ABSTRACT
19The idea that Australians now live in a period of accelerated change, leading to an experience Alvin Toffler (1974) called ‘future shock’, has become commonplace. In this context, there is also a lot of talk about how we are entering into new kinds of relationships with the rest of the world. To describe this process—which includes new technologies, the expansion of communication media and economic policies like free trade—many people have started using the word ‘globalisation’. Whether ‘globalisation’ is a useful concept or a mischievous metaphor is one question to which we will return at the end of the book.
To place the discussion of globalisation into a larger context, we explore the idea that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, societies like Britain, Germany, France and later the United States began transforming themselves. They shifted from being societies and economies based on ‘pre-modern’ religion, peasant-farming economies, small-scale communities and traditional cultures to what is referred to variously as ‘capitalist’, ‘industrialist’ or simply ‘modern’ societies. We draw on Polanyi’s (1973) model of the ‘Great Transformation’ to represent some of the key economic, political, demographic and intellectual changes that occurred.
It was in the context of the ‘Great Transformation’ that some people began speculating about why the process of change was happening and how it was happening. One result of that speculation was sociology.
