This article offers a reassessment of the relationship among nationalism, globalization and glocalization. Conventionally, globalization is viewed as a historically recent challenge to the nation. It is argued that globalization, in contrast, is a long-term historical process. The emergence and perseverance of the nation is linked to outcomes of global processes, such as the experience of globality. Two conceptual links among the nation-form, historical globalization and cultural glocalization, are presented to demonstrate the salience of this perspective. First, globalization’s dialectic of (...) homogeneity and heterogeneity influences the nation in a two-fold manner: whereas cultural and institutional isomorphism causes the homogenization of national symbols and institutions, cultural glocalization preserves the specificity of individual national identities. Second, transnational nationalism has played an important role in shaping the nation through the construction of various categories of ‘aliens’ and the subsequent pressure put onto cultural groups to adjust their identities vis-à-vis the nation-state. (shrink)

Since the 1960s, the concepts of the ‘global’ and the ‘transnational’ have challenged the state-centred orientation of several disciplines. By 1989, the ‘global’ contained sufficient ambiguity and conceptual promise to emerge as a potentially new central concept to replace the conventional notion of modernity. The consequences of the 1989 revolutions for this emerging concept were extensive. As a result of the post-communist ‘New World Order’, a new vision of a single triumphant political and economic system was put forward. With the (...) ‘globalizing of modernity’ as a description of the post-1989 reality, ‘globalization’ became the policy mantra of the Clinton and Blair administrations up until the late 1990s when ‘anti-globalization’ activists were able to question the salience of this dominant theory of ‘globalization’. In scholarly discussion, ‘globalization’ became a floating signifier to be filled with a variety of disciplinary and political meanings. In the post-9/11 era, this Western-centred ‘globalization’ has been conceptually linked to cosmopolitanism while it has played a minor role in the multiple modernities agenda. The article concludes with an assessment of the current status of the ‘global’ in theory and research. (shrink)

A perennial concern among scholars of globalization is the relationship between global social formations and national and subnational political and economic developments. While sociological understanding of “the global” has become increasingly rich, stressing the complex relationship between material and cultural pressures, an undertheorized nation state often sits on the receiving end of the sociologist’s model of globalization. The goal of this article is to help move the sociology of globalization out of the analytical trap of global-national dualism by developing an (...) account of the transnationalization of political authority. Building on neo-Marxist and Weberian theories of the transnational, or global state, which explicate the macro-structural dynamics that have led to the transnationalization of the state as such, I look at the process of the transnationalization of political authority from an institutional perspective, one that focuses on processes of transnationalization within, and across, specific state agencies. These theoretical points are empirically motivated through an historical investigation of the transnationalization of monetary authority and its relationship to the international diffusion of policies of austerity from the era of the classical gold standard through the economic crisis of 2008. (shrink)

Many scholars study the global diffusion of culture, looking at how institutions spread culture around the world or at how intermediaries adapt foreign culture in the local context. This research can tell us much about brokers’ “cultural-matching” or “congruence-building” strategies. To date, however, few scholars have examined brokers’ interpretive work. In this article, the author argues that globalization research needs to pay more attention to interpretation. Building on translation studies, the author shows that brokers’ work is shaped by how they (...) imagine their dual roles, how they imagine different parts of the world, how they interpret a text’s intertextuality, and how their audience imagines the foreign Other. In this way, the author lays the groundwork for a hermeneutic model of cultural globalization. (shrink)

Marxism was central to the understanding of South Africa’s struggle for freedom. This article provides a critical analysis of Marxist literature on South Africa since the 1970s, drawing out its relevance for contemporary analyses of the post-apartheid state and for radical politics today. It suggests that while the literature offered important insights into the character of the apartheid state, it failed to provide a critical appraisal of the state per se. Moreover, the capturing of state power by the liberation movement (...) was not grounded in an understanding of the oppressive character of the state-form. The undermining of mainstream Marxism under neo-liberalizing conditions in post-apartheid South Africa has opened up the prospects for anti-statist radical libertarian thinking (including autonomist Marxism), and this thinking is consistent with the practices of certain autonomist popular politics currently emerging. Social theorizing on South Africa has had a complex relationship with Marxism. This article is interested in drawing on this experience in an effort to understand its implications for the ‘new’ South Africa where, 20 years after apartheid’s formal ending, social transformation remains caught in the logic not of Marxism but neo-liberalizing capitalism. (shrink)