Martin Shaw

Teaching global sociology

John Beynon and David Dunkerley (eds.) Globalization: The Reader, London: The Athlone Press, 2000, £16.99, 309 pp., ISBN 0-485-00600-6

Robin Cohen and Paul Kennedy, Global Sociology, London: Macmillan, 2000, £15.99, 408 pp. ISBN 0-333-65112-X

David Held (ed.) A Globalizing World? Culture, Politics, Economics, London: Taylor and Francis, 2000, £11.99, 188 pp., ISBN 0-415-22294-X

With these books, global sociology has truly arrived. The spate of research and writing over the last decade is now reflected in texts and readers that will increasingly remodel the teaching of the subject. Two things are happening in these books. In all three, work on globalization is made available in bite-size chunks suitable for first-year undergraduates and advanced school students. And in Global Sociology, in some ways the most ambitious of the texts, sociology is effectively rewritten in global terms.

All the books contain extensive ranges of material. In The Reader this is organized in very straightforward terms, with long sequences of more or less brief extracts from a range of works (including, let me say before I am accused on biting the hand that feeds me, one of the present writer's). This is also literally a textbook - a large collection of short text extracts without graphical adornment.

In the other two works, much more complex structures are deployed. A Globalizing World is essentially four essays written by members of an Open University (OU) course team, but it is organized in a textbook manner with many illustrations, boxes and questions. It is partly organised around the structure of the globalization debate defined by another major text, David Held et al.'s Global Transformations (1999) (which in turn has spawned a reader of its own). Global Sociology is a fully-fledged, heavyweight textbook, with the largest collection of material, the most complex structure, and a plethora of devices for engaging the student.

All three books will be useful, but for different purposes. I don't teach courses at the levels at which I imagine these books are aimed, or will be most useful, but my final-year and even master's students could find them useful background sources. On the other hand, I do think and write global politics, and so I am bound to assess these texts above all on their intellectual foundations. Whatever the mechanisms employed, the essential criterion for a good textbook is that it offers an adequate and coherent framework of understanding. These are contested areas and texts have to make choices between different models of the global. (And clearly the present writer has an axe to grind, as a sociologist teaching international studies who happens to think the political dimensions of global change are far more important than often acknowledged.)

Looked at in these terms, The Reader is the least satisfactory of the works under review. Its ambitious title presents it as the guide to the globalization literature and it is hoist, I am afraid, by its own petard. Over a hundred short extracts mean that in one sense there is a breadth of coverage, but the editorial conception is relatively narrow. This is a reader for global society, culture, media and technologies. There are only ten extracts in the final section on 'political economy': fewer than in the sub-section of 'culture' entitled 'global consumerism, tourism and identity'. There is no section on global politics as such, and for a book claiming to be the reader there is an embarrassing absence of, for example, Anthony Giddens and David Held. One can guess at the reasons; but the competing Held Global Transformations Reader (1999) has, for my money, the edge in this particular market.

Held's theoretical prominence in this area ought to give A Globalizing World the edge among the texts available here. In a sense this is true, although Held himself contributes only a short introduction and an afterword. But this book is both more interesting and more limited than a typical text, since it contains within itself a debate about the validity and extent of global concepts. The framework for the debate is the Held et al. model of globalists, traditionalists (as the sceptics have been renamed) and transformationalists who 'seek to move beyond the sometimes arid debate' between the other two camps. This common framework appears at first sight to make this the most intellectually coherent of these works, and no prizes for guessing that A Globalizing World is primarily a 'transformationalist' text.

However since one of the main sections, on economics, is written by Grahame Thompson, who might be labelled a traditionalist by his colleagues, Held has to come back on his arguments in the final pages of the book. This clearly adds to the interest, but whether it makes for a good introductory text may be another matter. The debate is signposted only in terms of the general framework; the novice reader might be surprised at the end of the day to find that she has been drawn somewhat unwittingly into the major difference of perspective between two OU (in the case of Held, now ex-OU) global theorists. This book also looks at globalization through a rather conventional structure - society-culture-economy-politics - even if the present writer is pleased to see not only a proper discussion of economic globalization but a solid examination of 'power shift' by international relationist Anthony McGrew.

