Roland Robertson

Submitted by wdcoleman on Sun, 03/18/2012 - 11:44

Another prominent scholar like Rosenau, my previous posting, from the 1980s and 1990s, is Roland Robertson. Whereas Rosenaus contribution came from his innovative thinking about global governance and international relations, Robertson focussed more on globalization and culture. He trained in sociology and served as a professor in this field at the universities of Leeds and Essex in the United Kingdom and the University of Pittsburgh in the United States of America. Since 1999, he has held a Chair in Sociology and Global Society at the University of Aberdeen in the UK. Already in the late 1960s, Robertson had begun to look at international relations and world-wide phenom ena. As his research developed, he came to work most extensively on the sociology of religion. In this research, however, he did not focus on the usual sociological topic in the field, secularization, but on how religion had become a mode for ordering societies and the relations between them. As his thinking matured on this research, he concluded that the processes shaping these relations as well as individuals and nation-states themselves were uniquely global. With this conclusion, he introduced the concept of globalization into his work.

Accordingly Robertson was perhaps the first sociologist to work with and think systematically about the concept of globalization in the contemporary period. He began to develop his understanding of the concept already in the early 1980s, and published one of the first full books in the field in 1992, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. This book compiled many of his essays on the topic from the 1980s and early 1990s, while adding new essays to introduce and conclude the book. Defining Globalization For Robertson, globalization refers to processes whereby the world is moving toward "unicity" or "global unicity", the growing "oneness" of the world as a single, socio-cultural place. In moving toward unicity, the significance of territorial boundaries declines, a profound change because territoriality had been a basic strategy of geographic control for much of human history. The movement toward unicity refers to two features of the human condition for Robertson, rising connectivity across the world and "global consciousness". He adds that the analysis of globalization has often focused on rapid growth of transworld connections but paid less attention to the increasingly common phenomenon of people seeing the world as one place. But global unicity does not mean that the world is moving toward a single culture. To the contrary, Robertson stresses that consciousness of differences among people are, if anything, sharpened with the intensification of globalization. Robertson specifies a model termed the "global field" for conceptualizing the history and contemporary character of globalization. This field contains four components: national societies or nation-states (he uses both terms here), individual selves, a world system of societies (international relations), a notion of a common humanity or of humankind. In effect, these components are autonomous processes that have been going on for a long time, at least 500 years. Thus national societies/nation states refers to the processes

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leading to the emergence and global spread of the nation-state form of rule and the idea that societies constituted by this form of rule will develop a cohesive collective identity. Individual selves refers to processes where a sense of individuality or personal autonomy emerges, allowing persons (men at the start) to be self-deciders not necessarily controlled by religious, community, or other collective organizations. Over the same period, as national societies governed by nation-states becomes a dominant form, relations between these societies (inter-national), the third component, become more institutionalized and more important. Finally, he identifies processes leading to a sense of a common humanity: all persons in all societies have some important properties and "rights" that they share. Thus, consciousness of humankind is exemplified in one way by the emergence of notions of "human" rights, rights that all human beings have whatever their national origin, their gender, their physical characteristics, their religion and so on. Robertson frames his understanding of the history of globalization in terms of the relationships between these four component processes. He describes them as "autonomous" from one another. At the same time, he argues that over time, these components evolve to be more differentiated from one another, while becoming increasingly interdependent. And as this differentiation and interdependence intensifies, the components themselves change. National societies become more ethnically and cultural diverse, international relations become more encompassing of all parts of the world, individuals assume different and multiple, and understandings of humankind become the focus of debates around gender, sexual orientation, indigeneity, health and wellness and so on. Robertson uses the concept of "relativization" to stress the autonomy and reciprocity of these four fields. For example, one defines one's self relative to one's national society, relations going on between societies and to humankind. All are relevant for the identities one assumes and acts upon. Accordingly, for Robertson, globalization is not something entirely new or specifically contemporary. The four components and their growing interdependence provide a focus for historical research. And in carrying out that research, he suggests focusing not only on the increasing connectedness of the world, but also on the scope and depth of consciousness of the world as one place among individuals and communities. The Global and the Local Robertson became very well known by this thinking about the relationships between the global and the local. He resists strongly any argument that globalization is a homogenizing force, one that will lead to a single world culture, probably from a dominant West, or to sameness or isomorphism in social institutions from one society to another, and from one local place to another. He counters by positing that contemporary globalization involves the institutionalization of a twofold process of the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism Thus the experience, indeed the expectation, of particularity of distinctness and differences where one lives -- is increasingly the situation everywhere; it is universal. At the same time, when there are universal ideas equality

