G L O B A L I Z AT I O N S A R E P L U R A L

Introduction
From the Universal to the Global Gran Therborn, Guest Editor
Globalization is the most immediate legacy to the new century of the social sciences of the outgoing 20th century. Basically it is a concern of the second half of the l990s, although there were signicant sociological contributions in the rst half, such as Ianni (l992) and Robertson (l992). In the major dictionaries of English, French, Spanish and German of the l980s or the rst half of the l990s the word is not listed. In Arabic at least four different words render the notion. Whereas in Japanese business the word goes back to the l980s, it entered academic Chinese only in the mid1990s. The Social Science Citation Index records only a few occurrences of globalization in the l980s but shows its soaring popularity from l992 onwards, which accelerated in the last years of the past century. In comparison with the preoccupations of the social sciences 100 years earlier, the current overriding interest in globalization means two things. First of all, a substitution of the global for the universal; second, a substitution of space for time. Classical sociology and anthropology and the new marginalist economics focused on social universals be they social groups and relations, marriage, religion, rational capitalism or bureaucracy their origin, their elementary forms, their evolution and contemporary meaning. While the recent attention to globalization follows most directly upon a (largely post-Depression and post-Second World War) nationalization of the social sciences, it may be more illuminating to highlight the differences between the universal and the global. To think in terms of globalization means to contextualize the social, spatially. This implies at least three crucial differences with classical universalism, variability, connectivity and intercommunication. A global perspective involves to a widely varying extent an openness to and a concern with global variation as not just different steps on a ladder of universal evolution. Variability, in turn, makes questions of connections and linkages across the globe pertinent and important. Finally, serious empirical interests in global variations and connections
International Sociology June 2000 Vol 15(2): 149150 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) [0268-5809(200006)15:2;149150;012871]

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International Sociology Vol. 15 No. 2 have to rely on inter-communicating with the various parts of the world and their different perspectives. Classical sociology was concentrated on temporal contrasts between the modern and the pre-modern, between science and theology, the organic and the mechanical (Durkheim), the mechanical and the organic (Tnnies), the rational and the traditional, contract and status, and so on. Whereas postmodernism challenged the time conception of modernity, globalization is oriented toward spatial extension. In a sense, globalization may be interpreted as modernitys ight into space. To be useful for research and for world understanding, globalizations have to be seen as plural. That is, as involving different kinds of social processes, affecting social relations and institutions in different ways and as processes that take different shapes and meanings in different parts of the world. There are already several different kinds of globalization discourses, but each tends to be more or less exclusively self-centered. This issue of International Sociology is concerned with the implications of globalizations as plural, historical social processes both for the practice of social science and for the understanding of world issues. It has grown out of a multidisciplinary committee on global processes that was set up by the FRN (the Swedish Council for the Planning and Coordination of Research) and a thematic research program on Globalizations and Comparative Modernities at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (SCASSS). The bulk of these articles were presented as papers at conferences that were organized by FRN in cooperation with SCASSS. A key conference in Stockholm in October 1998 was sponsored by the Swedish Foreign Ministry. The doubled length of this International Sociology issue was made possible by a subsidy from the FRN. In the process of production one of our contributors passed away: Paul Bairoch, one of the worlds greatest economic historians. We remember him both as a magnicent scholar and as the nicest of men. Some planned and promised articles did not materialize, but I do hope that this issue can convey to global sociology the rich plurality of globalizations which are socially threatening as well as socially promising and intellectually challenging in both directions.

References
Ianni, O. (l992) A Sociedade Global. Rio de Janeiro: Civilizao Brasileira. Robertson, R. (l992) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage.

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