The Blackwell Companion to Globalization

Chapter 35

The Futures of Globalization

BRYAN S. TURNER

INTRODUCTION: DEFINING THE FIELD

Theories of globalization have been the dominant paradigm in sociology for at least two decades, but certain features of the globalization debate have been part of sociological discourse for much longer. In mainstream academic sociology, one of the earliest publications on the topic was by W.E. Moore (1966) in his ‘Global sociology: The world as a singular system’. He argued that sociology was becoming a global science and that ‘the life of the individual anywhere is affected by events and processes everywhere’ (Moore 1966: 482). ‘Globalization’ refers then to the process by which the world becomes a single place, and hence the volume and depth of social interconnectedness are greatly increased. Globalization is the compression of social space (Giddens 1990). The analysis of the future of globalization will have to address the consequences, both intended and more commonly unintended, of these processes of temporal and spatial compression.

In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan (1967) had introduced an influential vocabulary to describe the role of ‘the global village’ in the analysis of culture and mass media in order to understand how the world was shrinking as a result of new technologies of communication. The globalization literature grew apace in the 1970s and 1980s, mainly within the sociology of religion where religious revivalism was increasingly seen as a global process (Beckford and Luckmann ...