Toward A Global Sociology?: Evaluating Current Conceptions, Methods, and Practices

Abstract

This essay examines the response of U.S. sociologists to the growing call for a global sociology that can address both transnational social phenomena and international scholarly exchanges. We argue that existing research conceptions and agendas-rooted as they are in the comparative method, nationalist practices and units, and models of European-U.S development-are ill-suited for grasping transnational phenomena and building a worldwide community of sociologists. This argument is advanced by examining leading U S . scholars' on state formation and development, and then by proposing new orientations for future research.Over the course of the last decade the term "globalization" has appeared with increasing frequency in both popular and academic writing. Among scholars and especially sociologists, the term is now widely used to refer to social and cultural phenomena that flow across territorial boundaries, often dissolving state boundaries in their wake. Thus, Anthony Giddens (1990, p. 64) defines globalization as "the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa." Roland Robertson (1992, p. 8), who has labored longest in this field, stresses by contrast the awareness of a global village by defining globalization as "the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole" (emphasis added). In a more recent survey of the globalization literature, Malcolm Waters (1995, p. 3) combines these two aspects: "a social process in which the constraints of geography on social and cultural arrangements recede and in which people become increasingly aware that they are receding."As these definitions suggest, much of the focus of the globalization literature has been on the cultural characteristics of the late twentieth century. Indeed, despite the firm material roots provided by accelerating flows of transnational capital and technology, work on globalization has been especially prominent in the area of cultural studies-as in the study of religion (e.g., Beyer 1994; Robertson and Garrett 1991) or consciousness and identity *Direct all correspondence to William G.

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