Political critiques and social theories of the global : a critical overview

After three decades of writing on globalization, we have made some extraordinary gains in understanding. The historically changing and uneven nature of globalization is now generally understood, at least in principle. Much of the hyperbole has tended to drop away in scholarly writings and the normative assessment of globalization has become more sober and qualified. Most analytic approaches have tended to move away from essentializing the phenomenon as necessarily good or bad. Similarly, at least in the scholarly arena, there has been a significant move beyond the reductive tendency to treat globalization only in terms of economic domain. On the other side of the ledger, our central weakness of understanding goes back to the central paradox of globalization studies" the emergence of an aversion to generalizing theory at a time when the importance of a generalizing category of relations came to the fore. Globalization may simply be the name given to a matrix of processes that extend social relations across world-space, but the way in which people live those relations is incredibly complex, changing and difficult to explain. Thus, we remain in search of generalizing methodologies (not a singular grand theory) that can sensitize us to those empirical complexities while enabling us to abstract patterns of change and continuity. Our central question remains only partly answered. How is theory to be rethought in such a way as to handle issues of structure and change; continuity and discontinuity and dominance, emergence, opposition and contradiction?