14 results in Sociology in Times of Glocalization
Introduction: Glocalization and its Epistemological Challenges
- Christian Karner, University of Lincoln
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Summary
Setting the Glocal Scene
Recent decades have seen much talk about globalization. Yet, the term is often treated with little definitional care. What is more, there appears to have been a significant recent shift in the connotations intended by many of those who speak about “globalization.” Until not long ago commonly used as a neutral or in some cases celebratory shorthand for a growing degree of interdependency and interconnectedness spanning national and other boundaries, globalization has of late acquired more negative connotations to many. For instance, in his 2018 speech to the UN General Assembly then-US president Donald Trump set up a dichotomy between “patriots” and “globalists,” unambiguously siding with the former and finding deep fault with the latter. Almost instantly UK Brexiteer Nigel Farage tweeted his support for Donald Trump's speech and with it, one assumes, for the ideological binary it had contained (Euronews, September 25, 2018). In further illustration of how ideas today spread with a previously unknown speed and geographical reach, it did not take long for this juxtaposition of “patriots” to (negatively evaluated) “globalists” to also feature in statements made by Hungarian nationalists and Italian EU sceptics. Reflecting the circulation of figures of speech, the worldviews and political blueprints they contain and help articulate, this was merely one instance, albeit a particularly high-profile one, of some of the phenomena that define our era. These phenomena include our technological ability to share but also contest ideas instantaneously and across vast stretches of space. The issue at hand extends further to a paradox, namely the fact that some of the very illustrations of our global interconnectedness, ideational and technological, simultaneously contain a strong critique of such interconnectedness. The politicians just mentioned thus self-consciously also addressed transnational, if not even global audiences, and they did so by employing the very technological means that partly define our global era, only to advocate a return to something “smaller.” It is safe to conclude that to each of the politicians in question this “smaller” domain is that of the nationstate, which—in such statements—is shorn of all the historical guilt, or even of awareness or any memory of the many atrocities committed in the name of “nations” over the last 200 years.
Conclusion
- Christian Karner, University of Lincoln
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Summary
Attentive readers will have noticed an intertextual allusion in the title of this book to Gabriel García Márquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera. Where the latter's title centers on love, this book focuses on sociology; and the syntactical place of “time of cholera” is here taken by “times of glocalization.” The allusion is not accidental. Its intention is easiest to read with regard to the historical moments invoked by Gabriel García Márquez and this book, respectively. The former depicts an earlier historical moment, which—like present circumstances—was also characterized by far-reaching social shifts, experienced as deeply unsettling by some of the novel's protagonists; by environmental degradation, particularly the problem of waste and the depletion of natural resources; and, as the novel's title makes clear, an epidemic constitutes the backdrop to García Márquez’ story of entwined biographies and loves. Set in a very specific geographical location and in a different time (i.e., in Colombia from the late nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth centuries), the historical circumstances that frame Love in the Time of Cholera offer intriguing points of similarity, difference and comparison for the here and now.
The allusion is more subtle when it comes to love and sociology. What, if anything, might love and sociology have in common? Without wanting to stretch the analogy too far, sociology—like love—demands commitment, care, and passion. Like love, sociology requires focused and personal investment, namely in the “social.” Whatever else love is, and I certainly will not attempt a comprehensive definition of love (if such a definition was even possible), it needs a purpose, an “object” or a “recipient,” it is directed at something or, more often, at someone. Like those in love, sociologists need to be invested in that which constitutes the focus of their attention. We need to be invested in the social; the social—which by definition implicates others and transcends any individual—has to intrigue and pull us in. It needs to matter to us. Without a fascination with what happens in the spaces and relations between people, between individuals and their wider worlds, it would seem impossible to do sociology. To be fascinated by something means that we pay sustained attention to “it.” Quick, purportedly easy answers will not do for those who are fascinated. Our era's obsession with asking individuals for quick soundbites of “what they think” is not sociology.
