Victor Roudometof

The cosmopolitan—local continuum in cross-national perspective

This article examines whether the cosmopolitan—local continuum is present among advanced industrialized world regions. Strictly comparable factor analyses show that its nation-based and place-based variants are observable across world regions. Results indicate that, from 1995 to 2003 among the regions analyzed, place-based localism is declining everywhere. This finding suggests that globalization’s effects on personal lives are consequential in terms of decreasing people’s attachments to their traditional locales. From 1995 to 2003 nation-based localism has been increasing in most world regions. This finding suggests that nation-based localism — often under the guise of revamped nationalism — is a reaction to globalization’s effects on personal lives. But unlike the citizens of other advanced industrialized countries, Europeans have been reducing their own attachment to national societies.

Theorizing glocalization Three interpretations1

This article presents three interpretations of glocalization in social-scientific literature as a means of reframing the terms of scholarly engagement with the concept. Although glocalization is relatively under-theorized, two key interpretations of the concept have been developed by Roland Robertson and George Ritzer. Through a critical and comparative overview, the article offers an assessment of the advances and weaknesses of each perspective. Both demonstrate awareness regarding the differences between globalization and glocalization, but this awareness is far from explicit. Both interpretations fail to draw a consistent analytical distinction between the two concepts and ultimately succumb to reductionism: either glocalization is subsumed under globalization or globalization is transformed into glocalization. Next, a third interpretation of glocalization as an analytically autonomous concept is presented. Working definitions of glocalization and of glocality as analytically autonomous from globalization and globality are developed and examples are offered. By addressing the key themes of power and temporality, this third interpretation transcends the limits of the other two interpretations.

The Glocal and Global Studies

Abstract This article offers an overview of engagements with the glocal and traces the consequences of this research agenda for Global Studies. First, it compares the emergence of the global and the glocal in the literature. It tracks the uneven impact of the business use of the glocal and argues that this genealogy has obscured alternative accounts. Second, it offers a thematic overview of the uses of glocalization in the literature. It highlights publication clusters in specific areas of interdisciplinary interest. It further addresses key criticisms against glocalization. Finally, it explores the vicissitudes of research on glocalization on the scope and definition of Global Studies. Trends in Global Studies appear to move in an opposite direction from the one suggested by glocalization. This could lead to the emergence of a separate field of Glocal Studies, causing further fragmentation in the field.

The glocalizations of Eastern Orthodox Christianity

This article introduces the notion of multiple glocalizations as a means of analysing Christianity’s historical record and argues that multiple glocalizations are constitutive of the intertwining between religion and historical globalization. It proposes that four concrete forms of glocalization can be observed: vernacularization, indigenization, nationalization and transnationalization. Each of these offers different combinations of universal religiosity and local particularism. The salience of this interpretation is demonstrated through a cursory analysis of the historical record of Christianity’s fragmentation. It is argued that the very construction of distinct religious traditions (Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism) is an expression of this broader process. Finally, the historical record of Eastern Orthodox Christianity is examined in order to provide for additional historical instances of these forms of glocalization.

Orthodox Christianity as a transnational religion: theoretical, historical and comparative considerations

In this article I analyse Orthodox Christianity as a transnational religion. In the first section I develop a theoretical argument concerning the relationship among diaspora, transnationalism and Orthodoxy. Seen through these lenses, transnationalism represents a newfound situation connected to the epochal shift from empires to nation-states. I then give a historical overview of demographic trends which shows that in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries millions of Orthodox emigrated to North America and Western Europe; while large Orthodox groups were created in the USA by the early twentieth century, the majority of Orthodox immigrants to Canada, Australia and Western Europe are post-1945 arrivals. I then offer a brief overview of the situation of Orthodox transnationalism in the post-Soviet space since 1989, and argue that in contrast to that situation, it is the experience of migration that is most accurately captured by the label of religious transnationalism. Lastly, I conduct an initial comparison of North American and European experiences. The current fragmentation of Orthodox jurisdictions reflects the creation of autonomous church organisations or groups of parishes that extend the jurisdictions of Mother Churches into the host states. I contemplate the consequences of religious transnationalism for future developments.

Nationalism, globalization and glocalization

This article offers a reassessment of the relationship among nationalism, globalization and glocalization. Conventionally, globalization is viewed as a historically recent challenge to the nation. It is argued that globalization, in contrast, is a long-term historical process. The emergence and perseverance of the nation is linked to outcomes of global processes, such as the experience of globality. Two conceptual links among the nation-form, historical globalization and cultural glocalization, are presented to demonstrate the salience of this perspective. First, globalization’s dialectic of homogeneity and heterogeneity influences the nation in a two-fold manner: whereas cultural and institutional isomorphism causes the homogenization of national symbols and institutions, cultural glocalization preserves the specificity of individual national identities. Second, transnational nationalism has played an important role in shaping the nation through the construction of various categories of ‘aliens’ and the subsequent pressure put onto cultural groups to adjust their identities vis-à-vis the nation-state.

