociology Live.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#11" name="top11"><sup><b>11</b></sup></a></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Notes</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a name="1"><b>1. </b></a>See for example Cohen and Kennedy (2007), Ferrante (2008), Lie (1994), Macionis and Plummer (2008), Sklair (1995) Sneider and Silverman (2009).<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#top1"><sup>↩</sup></a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a name="2"><b>2. </b></a>It should be noted that the idea of the course rests on them both having a long-term engagement with the topic.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#top2"><sup>↩</sup></a> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><a name="3"><b>3. </b></a>Norwegian sociology is heavily dominated by American trends. One could argue that if this approach would meet challenge in Norwegian academe, it would certainly be more heavily challenged elsewhere. In that sense, exporting a framework of Global Sociology to Norway may seem as a simple “first step” if one wants a global outreach.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#top3"><sup>↩</sup></a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a name="4"><b>4. </b></a>As will be discussed in this paper, I believe that the Anglo-American context is important for how this framework has developed, despite Behbehanian and Burawoy's (2011) attempts to avoid this.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#top4"><sup>↩</sup></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a name="5"><b>5. </b></a>This paper is limited to discussing the definitions and approaches to Global Sociology that are offered by Behbehanian and Burawoy (2011).<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#top5"><sup>↩</sup></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a name="6"><b>6. </b></a>None of which produced a single article for publication in any of the top three sociology journals of the world (American Review of Sociology, American Sociological Review or British Journal of Sociology) between 2000 and 2004 (Neumann 2007: 276)<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#top6"><sup>↩</sup></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a name="7"><b>7. </b></a>I would add a couple of names to this list, amongst them Kathrine Fangen. However, I largely agree with the tendency Neumann here points at.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#top7"><sup>↩</sup></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a name="8"><b>8. </b></a>Webster has his doctorate from Witwatersrand, South Africa, but also holds a MPhil from York.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#top8"><sup>↩</sup></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a name="9"><b>9. </b></a>Baviskar (Dehli, Cornell) Bello (Princeton), Behbehanian (New York, UC Berkeley), Burawoy (Cambridge, Zambia, Chicago), Evans (Harvard, Oxford) Lee (UC Berkeley), Hanafi (Strasbourg, Paris), Harvey (Cambridge), Rodriguez-Garavito (Wisconsin-Madison, New York University), Roy (Mills College, UC Berkeley), Watts (Michigan), Wright (Harvard, Oxford, UC Berkeley)<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#top9"><sup>↩</sup></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a name="10"><b>10. </b></a>The Norwegian terms, “globalsosiologi” and “global sosiologi” searched 06.05.11 and 13.05.11.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#top10"><sup>↩</sup></a><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a name="11"><b>11. </b></a>The blog can be found on globalsociologylive.blogspot.com<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3462567020704656749&postID=971885039788460905&from=pencil#top11"><sup>↩</sup></a></p><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">References</span></b><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Bourdieu, Pierre. 1997. “Passport to Duke” in <i>Metaphilosophy </i>28: 4 (October): 449-455. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Behbehanian, Laleh and Michael Burawoy. 2011a. “Global Sociology: Reflections on an Experimental Course.” URL: <a href="http://globalsociologylive.blogspot.com/"><span style=" text-decoration:none;text-underline:nonecolor:windowtext;">http://globalsociologylive.blogspot.com/</span></a> , accessed 01.09.11.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Behbehanian, Laleh and Michael Burawoy. 