Читать книгу Essentials of Sociology - George Ritzer - Страница 17

No social change is as important today as globalization because it is continually affecting all aspects of the social world everywhere on the globe. A date marking the beginning of globalization cannot be given with any precision, and in fact, it is in great dispute (Ritzer 2012b; Ritzer and Dean 2019; Steger 2017). However, the concept of globalization first began to appear in the popular and academic literature around 1990. Today, globalization is a central issue in the social world as a whole as well as in sociology; globalization and talk about it are all around us. In fact, we can be said to be living in the “global age” (Albrow 1996). However, this fact as well as the advantages of globalization for the United States have been questioned by Donald Trump. Such questioning has led to talk of “deglobalization” (however, see my blog post “Deglobalization? Not a Chance” [Ritzer 2016]). Deglobalization was also behind the vote in the United Kingdom to exit the European Union (called Brexit), as well as actions taken by other European nations to create border restrictions. However, none of these actions are going to have much impact on globalization as a whole or in such areas as the internet, the media, and culture.

A major component of any past or present definition of sociology is society. There are about 200 societies in the world, including those that encompass the United States, China, and South Africa. Society is a complex pattern of social relationships that is bounded in space and persists over time. Society has traditionally been the largest unit of analysis in sociology. However, in the global age, societies are seen as declining in importance (Holton 2011; Meyer, Boli, and Ramirez 1997). This is the case, in part, because larger transnational and global social structures are growing in importance. These include the United Nations (UN); the European Union (EU); the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC); multinational corporations (MNCs), such as Google and ExxonMobil; and multinational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as Amnesty International. In at least some cases, these transnational structures are becoming more important than individual societies. OPEC is more important to the rest of the world’s well-being than are the organization’s key member societies, such as Abu Dhabi or even Saudi Arabia. However, this emphasis on the transnational and global has led to a counterreaction in which the focus has shifted back to one’s own society (e.g., “America First”).

Social processes, like social structures, exist not only at the societal level but also at the global level, and these global processes are increasing in importance. Consider migration (see Chapter 14). People move about, or migrate, within and between societies. For example, many people have moved from the northeastern United States to the West and the South. However, in the global age, people are increasingly moving between societies, some halfway around the world. The United States now has a higher percentage of immigrants than it has had in almost a century (see Figure 1.1). Many have migrated from and through Mexico to the United States (Massey 2003; Ortmeyer and Quinn 2012). More generally, large numbers of people are migrating from a number of predominantly Islamic societies in the Middle East and Africa to the West (Voas and Fleischmann 2012). In many cases, they were fleeing from war-torn countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Libya (Yeginsu and Hartocollis 2015). In addition, the movement of thousands of people from the West to join radical Islamist organizations (such as the Islamic State), especially in Syria and Iraq, has been of major concern to Western governments. Some fear that at least some of those involved in radical Islamist activities there will migrate back to the West and engage in terrorist acts.

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Figure 1.1 Number of Immigrants and Their Share of the Total U.S. Population, 1850–2020

Source: Migration Policy Institute (MPI) tabulation of data from U.S. Census Bureau, 2010–2016 American Community Surveys (ACS), and 1970, 1990, and 2000 Decennial Census. All other data are from Campbell J. Gibson and Emily Lennon, “Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850 to 1990” (Working Paper no. 29, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC, 1999).

There have always been large-scale population movements. However, in the global age, and even with recent restrictions, people generally move around the world far more freely and travel much greater distances than ever before. Another way of saying this is that people—and much else—are more “fluid.” That is, they move farther, more easily, and more quickly than ever before. Younger people, especially millennials (or Generation Y, those born from the early 1980s through the late 1990s, as well as the following Generation Z), are likely to be especially mobile, including globally. Their greater fluidity is reflected in, among many other things, the fact that they are more likely to book airline tickets and to check in for flights online and to use boarding passes sent directly to their smartphones (Lee 2013).

The movement of products of all types is also more fluid as a result of massive container ships, jet cargo planes, and package delivery services such as FedEx and UPS. Even more fluid is the digital “stuff” you buy on the internet when you download music, videos, movies, and so on. And in the realm of the family, tasks once confined to the home, such as caregiving and housework, have become increasingly fluid, as those who can afford to do so often outsource domestic labor (van der Lippe, Frey, and Tsvetkova 2012; Yeates 2009). More generally that greater fluidity is manifested in the information that flows throughout the world in the blink of an eye as a result of the internet, texting, e-mail, and social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter.