Chapter 4 - From Mobility to “Liminality” and Blockage
- Christian Karner, University of Lincoln
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Summary
There is strong case that social scientists ought to keep diaries. The keeping of a field diary is an intrinsic part of the ethnographic craft. It is where and how ethnographers have long captured the steady stream of events and impressions they encounter and experience in the course of their fieldwork; further, field diaries enable reflexive accounts of how the field impacts the ethnographer as well as, vice versa, of how the ethnographer—as a participant observer with a background and history of their own—impacts back on the people and settings around them. Diaries can also serve other purposes. C. Wright Mills famously demanded that sociologists “keep a journal” as a core part of their intellectual craftsmanship: in the sociologist's journal, “personal experience and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned” join; it is there that we reflect upon both what we “are doing intellectually” and what we are “experiencing as a person”; we give ourselves space to relate our quotidian to our “work in progress” and to “capture ‘fringe thoughts’ […] [or] ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard […] or […] dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking” (Mills 2000: 196). More recently, in advice directed primarily at PhD students but relevant to all social scientists, Les Back (2002: 3.5) has made a similar case for our ongoing recording of life around us and our reflections on “it.” Often in the “the middle of a creative drought,” Back (2002: 3.5) argues, “you will be doing something else […] and an idea will come into focus. My advice is be ready for this unexpected visitor. Carry a notebook all the time, keep a record of these ideas. You need to devise a system to record how your thinking evolves over time.”
In this spirit, and in continuation of a long-tradition of sociological journalkeeping, let me set the scene for this chapter with an extract from my own diary recorded in March 2020:
For years, I have been thinking and writing about our era as a time of multiple crises. Yet, how unprepared this still left me for what is happening now!? I am writing this against the backdrop of several crises that are already pushing local and regional communities as well as national, transnational and global structures to the brink.
Bibliography
- Christian Karner, University of Lincoln
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Chapter 3 - Of “Global Objects” and “Traveling Methods”
- Christian Karner, University of Lincoln
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Summary
I do not like shopping. Department stores quite literally tire me. I find trips to supermarkets, though necessary, tedious. And I have caused many a family disagreement with my inability to enjoy the practice of walking city centers and comparing similar items of ultimately the same thing. Buying souvenirs has always been my least favorite part of traveling, and I have often been embarrassed by the fact that my gifts to others are more modest than theirs for me. Neither has online shopping made purchasing commodities any more enjoyable for me, thoughts about what happens behind the scene (or behind the screen) prevent this, though they have not prevented me from joining the global ranks of online shoppers. Email requests to provide customer feedback on items just bought annoy me more than I can say: why does an economic transaction no longer suffice, why does this now get symbolically protracted into pseudo-reflexive “satisfaction-ratings,” I regularly ask myself. (I know why, of course, to help sellers’ self-advertising via their social media channels and, perhaps, to help potential future customers make their decisions. The problem is that I do not find those answers convincing, so I just routinely ignore the emailed feedback requests.)
These confessions of an arguably “flawed consumer” (Bauman 2005), or perhaps merely an overthinking one, still leave room for occasional surprises. Months ago, in a furniture shop I had no interest in visiting myself, I spotted an object that caught my attention and imagination: an incredible work of craftsmanship, sturdy yet elegant, a nostalgic invocation of premodern rurality that would, even I was immediately convinced, enhance its future owner's quality of life and aesthetically enrich any twenty-first century living room. The object in question was a sofa, one we did not need and did not buy. Yet, I found myself doing two things I would usually be extremely reluctant and unlikely to do: I asked the shop owner about the sofa's history, its materials and production; and I even took a picture of this particular piece of furniture. What was so beguiling to me was more than the object's apparent beauty. More fascinating was a deep contrast between its appearance and its history: the sofa oozed authenticity and local belonging. Made of Harris tweed and leather, it materially and semiotically referenced the Outer Hebrides.
Index
- Christian Karner, University of Lincoln
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Chapter 2 - The (In)Visible Worlds of the Economy
- Christian Karner, University of Lincoln
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Summary
A One-Hour Survey: Getting a Glimpse of Financescapes in Crisis
In his seminal Banal Nationalism, Michael Billig (1995: 110–127) reveals the ubiquitous, if largely unnoticed, discursive “f lagging” of national identifications through what he terms an “illustrative day survey.” Sampling British national newspapers on the relatively “ordinary” day that was June 28, 1993, Billig demonstrates how inescapable the distinctly national framing of headline news, political commentaries, sports reporting, weather forecasts and readerships is across the press, and how such daily “homeland-making” is an integral part of the routine reproduction of the institutions of the nation-state and of most of its citizens’ widely unquestioned identification with them. Billig's argument continues to resonate in, and indeed depicts, some of the ideological conditions of possibility for features of glocalization such as nationalist counterreactions against global f lows and interdependencies. Billig's day survey also poses more general, methodological questions as to how, twenty-five years on, other workings of glocalization and globalization may be captured. For that, it stands to reason that we may need to look to some of today's media with distinctly transnational orientations, international reach, and with a particular focus. Put differently, where are some of the processes and f lows underpinning our glocalizing world encountered?
