ABSTRACT
The chief goal of this volume is to shift the focus of scholarship from globalization in the narrow sense of increased interconnectivity and from conceptualizing global processes along single dimensions such as the political or the economic to understanding global dynamics of the world as a whole, as a society. This is an important enterprise; at least it is one about which sociological neo-institutionalists (world culture theorists) and modern systems theorists agree. The empirical patterns of greater and denser interconnections and quickness of flows across the globe take place in a context, and humans have a consciousness of all of this, a consciousness of the world as one place (Robertson 1992). It therefore is important to conceptualize the world as a whole, although to conceptualize a world culture and world society is of course controversial. One reasonable concern is that we do not want to take the reified concept of society formulated by the classical social theorists—a concept that for decades now has been understood to be a reification of the modern nation-state—and apply it to the world, repeating earlier errors on a global scale. (See the forum in International Political Sociology [Huysmans 2009].) Yet, the scholars who most press the importance of conceptualizing world society, those working in modern systems theory and sociological neo-institutionalism (world culture theory), are the most critical of assuming that society is a coherent, integrated, tightly bounded organism. Indeed, understanding the world as a whole is a key basis for critiquing such inadequate assumptions about national societies and states.
