A SOCIOLOGY OF GLOBALIZATION|W. W. Norton & Company is been independent since is founding in 1923, when ‘William Warde: Noron nd Mary D. Heer Norton frst published lecrre delivered at ‘he People’s Insite, the adule education division of New York Citys Cooper Union, The NNortons soon expanded thei program beyand the Iasticte, publishing books by cee brated academics from America an abcon. BY mid-cencuy, he wo mayor plas of Nor. ‘00's publishing pogram—crude books and college texts—were fey eablshed. tn he 1950s he Notton family eanferred contol of the company cots eaployes, od today ‘ith sal of four hundred an «comparble numberof eae, allege, aad profesional ‘es publ each year. W. Norton & Company stands asthe lage and olde publishing house owned wholly by its employee, (Copyright © 2007 by W. W. Norton & Compeny, In All ight reserved Printed inthe Usted States of Ameria us Bacon. Composition by Penaet, ne Manufctsing by Quebecor World —Pureld Divison. reduction manage: Jane Seal, ‘Seis design by Beth Toadeeaa Design, Libary of Congress Caalogingin-Pablcation Data Suen, Sa, Sociology of globalization / Sask Suse com. — (Contemporny socieuet) Includes bibiograptal efeences and inde ISBN 13:978-0.393.92726-9 (pbk) ISBN 10; 0-393.92726-1 (pbk) 1. Globalmation-—Social pects. Tile. I, Sete 21318828 2006 303.48'2—ae22 2006040138 1. W. Norton & Compiny, Inc, 500 ith Avenue, New Yetk, NY 10110-0017 1W. W. Norton & Company Ld, Castle Howse, 15176 Wells Stet, London WIT 3QT 234567890 PREFACE CHAPTER ONE Cuaprer Two (CHAPTER THREE Caprer Four (CHaprer Five CHAPTER SIX CHaprer SEVEN (Cuaprer EIGHT Notes REFERENCES Inpex CONTENTS Introduction Elements of a Sociology of Globalization The State Confronts the Global Economy and Digital Networks The Global City: Recovering Place and Social Practices ‘The Making of International Migrations Emergent Global Classes Local Actors in Global Politics Emergent Global Formations and Research Agendas an 45 97 129 164 190 213 241 261 297Chapter One INTRODUCTION TRANSNATIONAL PROCESSES such as economic, political, and cultural globalization confront the social sciences with a series of theoretical and methodological challenges. Such challenges atise out of the fact that the global—whether an institution, a process, a discursive practice, or an imaginary—simultaneously transcends the exclusive framing of national states yet partly inhabits national territories and institutions. Seen this way, ‘globalization is more than the common notion of the growing interdependence of the world generally and the formation of ‘global institutions. But if che global, as I argue, partly inhabies the national, it becomes evident that globalization in its many forms directly engages two key assumptions in the social sci- ences. The first is the explicit or implicit assumption about the nation-state as the container of social process. The second is the implied correspondence of national territory with the national—the assumption that if a process or condition is lo- cated in a national institution or in national territory, it must be national. Both assumptions describe conditions that have held, albeit never fully, throughout much of the history of the modern state, especially since World War I, and to some extent continue to hold. What is different today is that these condi- tions are partly but actively being unbundled. Different also is the scope of the unbundling.4 & A Soctotosy oF Gronauzarion Conceiving of globalization not simply in eetms of interde- pendence and global institutions but also as inhabiting the na- tional opens up a vast and largely unaddressed research agenda, ‘The assumptions about the nation-state as container of social Process continue to work well for many of the subjects studied in the social sciences and have indeed allowed social scientists to develop powerful methods of analysis and the requisite data sets. But they are nor helpful in elucidating a growing number of questions aboue globalization and the large array of transna- ‘ional processes turning up on the research and theorization agenda of the social sciences. Nor ate those assumptions help- ful in developing the requisite analytics. Thus methods and conceptual frameworks that rest on the assumption that the nation-state is a closed unit and chat the state has exclusive au- thority over its territory cannot fully accommodate the critical proposition organizing this book: ‘The fact that a process or an entity is located within the territory of a sovereign state does ‘not necessarily mean it is national or of the type traditionally authorized by the state (foreign tourists, embassies, etc); i might be a localization of the global. Whereas most such enti- ties and processes are likely to be national, there is a growing ‘seed for empirical research to establish the status of what is in turn a growing range of possible instances of the global. Much of what we continue co categorize as national may well be pre- cisely such instances. Developing the theoretical and empirical specifications that allow us to accommodate such conditions is a difficult and collective effort. This book secks co contribute to the collective effort by ‘mapping an analytic terrain for the study of globalization that ‘an encompass this more complex understanding. Ie includes, Cu, LIwrropucrion @ 5 but also moves