Reappropriating Billig's discursive-qualitative “survey” approach for different ends, we may, for example, wonder what satellite and cable channels exclusively dedicated to (global) financial markets, flows and investors depict and how. This is what I did, and recorded, in a shorter time-window, namely between 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. (GMT) on April 20, 2020. During this hour, as European markets reflected a difficult morning and the stock exchange in New York was getting ready to start its day, Bloomberg ran the following information recorded by the present author:
The rapidly changing numbers reported from the FTSE MIB, the DAX, the IBEX 35, the EURO STOXX 50, the CAC 40 and the FTSE 100 flicker across the bottom of my television screen. This alternates with current exchange rates—GBP/USD, GBP/EUR, EUR/USD—and their similarly rapid changes, which are interspersed by graphs depicting how those currency exchange rates have fluctuated over recent days. I realize that all this is on loop, constantly changing rates and figures and all: I am next offered the commodity indexes for gold, silver, copper, platinum, zinc, nickel, lead, wheat, corn, sugar, coffee, cocoa, soy beans, natural gas and ICE Brent, accompanied by indications of their recent changes, positive or negative.
Chapter 1 - From Localities to “Non-Places”?
- Christian Karner, University of Lincoln
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Summary
Photographing Social Change
My wife and I recently spent a difficult period of six months living in a previously semirural English location that had since become an infrastructural node in our national and international networks of travel, work, and commerce. Thus, living very near an airport that serves and connects the region in question to the world at large, I used to be woken up every night by heavy air traffic, by cargo planes taking off with ferocious frequency between one and four o’clock in the morning. We had ended up in this location by accident, needing accommodation at very short notice, in a place that would be geographically fairly convenient for both my and my wife's commutes to work. Given the urgency of this at the time, we had to disregard the fact that the area in question had also acquired a reputation for its high levels of Brexit support. Two (self-defining) Europeans moving there, at the height of the furor created by the UK's uneasily unfolding exit from the European Union, was—in hindsight—always going to be difficult. And so it was. However, our problems extended far beyond restless nights and our deep uneasiness with the political positions held by many of our neighbors at the time. What many residents in this particular location, and probably many others like it around the globe, share is a usually unarticulated but locally inescapable experience of being squeezed by changes to the area being imposed from the outside.
The intentions of this chapter are threefold and interrelated. First, I will sketch some of the methodological questions raised by our recent experiences in the locality in question, wishing to point toward some possible ways of capturing recent and ongoing social changes in places such as the one described above and in what follows. Second, this discussion will draw on several conceptual strands in recent sociological theorizing that can help us make sense of the social changes at stake here and of how they impact on local lives. Third, in combining the empirical with the methodological and the conceptual, this discussion shows that examples such as the one that lies at the heart of this chapter strengthen the more general case for a reinvigorated sociological imagination and for a public sociology (Burawoy 2005) today.
Chapter 6 - Glocal Palimpsests
- Christian Karner, University of Lincoln
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Description → Analysis (→ Criticism)
Core parts of this book are about how we may arrive at valid, sociological claims to knowing and understanding our present moment that is widely experienced as novel and qualitatively different from what preceded it. Skeptics may argue that assumptions about the uniqueness of one's times are nothing new, perhaps a historical constant in its own right, perhaps a sign of a recurring historical myopia. After all, have people not always considered their own epoch to be particular, and often particularly challenging? Leaving this question for historians to ponder, there are—as we have seen— compelling reasons to assume that there are indeed structural and cultural particularities that warrant depictions of the “here and now” as distinctive. The concept of glocalization provides, arguably, the most apt term for capturing the particularities in question.
In epistemological and methodological terms, previous chapters have gone some way toward developing central arguments offered in this book: namely that the flows, interconnectedness, interdependencies and counterreactions that define our age of glocalization demand novel or refined ways of generating data; this is particularly so for the tradition of empirical, qualitative sociology that Max Weber (1972 [1922]) famously defined through its focus on understanding (or more evocatively captured by the German term “verstehende Soziologie”). Previous chapters have conveyed some of the methodological richness of sociology's qualitative toolkit today. Admittedly, relatively few contributions to the discipline have met Weberian standards for illuminating the interplay of meanings, social action, and resulting social relationships and institutions. Yet, we have seen that there is no shortage of methodologically innovative work able to help sharpen social scientists’ senses for the many ways in which “the global” and “the local” intersect. In this chapter, I push the argument a step further: I again commence with empirical questions about where (else) to go looking for some of the manifestations of glocalization. Following the structure of previous chapters, the argument will then turn a more distinctly analytical corner to ask how some of the resulting observations may be read and interpreted. This also helps prepare the ground for the subsequent chapter, in which I will argue that updated ways of perceiving, recording and making sense of our lived realities sociologically must be accompanied not only by relevant analytical frames but also by a willingness to engage with the social world critically. I begin this chapter, once again, in a very specific locality.
