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Accounts of globalization in sociology have been seen as three broad tendencies or ‘waves’ which ran throughout the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century. And, though there has been much work on specific aspects of globalization since then, the structure of the debate continues to flow across these basic positions. There is an additional approach to globalization, which Martell (2017: 14) calls a ‘fourth wave’, based on forms of discourse analysis that study existing narratives of globalization and the way they frame, discuss and shape globalization itself (Cameron and Palan 2004; Fairclough 2006). However, while the majority of studies agree that important material changes are taking place internationally, they disagree on whether it is accurate or valid to bundle these together under the umbrella of globalization. Because of this, and for reasons of space, in this section we concentrate on the first three waves.

An influential discussion of the three main positions in the debate is that of David Held and colleagues (1999). This presents three schools of thought – hyperglobalizers, sceptics and transformationalists – which are summarized in table 4.4. The authors cited for each school are selected because their work contains some of the key arguments that define that school’s approach. We will take each wave in turn.