ABSTRACT
In the last decades, sociologists put tremendous effort into demonstrating and explaining the ever increasing global interconnectedness. In this context, ‘globalisation’ became a key word as well as a key sociological concept of the late twentieth century, referring to ‘the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’ (Giddens 1990, 64). According to this reading, everyone is exposed to this process, be it voluntarily or not. The same applies to individual mobility: ‘All of us are, willy-nilly, by design or by default, on the move. We are on the move even if, physically, we stay put: immobility is not a realistic option in a world of permanent change’ (Bauman 1998, 2). However, theoretical concepts that do not distinguish between an active way of globalisation (that is, for example, cross-border interaction and mobility) and a passive one, which just means to experience global interconnectedness, do blur the question of who the ‘agents’ of globalisation really are. Due to the dominance of research focused on macrostructural change, the role of microsociological actors within the processes of denationalisation both remains untheorised and empirically unexplored to a high degree (but see de Swaan 1995; Hannerz 1996; Nowicka 2006).
