ABSTRACT
Conclusions are best when they are short and sharp rather than protracted and prolonged.What is less clear is whether the complexity and multi-dimensionality of globalization that emerges from the contributions to this study can be reduced to a simple set of propositions.Globalization, has become a convenient umbrella concept for a range of very disparate and sometimes conflicting processes and institutions from multi-national corporations to new information technology, cosmopolitanism and human rights. There are in other words multiple globalizations rather than a single unitary form of globalization (Holton 2011). This suggests grand theories of globalization might better be replaced with a more fine-grained and dis-aggregated analysis of global threads, their origins, inter-sections and consequences (Walby 2009). In the first edition of this volume, the key issue was whether globalization would corrode
culture and community on the one hand or whether it would sustain and enlarge democracy on the other. Can we draw an optimistic conclusions that globalization may create conditions for the emergence of both wholly new communities and a cosmopolitan consciousness? Will globalization destroy the underlying foundations of solidarity and conviviality that make life tolerable if not enjoyable?Will globalization foster and expand the opportunities for friendship, sociability and intimacy? In this second edition, there is a stronger emphasis on the political economic element.
Written in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008-12 (Holton 2012), banking collapse and fiscal crises around austerity, a broader set of familiar questions is back on the agenda. Many of these may usefully be seen in terms of Schumpeter’s view of capitalism as creative destruction. The economic dynamic of global capitalism, associated now with China and the other BRIC economies, is only matched by its capacity to destroy value (Haldane, Brennan and Madouras 2010), radically increase global inequality (Piketty 2014) and raise concerns that inequality and financial insecurity threaten social stability and capitalist modernity. Such concerns are now voiced at the heart of the system in the Davos World Economic Forum, not just among anti-globalization activists. Even if neo-liberalism has positive as well as negative aspects, and is only one source of inequality among many, there are fundamental issues in social science that we have addressed more directly in this volume.
