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Key Themes - Chapter 2

This chapter makes an important distinction between the process of globalization, comprising a series of objective, external elements that are profoundly changing our world, and globality as a subjective and reflexive awareness of these changes. It also contextualizes both these changes within the age of reflexivity.

• Globalization has developed from immanent forces like modernity and capitalist industrialization. Six processes of globalization are identified in this context as inseparable and synchronous. Here the authors highlight the explosive potential these changes have for providing new foci of identity and collaboration between citizens of distant countries.
• Globality is defined as the suggestion that individuals, groups and movements have the capacities for critical self-examination and can use the opportunities provided by these changes to advance the common cause of humanity. These inter-related features of globality are specified as: the ability to think about ourselves collectively while identifying with all humanity; the end to one-way flows and the growth of multicultural awareness; the empowerment of self-aware social actors and the broadening of identities. Here the authors also discuss the ways in which we respond to the interpenetration of the local and the global by each other.
• These changes are set within the context of reflexivity as an aspect of late modernity characterised by the spread of mass education and the wide dissemination of scientific knowledge, in which individuals’ self-consciousness and greater personal freedom enables them to shape their own lives while redefining the world around them.