The ISA/COCTA Roundtable on concepts of Globalization took place in Montreal, July 1998, during the World Congress of Sociology. The following text was prepared for participants as an explanation of the logic of the concepts of Globalization document.

First, the concepts set forth in this document are not synonyms for globalization, but they are "sheltered" by this word. I use "shelter" here in a somewhat special sense that is discussed in a paper you can find at shelter terms. The basic idea is that a word in ordinary language is often twisted and turned in many directions and comes to refer to a variety of related, overlapping, and different concepts. All of them may be useful for some people but irrelevant for others. In context, a shelter can be used to mean any of the concepts such a term shelters, but out of context, such words are fuzzy and confusing.

We can protect ourselves and communicate more clearly if we have a term (tag) for each special meaning of a word. Then we can use it in place of globalization whenever ambiguity is likely to occur. The easiest illustration is mother. We all understand this word in a general sense, but it may cover such important but different ideas as a "birth mother," "step mother," "foster mother," "adopted mother," "courtesy mother," or even "mother land" or "mother tongue." Using these more precise terms enables us to reduce ambiguity but, in a context of talk about adopting children, it may well be quite clear that "mother" refers to an adopted mother. In other contexts, the same word may clearly mean something else.

The same is true about globalization. This newly invented word has already spread out to shelter a wide range of ideas, many of which are quite useful and require other terms as synonyms. We need to develop a vocabulary that can identify any of these meanings that we may want to talk about. However, we don't need to remember or use all of these terms -- just those that are useful to us. By storing all the ideas in a glossary that everyone can easily consult, we can look up unfamiliar terms when someone else uses them, and we can find one to use whenever we may want to talk about a special aspect or topic linked to globalization but don't know what to call it. Similarly, in any big dictionary we find many unfamiliar words we have no use for -- but when, suddenly, the word comes up, we are glad to have a reference book to tell us what it means.

The proto-glossary that we will produce on the basis of our exercise will be made available to anyone in the world who may have access to the World Wide Web and wishes to consult it -- and, of course, it can also be easily printed out for desk-side consultation by anyone writing about globalization.

Our interest in COCTA is not, of course, just in globalization. It is just one of many familiar but fuzzy words that need clarification. Do not dismiss a word because it is fuzzy and has many meanings -- indeed, that very fact shows how important it is. Dog and cat are important words with many meanings, but we rarely use rhinoceros, a word with only one meaning. Everyone prefers common words and often assign idiosyncratic new meanings to them. That's why they may become confusing. Our methodology, as illustrated in this round table, can dissolve that confusion by tagging each useful sense of a shelter term -- the fuzziness of common words is a challenge that should spur us to action, not dissolve our will to communicate clearly. .

#Concept Classes. Because our texts reveal a long list of possible meanings of globalization, we need to classify them into a small number of general categories -- I propose four such classes. It is easier to think about and find the specific terms we need whenever we can narrow the range of our quest. You will see a classified list of terms attached to a full discussion of the concepts found in this project. Here is a summary analysis based on four general categories: time/space; dimensions; functions and structures; and perspectives.

1. Time/space aways occurs concurrently, so it would be great if we could think of them in a holistic way, but our language and disciplines compel us to disjoin them -- e.g., in history or chronology, and in geography or locations. Globalization, as several participants have emphasized, has been with us for several thousand years, if we think of it as extending a social system to the full borders of a world-system, but it became planetary only after the 15^th century.

The intensity of interactions within our planetary world system has increased ever since then, but the industrial revolution and the rise and fall of modern imperialism truly accelerated its pace. During the past half century, following the collapse of the modern empires, new patterns of world politics, free trade and capitalist accumulation have intensified the dynamics of globalization: the INTERNET represents the latest and most remarkable mutation in the contemporary evolution of globalization, virtually spawning the information revolution.

