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Economic or cultural globalisation? Useless question?
Chris Perkins (October 4th, 2009)
At the recent Global Studies Association (GSA) conference during which this journal was launched, September 2nd to 4th 2009, there were a number of references made to the spectre of economism in global studies. The study of global processes has been, so the argument goes, hampered by a dogmatic institutional bias towards seeing globalisation in economic terms, and this will not do. Instead scholars need to focus on cultural globalisation, and if one had to choose between the two, cultural globalisation should take priority. This was all, it must be admitted, a certain amount of preaching to the converted: of all the presentations, only two were openly economistic. But in a sense this is beside the point. What is perplexing about the cultural / economic distinction is that it seems to be based on the assumption that scholars can somehow get globalisation right.
This is a misguided enterprise that is only likely to get in the way. Instead, I contend that it is more fruitful to view globalisation as an essentially contested concept, and that the configuration of the concept is reliant on a fusion between the background assumptions of the viewer employing it and the brute observable processes being viewed. Globalisation is not an autonomous process that stands apart from our observations of it. That is, in the sense that while people and information are flowing and communication technologies are changing, the way in which we both imagine the world and relate to those in it this is not globalisation until it is designated as such through some socially organised knowledge production enterprise. I am not denying that there are changes in the world out there, but I am arguing that the way we label those changes is ultimately, and irresolvable, contestable.
I think it is a truism that globalisation is an essentially contested concept (Gallie, 1956) but it is worth thinking through what this actually implies. Again, the first point to recognise is that globalisation is a conceptual category, and as a result does not do anything in and of itself. As the term has evolved a number of general concepts, such as interconnectedness and mobility, have embedded themselves; other, more contentious, factors such as neo-liberalism, borderlessness, humanitarianism, cosmopolitanism, homogeneity, cultural clash and cultural hybridity, hover around in the periphery. This list is far from exhaustive, but it is obvious from it that not all of these factors can exist happily next to each other even though it is possible to find empirical examples that would place them all under, or at least adjacent to, the rubric of globalisation.
What happens, therefore, when we talk about globalisation is that the term is either explicitly or tacitly decontested (see Freeden, 1996). By this I mean that the internal architecture of the term is rendered in such a way that certain articulations become more prominent than others in order to provide internal consistency. The nature of the decontestation is linked to the mass of factors that make up all the background assumptions (Searle, 1995) that produce the context for mobilisation of the term. So, for example, one usage of globalisation might privilege the economic as part of a neo-liberal capitalist project because of the institutional context of the researcher; another ideological project may do the same but for reasons of resistance born out of a different set of background assumptions. Cultural hybridity may come to the fore if the theorist is concerned with issues of agency, pluralism and difference; homogenisation if the theorist is concerned with hegemony and domination.
Another result of recognising the essential contestedness of globalisation is that it ceases to be something that researchers must get right. The positivist project goes out the window as no one definition of globalisation is going to fit the bill. Instead, globalisation, within limits set by the architecture of the concept can signify a whole host of disparate processes. To borrow Gadamer’s (1975) phrase, globalisation is the product of a ‘fusing of horizons’ – that of the researcher (or the person in the street) and the myriad processes occurring globally today - in order to produce something interpretable, even intelligible. Globalisation, therefore, is a category used in a sense making process: by itself it does nothing, it has no agency, it is not teleological like Hegel’s view of history, and it is always subjective. Like freedom, which when accompanied with guns and bombs radically alters in meaning, globalisation cannot, and should not, be separated from its accompanying material experience.
These observations have implications for method. Much like the perennial yet fruitless debates over the ‘true nature’ of globalisation’s sometimes notional precursor, the nation, trying to pin down its essential nature is unlikely to produce a satisfactory outcome. Instead of arguing that this or that form of globalisation is correct or more important, the emphasis should rather be on understandings of globalisation and the way they are intersubjectively constructed and contested. It is a method that asks how questions, namely how do people use the term to makes sense of the world they live in? And further, what does their usage and the way that the term is decontested say about the material reality of those who are embedded within the processes occurring under its auspices?
It is also a reflexive methodology. We, including academics, all work within a background set of assumptions that go on to inform the way in which we use concepts to make processes intelligible, and the makeup of background assumptions is a function of power. Globalisation as way of thinking about and making sense of the world does not exist outside our usage of it, and that usage requires an inevitable simplification. As has been argued in the case of international relations in these very pages (see Matthew Eagleton-Pierce’s article in issue one), reflexivity for the academic is crucial. When conducting fieldwork, publishing work, writing in newspapers and appearing on television the question of how this action will impact on the participants in the processes being discussed is critical: especially in the sense that they may have radically different conceptions of what they are involved in.
Finally it is a methodology that is concerned with power. Instead of trying to prove that one form of globalisation is more important than another, the questions we ask is how is it possible to think of processes in terms of globalisation and more pertinently why are certain ways of decontesting the term more pervasive than others? If economism is a spectre it is not because it is more (or less) factually right, it is because it occupies a hegemonic position in the way people make sense of the world through that term.
For a lot of people the experience of globalisation is economic because that is the dominant way their material experiences are designated and described in everyday life by politicians, by the media and by academics. And of course, thinking about the world and acting on the world are two sides of the same coin. If globalisation is decontested as the inevitable neo-liberal rationalisation of social relations, and this way of thinking achieves a measure of commonsense, then in all likelihood people would develop pragmatic (what Husserl called ‘natural’) attitudes and capacities towards this logic that go on to reinforce it through their everyday interactions.
Indeed, there is a strong case to be made for this already being the case. Assumptions gain momentum, a sense of inevitability through self-fulfilling prophecies. Such a scenario calls for the radical adoption of what Harold Garfinkel (1967) called ‘breaching’: disruption of taken for granted patterns of behaviour that fracture the consensus and break the logic of expectation. This is why protesters must protest and students must occupy academic buildings (such as in the recent cases at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the University of California Santa Cruz) whether or not it is in response to economic globalisation.
References
Freeden, M., 1996. Ideologies and political theory : a conceptual approach, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Gadamer, H., 1975. Truth and method, New York: Seabury Press.
Garfinkel, H., 1967. Studies in ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Searle, J., 1995. The construction of social reality, New York: Free Press.
Chris Perkins is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London, and co-editor of the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies.
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