Globality

Abstract: Summary Perceived self-efficacy represents an optimistic sense of personal competence that seems to be a pervasive phenomenon accounting for motivation and accomplishments in human beings. The General Self-Efficacy scale, developed to measure this construct at the broadest level, has been adapted to many languages. The psychometric properties of this instrument is examined among 19,120 participants from 25 countries. The main research question is whether the measure is configurally equivalent across cultures, that is, whether it corresponds to only one dimension. The findings confirm this assumption and suggest the globality of the underlying construct. They also point to a number of cross-cultural differences that merit further investigation.

Abstract: The sociological, economic, political, and anthropological literatures are devoting increasing attention to globalization. This chapter discusses the various connotations of the term and puts it in historical perspective. Existing theoretical and empirical research on globalization is organized around five key issues or questions: Is it really happening? Does it produce convergence? Does it undermine the authority of nation-states? Is globality different from modernity? Is a global culture in the making? A plea is made for a comparative sociology of globalization that is sensitive to local variations and to how agency, interest, and resistance mediate in the relationship between globalization causes and outcomes. The bulk of the earth must not only be spherical, but not large in comparison with the size of other stars. —Aristotle (384–322 BC), as quoted by Dreyer (1953, p. 118)

Abstract: Introduction.- A.D.King The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity.- S.Hall Old and New Identities.- S.Hall Social Theory, Cultural Relativity and the Politics of Globality.- R.Robertson The National and the Universal: Can there be such a thing as World Culture?.- I.Wallerstein Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures.- U.Hannerz Interrogating Theories of the Global.- J.AbuLughod, B.Abou-el-Haj, M.Turim, A.King & J.Tagg The Global and the Specific: Reconciling Conflicting Theories of Culture.- J.Wolff.

Abstract: The increasing realisation that there are modern problems for which there are no modern solutions points towards the need to move beyond the paradigm of modernity and, hence, beyond the Third World. Imagining after the Third World takes place against the backdrop of two major processes: first, the rise of a new US-based form of imperial globality, an economic–military– ideological order that subordinates regions, peoples and economies world-wide. Imperial globality has its underside in what could be called, following a group of Latin American researchers, global coloniality, meaning by this the heightened marginalisation and suppression of the knowledge and culture of subaltern groups. The second social process is the emergence of self-organising social movement networks, which operate under a new logic, fostering forms of counter-hegemonic globalisation. It is argued that, to the extent that they engage with the politics of difference, particularly through place-based yet transnationalised political stra...