The first set of concepts in our proto-glossary tries to handle these time/space aspects of globalization by giving us some handles for them, while recognizing that for different purposes and problems, the world in time/space needs to be subdivided in many different ways. Having said that, we may also recognize that for many people, globalization is distinctively contemporary. Others, with a broader perspective, see it as a long-term process. So long as we know what they mean and communicate it clearly, we can tell in context whether globalization refers to a recent development or an age-old process. Similarly, we can tell whether the process refers to expansion in an insular world-system, such as the Hawaiians had before Cook, or to a planetary system, such as has evolved since Columbus.

2. The Social Science disciplines offer different slants or viewpoints for looking at what, certainly, is a single, complex, multi-faceted phenomenon. Among these perspectives, some quite explicitly take a long-term view and we may see them as historical, counting on Historians to help us get the facts straight. Most social scientists, however, are more myopic and prefer to view the present world as a system: like a recent snap shot, it captures a current moment of reality and tells a story, but we need to remember that it's just a still in a very long moving picture.

Dividing up the contemporary scene by aspects, we can easily understand that Sociologists, Political Scientists, Economists, Anthropologists, Psychologists, Communications specialists, etc., all have their own particular slant on this gestalt. Our glossary contains some texts and terms that represent each of these windows opening into the vast edifice of our contemporary world system. I shall not say more about them here, but it would help us understand each other if those using any of these perspectives were to acknowledge that fact and let their audience know it too. Economists talking about word trade, capital flow, multi-national corporations, and monetary systems should stress that, while these economic dimensions have far-reaching consequences for the whole system, economic globalization is only part of the story, though admittedly a very very important part.

Similarly, Political Scientists naturally focus on politics and power, governments and states, and the growing importance of inter-state, trans-state and non-governmental organizations. Again, these structures and practices of political globalization have far-reaching consequences and causes, closely linked to the economic aspects. Sociologists, I think, aim at a more holistic approach that embraces both economics and politics, but they also have a focus on social globalization, identifying relations and problems that, somehow, have escaped the attention of Economists and Political Scientists.

No need to extend this recital which is covered in more detail by the paper. They giving us many windows on the world -- a world that is a whole regardless of what window we choose to look through. Actually, we have little choice. Area specialists who focus on an island like Palau may hope to encompass all its facets, but we cannot view our planetary system except through windows that permit us to view just a small part of it. Our great enigma as social scientists is how to adapt to the world scene the established disciplines which evolved in the Western part of our world-system, reflecting its peculiar problems, social structures and institutions. Globalization has radically expanded the scope of what social science needs to consider and this, I believe, calls for some radical re-orientation of established disciplines, not only by opening up new windows but also by reshaping many of the existing windows through which we try to view and understand our world.

3. Functions and Structures refer to some general concepts that cut across all the disciplinary windows, and apply in all times and places. No doubt additions are needed and I'm afraid this component is not well developed. At least, I failed to find support for more concepts in our texts. Nevertheless, two main sub-categories seemed to be implicit in the texts.

One is called processes, and looks especially at causes and consequences. Some ask about the causes of globalization: we already have a handy word, globalizing, that refer to whatever generates globalization. No matter what aspects or locations of globalization one thinks about, one can always ask why it happened, what were the forces or factors that contributed to its occurrence?

On the other side of this equation, whenever and wherever globalization occurs, it must have consequences. One may ask, "so what?" Strangely, we lack a counterpart for globalizing to talk about results, and yet many of our texts expressed concern about the consequences, for worse or better, of this phenomenon. I suggest we might well coin a neologism, globalation to discuss this process, but I anticipate strong resistance. We just don't like neologisms! No problem. Just use a phrase instead, like consequences of globalization. There is no need for anyone who rejects neologisms to use one. However, some reciprocity is called for. If some folks do choose to use a neologism, those who prefer a phrase composed of familiar words ought to tolerate them. After all, globalization itself is a relative newcomer to our vocabulary -- I find it only in recent dictionaries, but I cannot say when it was invented, or by whom. Does anyone know?