2011b. “The Class Discusses Global Sociology – What Have We Learned?” Lecture 14, Global Sociology Live, Spring 2011, UC Berkeley. URL: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmkfiKYcT10&feature=player_embedded"><span style="text-decoration:none;text-underline:nonecolor:windowtext;">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmkfiKYcT10&feature=player_embedded</span></a>, accessed 09.05.11.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Bello, Walden. 2011. “Global Institutions and Civil Society”, Lecture 5, Global Sociology Live, Spring 2011, UC Berkeley. URL: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/TzQgxYmGANQ?autoplay=1&rel=0&fs=1&enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=ytplayer"><span style="text-decoration:none;text-underline:nonecolor:windowtext;">http://www.youtube.com/v/TzQgxYmGANQ?autoplay=1&rel=0&fs=1&enablejsapi=1&playerapiid=ytplayer</span></a>, accessed 12.05.11.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Burawoy, Michael. 2009. T<i>he Extended Case Method: Four Countries, Four Decades, Four Great Transformations</i>.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Burawoy, Michael. 2010. “Facing an Unequal World: Challenges for a Global Sociology” Burawoy, Michael, Mau-kuei Chang and Michelle Fei-yu Hsieh (eds.) <i>Facing an Unequal World: Challenges for a Global Sociology</i>. ISA, URL: <a href="http://www.ios.sinica.edu.tw/cna/download/proceedings/01.Burawoy.Introduction.pdf"><span style="text-decoration:none;text-underline:nonecolor:windowtext;">http://www.ios.sinica.edu.tw/cna/download/proceedings/01.Burawoy.Introduction.pdf</span></a>, accessed 09.05.11.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Cohen, Robin and Paul Kennedy. 2007. <i>Global Sociology</i>. New York: New York University Press<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Ferrante, Joan. 2008. <i>Sociology: A Global Perspective</i>. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub. Co.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Hjelde, Ida. 2006. “Etnosentrisme i Sosiologien” [Ethnocentrism in Sociology] URL: <a href="http://www.duo.uio.no/publ/iss/2006/42008/hjelde.pdf"><span style="text-decoration:none;text-underline:nonecolor:windowtext;">http://www.duo.uio.no/publ/iss/2006/42008/hjelde.pdf</span></a>, Master Thesis, University of Oslo, accessed 09.05.11.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">ISA. 2011. <a href="http://www.isa-sociology.org/global-sociology-live/"><span style="text-decoration:none;text-underline:nonecolor:windowtext;">http://www.isa-sociology.org/global-sociology-live/</span></a>, accessed 09.05.11.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Khazaleh, Lorenz. 2006. “-Se det globale i det lokale” [See the Global in the Local]. Interview with Ida Hjelde. [URL]: <a href="http://www.culcom.uio.no/nyheter/2006/hjelde.html"><span style="text-decoration:none;text-underline:nonecolor:windowtext;">http://www.culcom.uio.no/nyheter/2006/hjelde.html</span></a>, accessed 13.05.11.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Lie, John (ed). 1994. <i>Global Sociology</i>. Needham Heights, MA: Simon & Schuster Custom Pub.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Macionis, John J. and Ken Plummer. 2008. <i>Sociology: A Global Introduction</i>. Pearson Prentice Hall<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Neumann, Iver. 2007. “Norsk Sosiologi: samfunnsteoretisk avante-garde eller arrière-garde?” [Norwegian Sociology: An avante-garde or arrière-garde social theory?]. <i>Nytt Norsk Tiddskrif</i>t 3: 2007. <a href="http://www.idunn.no/file/ci/3912129/nnt_2007_03_pdf.pdf"><span style="text-decoration:none;text-underline:nonecolor:windowtext;">http://www.idunn.no/file/ci/3912129/nnt_2007_03_pdf.pdf</span></a><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Næss, Hans Erik. 2007. “Røtter og vinger: Argumenter for en transnasjonal sosiologi” [Roots and Wings: Arguments for a Transnational Sociology.” Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Næss, Hans Erik. 2008. “Kompleksitetens Krav: Argumenter for en transnasjonal sosiologi” [The Demands of Complexity: Arguments for a Transnational Sociology]. <i>Sosiologisk Tidsskrift </i>16: 383-394. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Schneider, Linda and Arnold Silverman. 2009. <i>Global Sociology: Introducing Five Contemporary Societies</i>. Mc-Graw Hills Companies.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Sklair, Leslie. 1995. <i>Sociology of the Global System</i>. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.</p> <!--EndFragment-->Idahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02695111594221194749noreply@blogger.com0