Ask Yourself

Have you ever thought of your posts on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter as part of a global flow of information? In what ways do they actually fit this description? What does your position in this global flow of information reveal about you?

These flows can be expedited by structures of various types.

• Air cargo delivery will increasingly be facilitated by the development of the “aerotropolis” (Kasarda and Lindsay 2011), a preplanned “city of the future” developed because of proximity and access to a large, modern airport (Kasarda 2016). The “smart city” of New Songdo, South Korea, is being built (it is over 50 percent completed) because such an airport (Incheon) is nearby and easily reached via a 12-mile-long bridge. This is in contrast to the usual situation where the airport (e.g., Reagan National in Washington, D.C.; LAX in Los Angeles; Heathrow in London) is built within or very close to a city center. Traditional airports are typically too small and too difficult to reach, create too much noise for city residents, and cannot expand much beyond their current confines.

• The European Union (EU), founded in 1993, is an example of a social structure that serves to ease the flow of citizens among member nations (but not of people living outside the EU). Border restrictions were reduced or eliminated among the 27 EU member nations, although some of them have been reinstituted in recent years because of concern about the flow of undocumented immigrants. Similarly, the launch of the euro in 1999 greatly simplified economic transactions among the 18 EU countries that accept it as their currency.

• The continuing free flow of information on the internet is made possible by an organization called ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). It handles the net’s underlying infrastructure.

There are also structures that impede various kinds of global flows. National borders, passports and passport controls (Robertson 2010; Torpey 2000), security checks, and customs controls limit the movement of people throughout the world. Such restrictions were greatly increased in many parts of the world after the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001. This made global travel and border crossing more difficult and time-consuming. Then there are the even more obvious structures designed to limit the movement of people across borders. Examples include the fences between Israel and the West Bank, as well as one between Israel and Egypt completed in 2013. Even more recent are border fences under construction or completed in several European countries (e.g., Hungary, Slovenia), which are designed to limit, direct, or stop the flow of migrants from Syria and elsewhere (Surk 2015). During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to turn the existing barriers between the United States and Mexico into a wall, at least for part of the length of the distance required. In the early days of his presidency, Trump encountered opposition to the wall because of its high cost and environmental concerns. From late 2018 to early 2019, the U.S. government endured a partial shutdown because of Trump’s insistence on building the wall and congressional resistance to funding it. It remains to be seen how much of the wall will actually be built.

The existing fences across the Mexican border, and increased border police and patrols, have already led unauthorized migrants to take longer and riskier routes into the United States. There are more than 200 immigration detention centers in the United States (see Figure 1.2), and Human Rights Watch found that 18 immigrants died in them from 2012 to 2015 due to negligent medical care (Jula and Preston 2016). A crisis arose at the Mexican border in mid-2014 when tens of thousands of children from Central America flooded the area and overwhelmed detention centers (Archibold 2014). Another occurred in late 2018 when Trump exaggerated the risks posed by a “caravan” of immigrants from Central America and sought to counter it by sending thousands of U.S. troops to guard the border. There are, of course, many other structural barriers in the world, most notably trade barriers and tariffs, which limit the free movement of goods and services of many kinds.

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Figure 1.2 U.S. Immigration Detention Facilities, 2017

Source: U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, Detention Facility Locator, March 2017 (www.ice.gov/detention-facilities).

In sum, globalization is defined by increasingly fluid global flows and the structures that expedite and impede those flows. Globalization is certainly increasing, and it brings with it a variety of both positive and negative developments (Ritzer and Dean 2019). On one side, most people throughout the world now have far greater access to goods, services, and information from around the globe than did people during the industrial age. On the other side, a variety of highly undesirable things also flow more easily around the world, including diseases such as Zika, HIV/AIDS, and Ebola, and pollution released primarily by industrialized countries that worsens the adverse effects of climate change (including global warming). Also on the negative side are the flows of such forms of “deviant globalization” as terrorism, sex trafficking, and the black markets for human organs and drugs (Gilman, Goldhammer, and Weber 2011; Marmo and Chazel 2016).