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THE GLOBAL RELATIONAL. BETWEEN PROCESSES OF DIFFERENTIATION AND SUPRANATIONAL CONVERGENCE

S. Nanetti

Abstract

The term globalization has defined the reflection on the contemporaneity of the last thirty years, according with two directives: in an interdisciplinary sense, starting from the economic sciences up to the social and political sciences; in a broader sense, in the public opinion, for the affinity between the meaning of expression and the concrete experience of individuals. The globalization represented one of those rare cases of correspondence between science and doxa, so much to seems extremely effective in defining the contemporary era in its evolutionary course in constant transformation. Globalization includes, in the plurality of the visions that have proposed its definition (Giddens 1994; Habermas 1996; Beck 1999; Donati 2005), two fundamental dimensions: the temporal dimension and the spatial dimension, in terms of a "space-time compression" (Harvey 1997). On one side, globalization makes extremely distant processes to converge in a single place, using a variety of languages and cultures to share the same spaces; on the other side, it give limits the powers of the national states (Strano 1996), encouraging the emergence of new dangers and new challenges that involve the activation of tools and procedures indifferent to spatial and temporal characteristics (Giddens 1992). This phenomenon forces us to rethink about social relations, no longer linked to a particular place or limited to a specific territorial boundary. However, the emphasis on deterritorialization cannot avoid on paying attention on its opposite, that is the promoting and strengthening particular realities. In fact, the other side of globalization reside in those "glocal" processes of commingling between homologation and differentiation (Robertson 1998). Given these changes, the question is being asked about the identity of the emerging social categories in the global context. Is it possible to identify specific forms of sociation in an increasingly detestatualized and decentralized context? From which boundaries are these realities defined? Adopting the sociological relational perspective, an attempt will be made to redefine the process of globalization, introducing those social subjectivities that allow us to observe a new social and political conformations, that take into account the dual process of differentiation and homologation.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/SWS.ISCAH.2019.2/S01.016

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