ABSTRACT
Globalisation is now well established as a central theme in the social analysis of the economy. Over recent decades this broad concept has come to represent a general condition of economic life, as well as the key tendency driving diverse economic processes. It carries with it a certain sense of novelty, suggesting that current economic arrangements are distinctive in their form and unprecedented in their extent. A critical question therefore arises as to how far existing frameworks of socioeconomic analysis can account for the features and effects of globalisation. In particular, how does economic globalisation sit with sociology’s long-standing concern with capitalism as a social and economic system? In a contemporary context, the study of capitalism has been somewhat subsumed within larger debates over globalisation. While the big idea of globalisation extends beyond economic relations to describe a range of political, cultural, military and technological factors (see Beck 2000a; Giddens 1990: 71; Held and McGrew 2003), my focus here is on economic globalisation – specifically in terms of its continuities with earlier capitalist arrangements. Can processes of globalisation be understood as the expression of a long-term capitalist logic? To what extent do global economic forms remain vulnerable to a critique of capital?
