Conceptualizing Globalization
in Globalization East and West by Bryan S. Turner and Habibul Haque Khondker
Is globalization simply a euphemism for concepts such as Americanization or Westernization? Can there be “Asian globalization”? What about the plausibility of “alter-globalization”, a term that was popularized in the World Social Forum? In discussing concepts in social science, it is obviously important to ask whether the concepts at hand add anything new or valuable to the understanding of social reality. Social scientists have used various concepts – such as modernization, modernity, late modernity, post-modernity, development, post-development, imperialism – to describe a range of related social transformations. Does globalization as such add value to our conceptual repertoire? This chapter argues that, although these diverse intersecting concepts provide varied frameworks to analyze the processes of social change, globalization provides a more inclusive and comprehensive intellectual framework than any of these alternative concepts. Globalization, for us, is a historical process or a set of intertwined processes with certain structural properties. At one level it is a macro-historical process, a process of processes; at another level, namely, the micro-level, it deeply affects human beings directly, including their consciousness and everyday life.
