Introduction

Abstract

The social sciences have tended to see the globalization of the last half-century mainly in economic terms. Nations and states, in this view, respond to expanded external interdependence in various ways, but remain central units of analysis. More recently, analyses have come to emphasize the political character of world society, with its greatly expanded sets of international organizations, but the participating entities in these structures tend to remain nations and states. The cultural side of globalization has been at the center of popular attention and lay discourse, not academic analysis. In fact, the academic literature stresses the current and future need for cultural change toward a more global cosmopolitanism in the face of current crises, rather than analyzing such change on the empirical ground (e.g., Beck, 2006). There is, thus, a sense that cultural changes in identity and perception are not globalizing enough to enable human society to effectively deal with interdependencies that have in fact become supranational and global. Even in rapidly integrating Europe the main thrust of the discussion and analysis is that persons and groups principally retain a national or subnational identity, and only secondarily come to full terms with their larger continental society (see Haller, 2008, or for a more ambivalent review, Fligstein, 2008). The conventional view is always that Europe is on the edge of failure, precisely because globalization of identity and culture has not caught up with increased economic interdependence.

Citation

Meyer, J.W. (2012), "Introduction", Kamens, D.H. (Ed.) Beyond the Nation-State (Research in the Sociology of Education, Vol. 18), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. xi-xv. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-3539(2012)0000018004