Page 58 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

44 Politics in a Small World

result. Even more alarming, risks of environmental catastrophe for human,
animal and plant life on the planet have become increasingly apparent as
unforeseen consequences of the development of science and innovative
technology that make globalization itself possible.
As people ’ s daily lives and biographies are ever more entwined with
processes of globalization, it is increasingly obvious that the founding
sociological image of society as a bounded and coherent set of structures
and practices governed by the sovereign nation - state is redundant. Social
relations are now a good deal more complex, especially as states them-
selves are implicated in globalization, in trying to manage it through
international institutions, but also, in the case of economic globalization,

in promoting cross - border flows of all kinds.
Economic globalization – sometimes called “ footloose capitalism, ”
or even more emphatically “ turbo - capitalism ” – is a project of neo -
liberalization in which states have been engaged, to a greater or lesser
extent in different cases, since the 1980s. Following World War II,
Keynesian welfare state capitalism predominated in the West. International
trade was primarily of foodstuffs and raw materials, while production
was organized within national economies. International economic institu-
tions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, oversaw
the stability of the system through a mixture of protection of domestic
markets and the encouragement of international trade. In many cases,
parts of the economy considered to be strategic were owned by states
themselves – airlines, railways, and steel companies, as well as hospitals
and schools. Markets were embedded in governments. Since the early
1980s, the acceptance of neo - liberal ideas opposed to state planning has
led governments, beginning in the US and UK, to pursue projects to
free markets from state control: privatizing national industries, and lifting
regulations on foreign investment and fi nancial markets. States have
been involved in disembedding markets to enable multinational corpora-
tions to operate transnationally, promoting fl ows of staff, money, infor-
mation, and products across borders. States no longer control industrial
processes and financial exchanges in the name of national economies;

they are engaged, rather, in trying to attract multinational corporations
by providing infrastructure, corporate tax breaks, and a well - trained
and well - disciplined labor force that will accept their working conditions
and pay. It is important not to over - estimate the extent to which the
global economy is integrated. It is certainly geographically uneven: as
Hirst and Thompson have pointed out, multinational corporations still

tend to operate within European, Asian - Pacific, and NAFTA - Latin