A more important point involves the interdependence of causes and consequences. Gunnar Myrdal often emphasized circular causation and I strongly believe that every cause is affected by its consequences, and every consequence has feed-back effects on its causes. In this context, globalization probably causes itself and is its own consequence. However, I don't want to debate this point -- I merely mention that we can use "globalization" to refer to a cause/consequence set of relationships. When we want to be more specific about its causal aspects, we can talk about globalizing, and when we wish to focus on consequences, we could mention globalating.

Another theme relating to globalization points away from its quantitative to its qualitative aspects. If we think of structures as co-existing and interacting, we may ask how many there are and how intensive are their relationships. For me, the entrancing aspect of globalization is not that it has expanded to a planetary scale, but rather than the quality of interactiveness has reached new levels of intensity. The fact that I can sit in my home and communicate with all of you by sending a message simultaneously to everyone on Globe-L is a miracle whose ramifications I still cannot fully grasp. Only a short time ago I could not do that nor could you. It means that all kinds of groups with different and conflicting interests are now free to contact and work with each other -- and against each other, too. This has radically changed our world. As a boy, I lived in China where it took months for a letter to reach our family in New York -- admittedly, we could also send cables but they were so costly we could only do it rarely and in very brief coded messages, relying on Morse Code. The shift from Morse to HTML represents a qualitative change of far-reaching import -- at least, I think we should be able to talk about this. I cannot find suitable words in our vocabulary -- the phenomenon is so new we scarcely reflect it yet in our vocabulary. For this reason, I've suggested some additional neologisms, but will not mention them here -- however, you can find them at Globalization Concepts.

4. Perspectives reflect the many ways we see and think about the world rather than what is going on outside ourselves in that world. I'm not happy with any of the terms used to characterize these perspectives, but I hope you can help. I classed them under three sub-headings: ontological, normative, and paradigmatic. Do they make sense? Let me speak briefly about each:

The Ontological perspective involves our sense of what is real or imaginary in the world. Is globalization something that really exists, or only something we have constructed in our minds? You can make arguments for both positions and they are not contradictory. I think they link up with important philosophical questions about knowledge and truth and how we know what we think we know. At the one extreme, we like to build models and use deductive reasoning to create images of what exists. Economists are better at that than other social scientists -- as are mathematicians. At the other extreme, we like descriptions and case studies, empirical facts and data -- what may be called the inductive approach. This approach can produce a vast collage of apparently unrelated things. Somehow, globalization appeals to both camps. We can create a logically coherent picture of the world as we think it is and call it global, or we can compile a long catalog of observations and talk about the composite picture as something global. When we do that, I think we produce quite different images that we may want to separate in our minds and the document offers a way to do that, offering both neologisms and phrases that could be used. A mathematician's circle is invisible but, somehow, relates to a penciled circle I might draw on a piece of paper. Each, in a sense, complements the other. Both are "circles" yet each is significantly different from the other.

The Normative perspective involves our values and what we think of as good and bad in the world. For some observers, globalization is a terrible disaster and for others a wonderful world of possibilities and innovation. In my opinion, the world is just there, same regardless of how one evaluates it, but the evaluations are terribly important too and they seriously affect our lives and the way we talk about what we see and how we view it. If we could recognize this fact and use terms such as those mentioned in the document, we could help ourselves and our audience understand the normative framework that informs our thinking about globalization.

Finally, as a recent addition, for which owe a special debt to George Modelski, I have added the Paradigmatic perspective. The point is that there are underlying premises, theories, postulates, or assumptions that deeply affect the way we try to understand whatever we see. You are probably more familiar with the profound arguments that Thomas Kuhn's work has inspired than I am, but I thought we might pick up on his term -- and paradigm itself is a shelter for many linked concepts -- to think about several fundamentally different and perhaps complementary ways that we can invoke to help us understand how we are thinking about globalization. I was able to pick up four paradigms from the literature and your texts -- all imply a long-term perspective. I'm not sure that very short-term views of globalization imply any paradigms, but maybe they do.

