Chapter 10. Global Society
10.3. Contemporary Global Society
Global society is a new and distinct form of social life. Over the tens of thousands of years of human existence, the world has never been as integrated. From the point of view of interpretive sociology, globalization signifies a qualitative shift in the nature of the lived experience of everyone on the planet. In particular, it has strong implications for the way in which people understand themselves, conceptualize the problems they face and define their place in the world.
Anthony Giddens (1990, 1991) and others have referred to this new form of life as late modernity. He identifies four key developments that characterize this new period of human existence.
De-Traditionalization
One aspect of the world as a global village that Marshall McLuhan described at the beginning of the chapter is the way it both resembles and no longer resembles the village life of humans that existed for millennia. It resembles that village life because, through the transformation of media and transportation, the world has shrunk. People around the world are in many respects closer, more aware of, and more involved in each other’s lives. They are also exposed to each other’s traditions. But it also no longer resembles that age-old village because, through the same transformations, as well as the formation of a global economy, people lives have become increasingly disembedded from the particularities of local traditions and local cycles of nature.
Giddens describes two concepts involved in this aspect of globalization. De-traditionalization is the process whereby day-to-day life is increasingly less informed by traditions or the ways of life passed down in local cultural and ecological contexts. “For someone following a traditional practice, questions don’t have to be asked about alternatives. Tradition provides a framework for action that can go largely unquestioned” (Giddens, 2002).
Disembedding is the process in which day to day life is no longer embedded in local, micro-level interactions in any simple way but becomes coordinated on a global basis. One has to get up at 3AM for a video meeting with business colleagues in New York or Tokyo, or (back in the day) train their hair stylist to give them a Beatle’s or Twiggy haircut. Giddens describes it as a process that “lifts out social relations from local contexts of interaction” and restructures them “across indefinite spans of time and space” (Giddens, 1991).
What replaces tradition and locality? The hold of tradition — the customary patterns of life, beliefs, rituals of places — and the restraints of local time and space are diminished to the degree that societies are organized extra-locally and globally through expert systems (Giddens, 1990). Expert systems refer to advanced systems of knowledge and practice in science, technology, computerization, communications, law, medicine, and finance, etc., that are required to run the complex institutional arrange