In 2013, Barry Gills, editor-in-chief of this journal, asked Manfred B. Steger and Paul James to guest-edit a special issue on the topic, ‘Globalization: The Career of a Concept’. This became the incubator for a book-length study, Globalization Matters: Engaging the Global in Unsettled Times (Cambridge University Press, 2019). With some elan, it attempts to develop a generalizing approach to globalization, though with appropriate social-scientific caution. The themes and issues raised in the book stand front and centre in this Special Forum.
But is it possible to develop a general and integrated approach to globalization that links theory and practice in a socially engaged way? Many relevant academic developments suggest not. For example, the postmodernist turn at the end of the last century expressed a profound ‘incredulity’ toward ‘grand narratives’ in the social sciences and humanities. A decade later, some neo-Marxist critics condemned the ‘follies of globalization theory’. More recently, the ‘post-truth’ interventions of national populists suggest not only that ‘globalism’ is the political enemy but also that attempts to understand its patterns and manifestations are relative or irrelevant. Manfred B. Steger and Paul James’s Globalization Matters: Engaging the Global in Unsettled Times (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is an important recent study that attempts to contest both populist narratives of alleged ‘deglobalization’ and academic discourses opposed to general theorizations of such complex social assemblages as globalization.
This Special Forum takes Globalization Matters as a point of departure for a debate on both the possibility and desirability of bringing integrated theory back into globalization research. While, as they suggest, there can hardly be a single and all-encompassing ‘grand theory’ of globalization-in-itself, Steger and James argue for the development of a general and systematic approach to globalization dynamics, past and present. In other words, theorizations of the global should be holistic and integrative, taking place in tandem with methodological frameworks that consider the contradictory and uneven layering of different transnational practices and subjectivities across all social relations.
As part of the brief, the contributors to this Special Forum were encouraged to address some pertinent ‘big’ research questions that have emerged consistently in the academic globalization debates of the last three decades:
How should globalization be theorized?
What is the value of holistic and integrative conceptualizations of globalization?
How can we theorize globalization to arrive at better explanations – and justifications – for the continued relevance of conceptual frameworks that treat global inter-relationality as the basic unit of social analysis?
Should we generate generalizable knowledge about the global in systematic ways that cut across entrenched academic disciplines?
How can globalization scholarship respond in innovative ways to contemporary ‘global problems’?
What is the relationship of globalization theory to social practice?
Should this relationship be engaged, that is, crucially informed by political activism or other forms of social engagement?
How would such an engaged theory of globalization help us understand our present world in upheaval?
The Special Forum contains reflections on all these questions, and others deemed appropriate by contributors, at a time referred to in Globalization Matters as the ‘Great Unsettling’. This phrase is shorthand for the profound dynamics of volatility and destabilization manifested in economic dislocation, automation, precarious work, inequality, migration, pandemics, technological transformation, cultural shifts, climate change, and resurgent national populism. Today the intensifying features of the Great Unsettling include the havoc occasioned by Covid-19, and the responses to it. Taken together they constitute a suitable moment – possibly a critical conjuncture – that allows the participants in this Special Forum to take stock of globalization and to reflect on its scholarship. The conjuncture also provides a backdrop for Steger and James’ avowed aim to promote ‘engaged’ globalization research, which runs like a thread through the book. As readers will see, some colleagues see this as a laudable, even noble, aim; for others, it is enduringly contentious.
The essays that follow are written from a variety of disciplinary, analytical and normative perspectives. In that they reflect the variety of globalization’s scholarship. Contributors take Steger and James’ book as a point of departure and then address that prospectus directly, or use it as a jumping-off point from which to remark their own views on the big questions posed above. An author who is prominent in her/his field writes each contribution; and they make for compelling reading. As editor it has been a pleasure to work with these colleagues and with Manfred Steger and Paul James, who – fittingly – provide the final essay where they respond to the ‘engagements’ of their fellow theorists.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Barrie Axford
Barrie Axford is Professor Emeritus at Oxford Brookes University, UK, where he is a member of the Centre for Global Politics Economy and Society (GPES). His latest book is Populism Versus the New Globalization (Sage, 2020).