The first two paradigms are scholarly and reflect profound analyses of deep problems involving globalization. The former is one that Modelski himself embraces, and we agree that it is evolutionary. It reads into the historical record some patterns that have cause/effect and also cyclical aspects. A second and perhaps overlapping paradigm is well stated in Viola's contribution -- it stresses the interdependence of human action and nature, and tends to stress the damage to many natural resources that wanton exploitation by mankind has produced with accelerating force as globalization proceeds, and we may well use ecological to underline this perspective.

The third and fourth paradigms reflect a difference between religious and secular ways of thinking. I find both of them unconvincing but that's a personal evaluation and I think we need to recognize that these perspectives are widely held and influential in the way many people understand globalization. Remember, the existence and use of any concept does not imply that it is true or false. We could not disagree with a concept if we had no way to talk about it. We need, therefore, to identify concepts even when we totally reject them.

Some see supernatural forces at work and interpret globalization as a sign of Divine judgment -- more typically as evidence of wrath rather than of grace. By contrast, secularists may argue that Nature has no rationale, it just is. In this perspective, what is happening to humans may reflect decisions made by humans, but they are accidental happenings and cumulative events, not evidence for a higher logic or ultimate causes. Perhaps these oversimplified versions are, indeed, too simplistic. How could we more usefully think and talk about the underlying premises of our work on globalization? To help us, I have suggested four pairs of terms: each including both a succinct neologism and a phrase using familiar words. Take your pick, or suggest something better. I do, however, think we need to recognize some paradigmatic premises that deeply affect the way all of us think and talk about globalization. If so, should we not include this segment in our glossary? What other paradigmatic concepts are needed -- we could use help.

These are the kinds of questions I hope our exercise will generate and, perhaps, also produce some answers. These are not the substantive questions we all focus on -- instead, they are just the infrastructural issues. To be clear and make sense in our discourse, we need to understand each other and having some well defined tools of thought seems to be necessary. The fuzzyness of the many meanings attributed to globalization and the growing popularity of this word as a "buzzword" provides an opportunity and a challenge. Our roundtable is predicated on that challenge.

#Agenda. To organize our discussion at the roundtable, we will avoid opening statements. Henry Teune and I shall assume that all participants have read and understood both the background paper on GLOBALIZATION: KEY CONCEPTS, and this commentary on it. That will enable us to take a leap into discourse, basing our discussion on several key questions. Here is my proposed agenda, but there is still time to revise, add to, or subtract from it. What is your will? Please use the short time that remains to give me your feedback.

• 1. Groundrules: What questions arise about our goals and procedure?
  
  
• 2. The Time/Space Continuum of Globalization: Are we in agreement or should we make and useful changes in the document?
  
  
• 3. The Dimensions of Globalization: Do we accept the disciplinary windows as points of view for looking at globalization as a world-system phenomenon, and how should thy be revised?
  
  
• 4. The Functions and Structures of Globalization: Can we accept cause/effect circles and cycles as premises, and also the densities of structure and process as key variables?
  
  
• 5. The Perspectives of Globalization: Do we want to make any basic changes or additions to the suggested ontological, normative and paradigmatic contexts of our thinking about globalization?
  
  
• 6. Conclusion: How should we proceed to consolidate, amplify, revise, and utilize the results of our work?
  
  

I do not expect closure in any sense of a "final product," but I hope we have launched a process that can continue and prove useful. It can be expanded by taking it to other disciplines and contexts, and applying the methodology we have used to other important terms and concepts. Individuals can use our product as they find helpful, and they will be invited to contribute to its further development. If they acknowledge reliance on our tool, its uses and values for the whole community may be enhanced. If so, then COCTA and the INTERCOCTA project may also become more useful and that is my personal hope. I am available, so long as I am able, to facilitate this process. Please let me have your comments and further suggestions. All best wishes and much aloha, Fred

See: Globalization concepts || Globalization roundtable || and Globalization texts

See also: [] COCTA || and Shelter Terms []

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Updated: 26 September 1998