Sociology of Globization English 2006

Today, we are living in the heightened era of globalisation. There are widespread movements of capital, humans, goods, and ideas across the globe resulting in transformations in the quality of socio-cultural life of the common men and women of all societies. As a concept and an empirical process, globalisation has been attracting much social scientific attention in recent years, so much so that the word has attained the notoriety of being a buzzword. There is a tendency to look at such overarching and divergent processes of globalisation from the narrower perspective of capital flow from the North to the South. Though this volume does not aim to be a corrective to such perspective, it is surely different from it. "Most contributions to this volume closely examine the nature of `globalisation' as a very ancient historical phenomenon and how its structures and processes have changed in the present avatar of globalisation. There are convincing arguments on the reverse direction of the global flow which otherwise goes unnoticed by many: e.g., globalisation may originate from below" (quoted from Prof. Yogendra Singh's foreword). Through contributions from researchers from divergent disciplinary backgrounds, this volume adds hitherto unexplored dimensions to the discourse of globalisation.