Chapter 6 - Glocal Palimpsests

Summary

Description → Analysis (→ Criticism)

Core parts of this book are about how we may arrive at valid, sociological claims to knowing and understanding our present moment that is widely experienced as novel and qualitatively different from what preceded it. Skeptics may argue that assumptions about the uniqueness of one's times are nothing new, perhaps a historical constant in its own right, perhaps a sign of a recurring historical myopia. After all, have people not always considered their own epoch to be particular, and often particularly challenging? Leaving this question for historians to ponder, there are—as we have seen— compelling reasons to assume that there are indeed structural and cultural particularities that warrant depictions of the “here and now” as distinctive. The concept of glocalization provides, arguably, the most apt term for capturing the particularities in question.

In epistemological and methodological terms, previous chapters have gone some way toward developing central arguments offered in this book: namely that the flows, interconnectedness, interdependencies and counterreactions that define our age of glocalization demand novel or refined ways of generating data; this is particularly so for the tradition of empirical, qualitative sociology that Max Weber (1972 [1922]) famously defined through its focus on understanding (or more evocatively captured by the German term “verstehende Soziologie”). Previous chapters have conveyed some of the methodological richness of sociology's qualitative toolkit today. Admittedly, relatively few contributions to the discipline have met Weberian standards for illuminating the interplay of meanings, social action, and resulting social relationships and institutions. Yet, we have seen that there is no shortage of methodologically innovative work able to help sharpen social scientists’ senses for the many ways in which “the global” and “the local” intersect. In this chapter, I push the argument a step further: I again commence with empirical questions about where (else) to go looking for some of the manifestations of glocalization. Following the structure of previous chapters, the argument will then turn a more distinctly analytical corner to ask how some of the resulting observations may be read and interpreted. This also helps prepare the ground for the subsequent chapter, in which I will argue that updated ways of perceiving, recording and making sense of our lived realities sociologically must be accompanied not only by relevant analytical frames but also by a willingness to engage with the social world critically. I begin this chapter, once again, in a very specific locality.