Gusts of Change: The Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions for the Study of Globalization

Since the 1960s, the concepts of the ‘global’ and the ‘transnational’ have challenged the state-centred orientation of several disciplines. By 1989, the ‘global’ contained sufficient ambiguity and conceptual promise to emerge as a potentially new central concept to replace the conventional notion of modernity. The consequences of the 1989 revolutions for this emerging concept were extensive. As a result of the post-communist ‘New World Order’, a new vision of a single triumphant political and economic system was put forward. With the ‘globalizing of modernity’ as a description of the post-1989 reality, ‘globalization’ became the policy mantra of the Clinton and Blair administrations up until the late 1990s when ‘anti-globalization’ activists were able to question the salience of this dominant theory of ‘globalization’. In scholarly discussion, ‘globalization’ became a floating signifier to be filled with a variety of disciplinary and political meanings. In the post-9/11 era, this Western-centred ‘globalization’ has been conceptually linked to cosmopolitanism while it has played a minor role in the multiple modernities agenda. The article concludes with an assessment of the current status of the ‘global’ in theory and research.

Special section: Orthodox Christianity in Western Europe

In 2013, Jerry Pankhurst of Wittenberg University and I co-organised two panels on Orthodox Christianity in Western Europe for the biennial congress of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion (Turku/Åbo, Finland). The planning and preparation of the panels was an opportunity to rekindle our past collaboration (Roudometof, Agadjanian, and Pankhurst 2005) in the field of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Unfortunately, because of health reasons, I was unable to attend the conference. Afterwards, however, I felt that I should take the initiative in arranging for the publication of the panel papers. Thus started a long journey that concludes with the papers presented in this issue of Religion, State & Society. In pursuing the topic of the presence of Orthodox Christianity in Western Europe, I was aware that this was a new but underdeveloped area of inquiry (for an overview of Eastern Christianity, see Leustean 2014). In my past efforts to explore the relationship between Orthodox Christianity and transnational religiosity (Roudometof 2000, 2014), it seemed quite appropriate to focus on North America, where Orthodoxy has a well-documented presence. In contrast, information and scholarship on Western Europe was almost nonexistent. Traditionally, both researchers and laypeople are accustomed to think of Eastern Europe as predominantly (if not exclusively) Eastern Orthodox, and similarly, to think of Western Europe as overwhelmingly Catholic and Protestant. But the world’s religious demography is ever-changing. Over the course of the post-WorldWar II era and evenmore so since the end of communism in Eastern Europe, this traditional image has been transformed. While not claiming to be an authoritative account, even the cursory demographic information conveyed in the following pages suggests that the number of Eastern Orthodox Christians in Western Europe is rapidly approaching or even surpassing the number of Eastern Orthodox Christians in North America. The overall figures might not be high, but one should recall that Orthodox Christianity has a history of several centuries in North America. The new immigrant communities of Orthodox Christians in Western Europe remain an understudied group. This special section is only the second scholarly effort to inquire into their situation (the other one is Hämmerli and Mayer 2014). Reliable figures are hard to come by, and there are countries – such as Spain – where there is a notable absence of researchers working on this group. An additional source of difficulties is the result of the shifting geopolitics in Europe. During the Cold War era, the definitions of ‘East’ and ‘West’ were fairly clear and coterminous with specific political regimes. In the era since 1989, however, there has been a geopolitical shift, whereby countries that used to be part of the communist bloc

Orthodoxy and Modernity in Cyprus: The 2006 Archepiscopal Elections in Historical Perspective

This article offers an analysis of the 2006 Archepiscopal elections of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus (OCC). It uses this analysis to develop an interpretation of the OCCs evolution over the last two centuries. Unlike other Orthodox churches, it is the laity and the clergy—through a system of proxy voting—that elect the OCCs high clergy. In the 2006 elections, the first contested elections since 1950, the contenders and the public divided into mainstream modernizers and traditionalists. The election of Chrysostomos II signifies continuation with the OCCs conventional interventionist role in the islands social, economic, and political life. The election also led to the creation of additional eparchies, which suggests the normalization of the OCCs organizational structures. These developments point to a conventional pattern of coexistence between Orthodox religious institutions and modernization. Therefore, the Cyprus case casts doubt on scholarly arguments advocating Eastern Orthodox Christianitys exceptionalism vis-à-vis Western Christianity.

Innovation in the Orthodox Christian Tradition? The Question of Change in Greek Orthodox Thought and Practice

the importance of affective feelings in the analysis of music and religion. Further, some of her criticism about ‘religion’ as a field of study and the changing nature of ‘religious’ behaviour has significant force behind it, as has her helpful consideration of how notions of scapegoating can apply to Hip-Hop culture. And she is surely right to stress the importance of the body and embodiment in this discussion. However, some questions remain, not least if language is a key constituent of the social construction of various forms of ‘religion’—can meaning and meaning-making environments be so conveniently separated, as Miller seems to suggest? And despite the problems surrounding the term ‘religion’ and its socially constructed nature (with all its preand post-Enlightenment baggage), is ‘religion’ the second-order cultural creation that Miller proposes or is it—along with music—much more fundamental to the evolution of human culture than she allows for in this study?