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between the sexes, monotheism, free trade, human rights, "natural" resources they are lived out and refashioned (particularlized) wherever in the world they land. Accordingly, for Robertson seeing the global and the local as somehow distinct from, or opposed to, one another does not do justice to the dynamic effects of becoming more similar and more different at the same time. To emphasize this point, Robertson introduced into the English language globalization literature the concept of "glocalization". By choosing to use this term inspired by a cognate phrase in Japanese, Robertson challenges views that argue that the "local" is the site where resistance to globalizing trends occurs, or where subaltern peoples are pitted against hegemonic societies. In contrast, "glocalization" suggests that what happens locally and globally are mutually constitutive; by invoking the "local", one is already thinking of the local as being shaped by the global and the potential for the local to change the global. For example, if a local community in France mounts stout resistance to the opening of a Walmart store in its midst, it sees that very community as being shaped by the global. And in resisting and fighting off that Walmart store and perhaps connecting with other communities in other parts of France or the world doing the same thing, these community members also challenge a global institution and articulate an alternative view of globality. Robertson looks at the rise of fundamentalisms through these same lenses. Let us take the rise of Hindu fundamentalism as an example. On the one side, it shares similar properties with other fundamentalisms in the world value-oriented, while seeking the reorganization of all spheres of life in terms of these particular absolute values. On the other side, it focuses on differentiating itself sharply from religions such as Islam, Christianity, Sikhism or Buddhism. Followers stress strongly the culturally distinct elements of being Hindu particularly in opposition to being Muslim. But in doing so, they change Hinduism itself by identifying core divinely inspired texts as guides, a universal characteristic of fundamentalisms elsewhere. Religious leaders employ contemporary communication media to articulate a vision of Hinduism independent of place, thus a universal ambition. Fundamentalisms reflect once again the particularization of universals about what a religion entails and on the other the universalization of one notion of Hinduism that speaks to potential Hindus anywhere in the world. In conclusion, Robertson sees his four components of the global field as processes long in development with origins preceding the onset of modernity. He leaves room for the history of globalization to extend back perhaps even a millennium. He distinguished himself at the time be focusing on globalization and culture. The tensions Robertson sees in contemporary globalization heterogeneity versus homogeneity, universalism versus particularism are profoundly cultural in nature. Moreover, Robertson puts considerable emphasis on the global spread of consciousness of the world being one place, a process he terms unicity. So a globalizing world for Robertson is one of considerable social and cultural tensions. Many of these tensions are expressed through cultural activities: religious differences, varying understandings of masculinity and femininity, dietary practices, conceptions of the family, or speaking different languages.

Major Globalization Writings (with F. Lechner) 'Modernization, Globalization and the Problem of Culture in WorldSystems Theory', Theory, Culture & Society, 2 (3) (1985) : 103-118. (with J. Chirico ) 'Humanity, Globalization and Worldwide Religious Resurgence: A Theoretical Exploration', Sociological Analysis, 46 (3) (1985) : 219-242. Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as the Central Concept', Theory, Culture & Society, 7 (2-3) (1990) : 15-30. (with W. R. Garrett eds ) Religion and Global Order (New York : Paragon House, 1991). Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London : Sage, 1992). (with M. Featherstone, S. Lash eds) Global Modernities (London : Sage, 1995). (with Kathleen White) 'Globalization: Sociology and Cross-disciplinarity' in The Sage Handbook of Sociology, eds Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek and Bryan Turner. (London: Sage Publications, 2004.)

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