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nation states, common patterns of material and cultural consumption, with
converging satellite, computer, cable, VCR, telephone, fax, television and radio
technologies between them being assigned a causal role in achieving intercon-
nectivity and interaction in all four domains.
For many social scientists, structural processes of institutional change are at
the heart of this reordering. Thus, the topic of globalization provides a concep-
tual entry point to an evolving world order and a concept for evaluating ‘a par-
ticular series of developments concerning the concrete structuration of the world as
a whole’ (Robertson, 1990: 20). More holistically and in terms of process, our
incorporation into a one-world, global society is contingent on changing value
orientations that propel us towards ‘the whole earth as the physical environ-
ment, everyone living as world citizens, consumers and producers with a com-
mon interest in collective action to solve global problems’ (Albrow, 1990: 8–10).
Postmodernist interpretations of globality, on the other hand, focus more on
the emergence of a common culture of consumption and style (see, for example,
Baudrillard, 1985; Jameson, 1984). Acknowledging that transsocietal processes
of cultural integration and disintegration lie outside the bounds of the nation
state, the revisionist model of postmodernist globalization is both relativist and
absolutist, allowing for cultural diversity in global unity (see, for example,
Featherstone, 1990: 1; 1991: 144–7). 1
The divergences between the ‘globalizationists’ and their critics should not
obscure the extent of agreement between the parties. All locate their concerns
in the empirical reality of a more visible and powerful supranational order, a
‘world system’ in Wallerstein’s (1990) terms, that shifts many former national
concerns to the world geopolitical stage.

The Problem of Evidence

These changing contours of political and cultural economy may be located
in space and, to a certain extent, in time. In the 1980s, the globalizing impetus
manifested itself in science, politics and economics, in technology, deregulation
and the Friedmanite free market, as new commercial imperatives oscillated
between North America, Western Europe and Japan.
Typically, economic indicators are used as the yardstick of globality: multi-
continental flows of capital, services, manufacture, goods, data, telecommunica-
tions; the large-scale privatization of publicly owned assets in countries as far
flung as Britain, Australia and Mexico; the deregulation and reregulation of
broadcasting systems, most notably in Europe; and the institutionalization of
twenty-four-hour electronic world trading and money markets. But sociodemo-
graphic indicators also point to other forms of culture and value migration: for
instance, the transborder passage of social movements, such as environmentalism;
of antisocial artefacts, such as drugs and weapons; and of people, i.e. the massive
movements of refugees, professionals, tourists and immigrants.
The centrality of media technology and artefacts to the globalizing process, as
noted above, builds on pre-existing international production and distribution