Neither The Reader nor A Globalizing World adopts an explicitly disciplinary focus. This is partly as one would expect given the extent that globalization literature has been interdisciplinary, and indeed to which global change brings into question the extant disciplinary frameworks. Sociology is by no means exempt from the problems that global change has posed for social sciences that have tended, in the words of Jan Aart Scholte (author of another good globalization text: Scholte, 2000), towards 'methodological nationalism'. As Michael Mann (1993: 9) noted, throughout the modern period, 'the nation-state and a broader transnational Western civilization competed as basic membership units. Sociology's master-concept, "society", kept metamorphosing between the two.' There has been a chronic uncertainty about the meaning of society: sociology uses both general concepts like 'industrial' and 'capitalist' and a variety of overlapping national terms like 'British' and 'Welsh'. Global change increases the demand to resolve these sorts of inconsistencies, which involve rather more than nomenclature.

The aim of reconstructing sociology in global terms, and introducing it to students in this way, is therefore an important one. Global Sociology is therefore for me the most interesting and in some ways the most satisfying of these books. It presents society, globalization and sociology itself as historical products. In this way it anchors global social theory and knowledge in their historic foundations, dealing both with globalism as a new phenomenon and with 'modernity and the evolution of world society' as the framework within which to understand global change. Like McGrew, Cohen and Kennedy give a prominent place to issues concerning the nation-state, and deal much more fully than the other texts with social movements, gender, ecology and identity.

In summary, therefore, I would be happy to teach students reared on Global Sociology rather than some of the pre- or non-global introductory sociology texts that are still available. The aim of placing the discipline as a whole in a global context was an important one in which the authors have largely succeeded. There is a sense in which it is inevitable that textbook writers reflect the existing state of the discipline, and it is more difficult for them to go beyond. Global Sociology, however, is near the cutting edge, and manages well the balance between representation and development of the scope of the field. Its weaknesses are those of the field as a whole, but also less disabling than those of some sociological writing about globalization.

The critique that I develop here is not intended, therefore, as carping, and is presented in the spirit of a challenge to sociologists in general than Cohen and Kennedy in particular. They incorporate, constructively, some basic international relations into the sociological canon. (This compares favourably with the attitude of some sociologists in my own institution, who resist the idea of a joint degree between sociology and international relations!) As a sociologist working in international relations, I have no wish to eulogise my adopted field, which has its own very definite problems. There is a danger, however, that in globalising sociology the limits of any single-disciplinary project are understated. While one should certainly not reify disciplinary boundaries, there is a case for incorporating some critical reflection on their functions and limits, especially when they are brought into question by global theory.

As I suggested above, political aspects should be given even greater prominence in the account of global change. This issue is relevant to the very definition of global. This is posed, as Global Sociology notes, primarily in space-time, interconnection and flow terms, but 'interlaced in the fabric of globalization is the growing commonality of problems facing the nations and peoples of the world.' This is an important insight but it should be extended. What is important is the commonality not just of problems but also of the values through which human beings across the world address them. The relationship between global and universal - and the normative agenda that goes with it - is a key dimension of global change that tends to be understated in this text, as in much sociological analysis. Clearly the idea of universal values is still problematic and contested; but it is there at the heart of the global social understanding.

Values become important, of course, in practical political contexts, and so the issue of global institutions is crucial. Though Global Sociology does address the state forms of the global era at some points - indeed it introduces my own arguments about these issues - I think it underplays the state-level development of global politics. There have been societies without states - but in the late modern world, can there really be a global society without global state formation? We fail to recognise the emergence of global state forms because we are looking for a nation-state writ large; it is this failure that leads to the sterile counter-position of global society and nation-state.

Sociology has still far to go in addressing these profound challenges of global change to its theoretical foundations. Global Sociology fulfils a major role as a textbook of a new kind; the issues posed by a global sociology, or indeed a global social science, will continue to preoccupy us for many years to come. Future texts will n

HELD, D., MCGREW, A., GOLDBLATT, D. and PERRATON, J. 1999 Global Transformations Reader, Cambridge: Polity.

HELD, D., ed. 1999 The Global Transformations Reader, Cambridge: Polity.

MANN, M. 1993 The Sources of Social Power, Volume II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

SCHOLTE, J.-A. 2000 Globalization: A Critical Introduction, London: Macmillan