Cluster IV: On Globalization in a Post-globalization Era

With the publication of the 2016 monograph on glocalization, an important task emerged concerning the completion of overall framework. This task is pursued in my article "Recovering the Local: From Glocalization to Localization", Current Sociology (2019). Real-life events have been instrumental in shaping this new theoretical direction. The emergence of national populism across the globe & the recurrent theme of "de-globalization" have provided the impetus to focus more closely on these developments. A first attempt to explore the failures of dominant social-scientific perspectives to understand 21^st century populism was pursued in "Globalization, Cosmopolitanism and 21^st century populism", Proto-Sociology (2020) 37: 165-86. This topic is more fully addressed in a chapter for the edited volume A Modern Guide to Globalization (forthcoming).

During the post-Great Recession era proclamation that "globalization is over" has been a popular intellectual mantra. Trying to address this new debate over the presumed "end of globalization" has been the subject of the article "How should we think about globalization in a post-globalization era?", which was penned for the inaugural issue of the Journal Dialogues in Sociology (2024). This article and the subsequent debate that is featured in the journal's pages concern precisely the intellectual challenge of reconciling the broader problematic with the current historical conjuncture.

Some additional efforts towards a new perspective capable of addressing both intellectual critiques and real-world developments were made in my article "The New Conceptual Vocabulary of the Social Sciences: The Globalization Debates in Context", Globalizations, (2021) 18:5, 771-78 & two chapters prepared for Political Sociologies of the Cultural Encounter (London: Routledge, 2020) & The Craft of the Social Scientist in the Global Arena (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

These efforts are related to the necessity to critically engage with the notion of "global sociology" and related post-colonial (or anti-colonial) perspectives that have gained in popularity in 21^st century academic scholarship. To effectively address these matters has been the subject of the French-language article "Malaise dans la Sociologie Globale" (2020), originally published in Diogenes (271/272) & several years later, translated and published in the English language version of the journal under the title "Global Sociology and its Discontents", Diogenes (2024) 65 (2): 235-250. The original argument was further expanded and eventually published in open access format under the title "In Search of Global Sociology: A Critical Overview of Competing Research Agendas", Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11, 889 (2024).

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