Göran Therborn

Globalizations Dimensions, Historical Waves, Regional Effects, Normative Governance

Globalization is a plural phenomenon. There are at least five major discourses on it that usually ignore each other: competitive economics, social criticism, state (im)potence, culture and planetary ecology. The dimensions of globalization include a number of substantial social processes as well as two different kinds of dynamics: systemic and interacting exogenous actors. Globalizations are not new phenomena. At least six historical waves, beginning with the spread of world religions, may be identified. An attempt is made to systematize the effects of globalizations on different world regions and social actors. Issues of governance are raised, focusing on states and norms.Globalization is a plural phenomenon. There are at least five major discourses on it that usually ignore each other: competitive economics, social criticism, state (im)potence, culture and planetar...

Monumental Europe: The National Years. On the Iconography of European Capital Cities

This is a study of the historical processes and the symbolic forms which made Berlin, Brussels, London, Madrid, Paris, Rome, St. Petersburg/Moscow, and Vienna, into national capital cities. The preceding historical background are ecclesiastical sees, trading centres, and dynastic residence cities. Paris of the French Revolution meant the launching of a capital of the nation, a process then gathering momentum in the 19th century, taking different expressions due to different national politics. Public buildings, the layout of public space, the character of monuments, and urban nomenclature are foci of analysis.

Migration and Western Europe: The Old World Turning New

The 1960s meant a historical turn of Western Europe, becoming an immigration area. Net immigration has been concentrated to some of the prosperous Western European countries and has been mainly determined by the demand of their particular national labor regimes. The size of alien employment has been very differently affected by the 1973 crisis, but a multiethnical society will remain a novel feature of most Western European countries. Political abdication from full employment and technological change makes a ghetto of un(der)employment a likely prospect of a large part of the second generation of recent immigrants into Western Europe.

Convergence or divergence? : comparing recent social trends in industrial societies

Trends in fertility decline, intergenerational relations, religion and secularization, ecological movements, employment and labour-market changes, personal authority, and social conflict are examined. This analysis shows an unmistakable convergence of social trends except in the domain of religion. But when the interconnection of these trends within each national society is examined, unexpected divergences are revealed. There are parallel trends in demography, organization of production, national institutions, social practices, and life style, and divergent trends in social inequality, social movements, and local institutions. Barriers between social classes have eroded and something that might be called multidimensional stratification has emerged, the diminution of violence in social conflicts implies an increasing volume of negotiation, and all forms of personal authority have been weakened. The transformation of the family structure is no doubt one of the most important changes in western civilization. The cross-national analyses of recent social trends help us to assess both convergence and divergence and to identify emergent singularities. Does convergence of trends mean these societies face a common destiny? With respect to trends so strong that they act as exogenous variables, the answer is yes. However, with respect to the responses those trends elicit in the context of a particular society, the answer is no. Massive convergence of trends does not mean that societies face a uniform future.

Class Perspectives: Shrink or Widen?:

Portes, A. 2000. The Resilient Importance of Class: A Nominalist Interpretation. Political Power and Social Theory, 14, 249-284. Rokkan, S. 1966. Norway: Numerical Democracy and Corporate Pluralism. In R. A. Dahl (ed.), Political Oppositions in Western Democracies. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sklair, L. 2001. The Transnational Capitalist Class. Oxford: Blackwell. Treiman, D. J. & Ganzeboom, H. B. G. 2000. The Fourth Generation of Comparative Stratification Research. In S. R. Quah & A. Sales (eds.), The International Handbook of Sociology London: Sage. Wright, E. 0. 1997. Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Where are the PIGS? Still a Southern European Welfare Regime?