Contents
- Christian Karner, University of Lincoln
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Chapter 7 - New Technologies Everywhere?
- Christian Karner, University of Lincoln
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Summary
Logging the Digital Revolution in Everyday Life
Although “globalized technologies” constitute only one aspect of globalization, they are arguably the dimension that brings global flows “closest to home” (Lemert 2015: 14). How, then, might one capture, self-reflexively and hence critically, one's own everyday reliance on our era's information and communication technologies? One possible starting point for such an undertaking is a simple recording exercise: in a randomly chosen week, how many hours do we spend doing particular things, communicating digitally, consuming information and entertainment via channels and through means that simply did not exist until not very long ago? Here is my own, in many ways atypical “technology and communication log” compiled during a week in early September 2020 (Table 7.1).
This is idiosyncratic. Timing and immediate context must be borne in mind: early September constitutes an unusual point in the annual cycle of academic work, when “we” still get to spend proportionally more of our time doing research, writing publications, and preparing our teaching rather than engaged in administrative matters and the delivery of teaching. What is more, the point in time captured here was still profoundly shaped by the Covid-19 pandemic: with more of our lives spent at home, our reliance on digital means of communication was clearly pronounced. Concurrently, especially for those of us with families in different countries, and whatever our general attitude toward our technological age, the personal importance of video calls across long geographical distances cannot be overstated. At the same time, my nonexistent use of social media (neither as an active contributor nor as a consumer thereof) arguably shows me to be old-fashioned and anachronistic. Other people's categories of activity will undoubtedly be far more numerous and, in light of their “fuller” digital lives, considerably more nuanced and multifaceted. Yet, this tentative table says something profound, particularly as it captures one week's activities in the life of a digital skeptic.
The picture becomes even more revealing when Table 7.1 is read alongside Table 7.2, which summarizes my non-digitally-mediated activities in the same week in question.
Further explanation is needed at this point. The proportion of digitally mediated to non-digital activities is noteworthy: the sum total of the first log amounts to ninety-one hours across seven days, compared to a sum total of ninety-nine hours of non-digital activities (including six hours of sleep per night, which for non-Fitbit-wearers are by definition non-digitalized).
Chapter 5 - Running in the City, Capturing Urban Life
- Christian Karner, University of Lincoln
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Summary
Austrian sociologist Roland Girtler (2004) specifies ten principles for ethnographic fieldwork. These include the taking of public transport, walking or cycling around a chosen location for fieldwork (rather than retreating to the isolation of a car); the visiting of local cemeteries (i.e., ideal for biographical glimpses relevant to the locality in question) and of high vantage points (i.e., to appreciate its fundamental geographical parameters). On one of my recent returns home, to the city in which I grew up, which I know better than any other place in the world, and which features in some of my previous research (Karner 2007b, 2011, 2021b), I stumbled—almost literally and quite by accident—across a methodological dimension to be added to Girtler's principles. This addition offers, so my claim in parts of this chapter, surprising benefits to the sociologist of any “global-local-nexus.” It also, however, presupposes considerable amounts of prior local knowledge.
There is no established name I know of for my proposed methodological innovation yet. Bizarre though it may appear, I propose to term it the historically informed jogging-method (or, in inter-textual allusion, insights-and-memories of the long-distance runner). Running is part of my life, almost as much as sociology is. Without long and regular runs, I am not sure how or where I would generate new ideas for potential research projects, nor how I would manage to finish older projects. On one of my recent runs, in Austria's second city, it suddenly dawned on me, quite fortuitously, that running might provide yet more than merely momentum for new or developing ideas. What if running, in certain places and under specific circumstances, could metamorphosize into a form of auxiliary, quasi-ethnographic data collection? Here is an extract of a field diary of sorts, jotted down soon after my return from running that day:
I run along the river that structures some of my earliest memories […] of cold winters when this river was almost frozen over. This hasn't happened since. Along long stretches, the previously dense river-woodlands have recently been destroyed, causing great local controversy, to make way for the mayor's “prestige project,” a new hydroelectric power-station. Aware of the many objections, the council has put up public information signs promising that eventually the power-plant will generate “green energy” and “be in harmony with nature.”
Acknowledgments
- Christian Karner, University of Lincoln
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Frontmatter
- Christian Karner, University of Lincoln
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