The Blackwell Companion to Globalization

Chapter 7

Studying Globalization: Methodological Issues

SALVATORE BABONES

INTRODUCTION

Globalization means many things to many people, so many things that it hardly seems worth offering yet one more definition of the term. It would be difficult enough to pick among existing definitions, or even to list them: reviewing trends in 26 indicators of globalization, Guillen (2001) notes that not one has risen as quickly over the past 20 years as the number of academic publications on the topic. Happily for future writers of review articles, a search of the Sociological Abstracts database suggests that this trend has reversed: after peaking at 705 in 2002, the number of peer-reviewed publications returned from a keyword search on globalization declined to 601 in 2003 and 553 in 2004. Perhaps Chase-Dunn and Babones (2006) are right to caution that ‘waves of globalization have been followed by waves of deglobalization in the past, and this is also an entirely plausible scenario for the future’. If academic interest is a leading indicator, this future may come sooner than any of us expect.

Whatever the trend, the sheer number of academic treatments of globalization eliminates the possibility of agreeing on a common definition for the term; a common definition of globalization may not even be desirable from the standpoint of advancing our theorizing on the subject (Smith 2001). Lack of consensus among theorists and practitioners, however, does create difficulties for the methodologist. Ideally, ...