This special issue, guest-edited by Francisco Javier Fuentes-Moreno and Pau Marí-Klose, who have done an excellent job on it, brings into focus social patterns and policies of the Southern Rim of Europe. Is there a special Southern social pattern, comparable to the Nordic, Continental, and Anglo-Saxon ‘welfare regimes’? Or was it a transitory phenomenon, a conceptual stopgap of the mid 1990s to cope with lacunae of the original Trinitarian world of welfare capitalism? This question has got a new political and socio-economic relevance with the current debt and finance crisis of these countries, which economic journalism has grouped together under the acronym of PIGS.

Globalização e desigualdade: questões de conceituação e esclarecimento

This paper refers to three sets of fundamental issues which are still controversial and unsettled among social scientists. Two are basically conceptual or theoretical, one is both conceptual and empirical. First, what is globalization? How should it be conceptualized? Second, what kinds of inequality can be distinguished, and what are the most pertinent? Third, what kinds of processes produce the global outcomes of inequality that we are observing and experiencing? None of the three questions above has, and can be expected to get one straight answer. The aims of this paper are to conribute to a clarification of alternatives and their implications, to argue a certain conceptual-analytical viewpoint, and to provide some empirical arguments for a multi-faceted approach to the production of inequality in the world. Globalization and inequality are two crossroads of the social sciences and of social philosophy. This writer is reaching them from a background as a sociologist and as a political scientist.

The World's Trader, the World's Lawyer Europe and Global Processes

Europes position in the world is analyzed in relation to a specification of globalization into five global processes, whereby Europe stands out as the central node of global flows of trade and capital and as the region of uniquely high transnational entanglements, as an area of transnational normativity. The historical background and inter-relation of foreign trade and trans-polity law within Europe, both in early modern social theory and in post-Second World War institution-building, are highlighted, as well as the spread of European law to other continents. The concepts of position, role, and identity should be distinguished. This historical and current position of Europe in the world is little expressed in the roles that contemporary European leaders want to play and in contemporary formulations of European heritage and identity. This is due partly to a nostalgic misjudgment by former great power politicians, but largely because of the delimited position of conventional trade and law in Europe, and of the actual but untheorized transformation of trading traditions into socially embedded trade and of the legal tradition into democratic international normativity. It is finally argued that these European practices of trade and law in fact correspond to many current critical views on global trade and global governance.

Cities and power

In one, secondary, sense, this special issue on cities of power is related to an ongoing project of mine on cities of power. As far as I understand, it was the reason why professor In Kwon Park and...

Generations and trust

Both themes of this issue are topical products of the last two decades. As such they may be read as intellectual symptoms of social change. The interest in trust is part of a political and cultural success of liberalism and individualism since about l980. But in contrast to its hardnosed sisters economic neoliberalism and rational choice, trust refers to a concern with others, not with their eventual plight but how they will act and react, and with how some common good might be achieved. Once individuals are substituted on the centre-stage for collective forces and institutional structures, social cooperation becomes inherently problematic. Trust is one way of addressing that problem. It has become a central concept of political science, as an important take on liberal democracy, going back at least to the l960s classic by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (1963) but boosted recently by the reception of the work of Robert Putnam (1993, 2000). While the main domicile of the concept of trust is political science and political sociology, it is also deployed in game theory and economic transaction analysis, and Piotr Sztompka (1999) has put it into the mainstream of sociological theory. Generations have come to the forefront because of demographic change, the ageing of European and other developed societies. Old age is no longer an individual status of a few, but a large aggregate of many, which is being seen either as a social burden or as a significant social force, or, at the very least, as a non-negligible component of contemporary society. Intergenerational relations have become a major focus, of public political discourse as well as sociological investigation. An important theme, as in this issue, is intergenerational exchanges and their possible asymmetries and conflicts. The classical sociological conceptualization of generation had a very different background and perspective than the current one. While there are very good reasons for the new approach, the classical one has hardly become obsolete or irrelevant. The classical sociological theorist of generation was Karl Mannheim (1952): Mannheim, actually writing in the interwar period, was primarily interested in ‘the dynamic of historical development’ and looked at generations and generational consciousness from a class analogy. Generations were defined by a common, historically