World Society/Network Society

Abstract

When the term “globalization” gained prominence in social scientific discourse in the 1990s, its vagueness was widely deplored. Critics regarded globalization as a fad whose provenance from management discourse invalidated any conceptual aspirations. To others, the end of the Cold War and the emergence of instant worldwide communication gave credence to narratives of a bright future in which a connected world would grow together. By today, the initial fuzziness of the globalization concept has been replaced by separate but connected debates that focus on cross-border connectivity or on the societal forms that supplement or even replace container notions of the nation-state. While concepts of transnationalization and denationalization highlight border-crossing connections and mobilities against the backdrop of nationally bounded societies, theories of global society seek to revise the concept of “society” to reflect an encompassing social reality that extends beyond any particular nation-state or region. Building on precursors from the fields of philosophy and political economy, a first step in this direction was taken by sociologists who began to rethink the concept of society to reflect the increasing global interdependence of the twentieth century. In the context of various sociological paradigms, the “social system” concept offered a way to describe networks of communication and exchange. While Immanuel Wallerstein conceived the “world-system” in terms of specific, particularly economic relationships in addition to and beyond national societies, Niklas Luhmann conceptualized society as a whole in terms of a differentiated social system consisting of a multitude of global subsystems such as the economy, science, religion, and the international state system. More recently, the globalization of society through communication has also been highlighted by theories of a global “network society” that examine the consequences of new information technologies as well as the mobilities of people and objects. Based on telecommunication, sociality has become increasingly deterritorialized and has fostered social relationships that are both long-distance and simultaneous. In addition to networks of communication, mobility underpins the social fabric of global society. Flows of people and objects connect distant locations, and cultural flows establish transnational “scapes.” For people who move from one place to another, be it temporarily or permanently, it has become much easier to maintain relationships across distance. Among migrants, for instance, personal networks result in transnational social spaces emerging above and beyond the global versus nation-state distinction. Studies of transnationalization emphasize the continued importance of the local and the changes ensuing from local actors becoming part of global networks. These insights are the basis for more encompassing efforts to theorize world society as a social entity. The macrosociology of world society has evolved into two directions: first, different concepts—such as communication, culture, or global risks—are employed to elaborate the conceptual foundations of world society theory; second, specific forms of globalization in societal domains such as politics, religion, and the arts are examined, often with reference to the differentiation of society at a global scale. Current debates highlight and critically reflect on the embeddedness of world society studies in Eurocentric classics.