beyond, understandings of globalization that focus only on growing interdependence and self-evidently global institutions. Thus part of che research entails detecting the presence of globalizing dynamics in thick social environ- ‘ments that mix national and non-national elements. This fram- ing of the global allows us to use many of the research techniques and data sets in the social sciences that were devel- oped with national and subnational settings in mind. But we still have to develop new conceptual frameworks for interpreting findings—frameworks that do not assume that the national is a closed and exclusive system. Surveys of factories that are links in global commodity chains, in-depth interviews that decipher individual imaginaries about globality, and ethnographies of national financial centers—all expand the analytic terrain for understanding global processes. Such expansion opens up the research agenda for the social sciences in general and, pethaps especially, for more sociological and anthropological types of questions. ‘What is it, chen, that we are trying to name with the term globalization? In my reading it involves ewo distinct sets of dy- ‘namics. One involves the formation of explicitly global insti- tutions and processes, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), global financial markets, the new cosmopolitanism, and the International War Crimes Tribunals. The practices and organizational forms through which such dynamics operate constitute what is typically thought of as global. Alchough they are partly enacted at the national scale, they are to a large ‘extent novel and self-evidently global formations. The second set of dynamics involves processes that do not necessarily scale at the global level as such yet, I argue, are part6 @ A Soctotosy oF Gromatizarion of globalization. These processes take place deep inside tertito- ries and institutional domains that have been constructed largely in national terms in much of the world, though by no means in all of it. Although localized in national—indeed, in subnational—settings, these processes are part of globalization in that they involve transboundary networks and entities con- necting multiple local or “national” processes and actors, of the recurrence of particular issues or dynamics in a growing number of countries or localities. Among these entities and Processes I include, for instance, cross-border networks of ac- tivists engaged in specific localized struggles with an explicit or implicit global agenda, as rights and environmental organizations; particular aspects of the work of states—for example, the implementation of certain ‘monetary and fiscal policies in a growing number of countries, often with enormous pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United States, because those policies are critical to the constitution of global financial markets; and the fact that national courts are now using international in- the case with many human struments—whether human rights, international environmen- tal standards, or WTO regulations—to address issues where before they would have used national instruments. I also in- clude more elusive emergent conditions, such as forms of poli tics and imaginaries that are focused on localized issues and struggles shared by other localities around the world, with all participants increasingly aware of this situation; I call these soncosmopolitan globalities. ‘When the social sciences focus on globalization, it is typi- cally not on this second type or set of processes and insticutions Cu. LInrropucnon @ 7 but rather on the self-evidently global scale. The social sciences have made important contributions to the study of this global scale by establishing that multiple globalizations exist and by making it increasingly clear that the dominant form of global- ization—the global corporate economy—is but one of several. Political science—specifically, international relations (IR)—has a strong canonical framing of the international, with the na- tional state as a key actor. The strength itself of this canon poses difficulties when it comes to opening up to the possibil- ity of global formations and their multiscalar character. The same can be said for sociology. The strength of its research methods and data sets has rested to a large extent on the type of closure represented by the nation-state. This holds in particular for the more quantitative types of sociology, which have been able to develop increasingly sophisticated methods predicated on the possibility of closed data sets. Though using very differ- ent methods and hypotheses, applied economics is similarly conditioned on data sets that presume closure in the underly- ing reality. On the other hand, although still maintaining similar assumptions about the nation-state, more historically inflected forms of sociology have made significant contribu- tions to the study of international systems; notable here is the work on world-systems and cross-border migrations. Economic and political geography, more than any of the other social sciences, has contributed to the study of the global, ‘specially through its critical stance on scale. It recognizes the istoricity of scales and thus resists the reification and natural- ization of the national scale that is so presene in most of social science. Anthropologists