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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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