have contributed studies of the chick8 © A Sociovocy oF GrosauuzArion and partis laristic forces that are also part of these dynamics, thereby indirectly alerting us to the risks of exclusively scalar analytics that disregard these complex environments. Without wanting to generalize, I will suggest that the analytic and interpretive tools of these two disciplines have been at an ad- vantage when it comes to studying the global both in its conventional understanding as interdependence and in the more expanded approach developed in this book, notably its subnational scaling. Despite these advances in the social sci- ences, there is still much work to do, at least some of which entails distinguishing the various scales that get constitueed through global processes and practices and the specific contents and institutional locations of this multiscalar globalization. ‘There are conceptual and methodological consequences to the approach developed in this book. Most important, my ap- proach incorporates the need for the detailed study of particular national and subnational formations and processes and their re- coding as instantiations of the global. This means that we can use many of the existing data sets and technologies for research, but we need to situate the results in different conceptual archi- tectures. These architectures require new categories that do not presuppose the customary dualities of national/global and local/global. Examples of these categories are transnational communities, global cities, commodity chains, and space-time compression. This terminology arises partly out of an attempt to name conditions that are novel, have assumed novel forms, or have become visible because of the unsettlement of older re- alities. Older analytic categories may be used, but in ways that differ from those for which they were designed. Familiar socio- Cu. LINtropucrion @ 9 logical categories—such as race, gender, cities, immigration, and social connectivity—in principle can incorporate the ana~ lytics emerging from this conceptual reorganization. The cate- gory of denationalization that I use in this book and developed elsewhere (Sassen 1996, 2006a) captures an increasingly com- mon effect arising from the interactions of the global and the national. A critical element in this interaction is the highly in- stitutionalized nature and the sociocultural thickness that char- actetize the national. Structurations of the global inside the national therefore entail a partial, typically highly specialized and specific denationalization of particular components of the national. Ouruine oF THE BOOK ‘The next chapter and the final chapter introduce what are prob ably the least familiar material and analytics. The effort in those chapters is ro expand the analytic terrain within which globalization may be situated as an object of study. ‘The aim in Chapters Two and Bight is experimental rather than co ground globalization in the existing scholarship. Readers who are unfa- miliar with the subject might consider skipping Chapter Two. ‘At the heart of the book are chapters that explore the existing. specialized scholarship in sociology in order to understand what it might contribute to the sociology of globalization “Most of the scholars whose work I discuss have never written about globalization. That is precisely the point, and it parallels the effort here and in Chapter Two to expand the analytic ter~ rain within which to examine globalization. In this case the ef- fort is to expand the scholarship we might bring to bear on10 @ A Sociovocy oF Guowatizarion core issues of a sociology of globalization. Chapters ‘Three through Seven do this by addressing the state, cities, migra- tions, and emergent global classes. Those are core categories in sociology. The scholarship discussed in those chapters helps us explore different types of research and theorization practices in the study of the global. Chapter Two ELEMENTS OF A SOCIOLOGY OF GLOBALIZATION ‘Tuts CHAPTER DEVELOPS the theoretical and methodological ele- ments of a more sociological study of the globalizing and de- nationalizing dynamics introduced in Chapter One. Critical among these elements are questions of place and scale. The global is generally conceptualized as overriding or neutralizing place and as operating on a self-evidently global scale. A focus on places, scales, and diverse meanings of the national helps us explore types of research and theorization practices not usually included in the study of the global. Furthermore, studying global processes in terms of these three elements touches on tradicional objects of study in sociology: social structures, prac- tices, and institutions. In later chapters, I examine how sociol- ogy provides a variety of concepts and methodological tools for apprehending the complexity and diversity of globalization as constituted by specific empirical referents, notably cities and states. Yet while particular attention is given to a sociological perspective, the questions addressed in this chapter are clearly not confined to sociology. Constructing the object of study in this type of effore often means operating at the intersection of multiple disciplinary forms of knowledge and techniques for research and interpretation. Global formations may have existed for centuties. Sociolo- un