People, Place and Time: How Structural Fieldwork Helps World-Systems Analysis (original) (raw)
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In 1995 George Marcus wrote on the ‘emergence of multi-sited ethnography’, contrasting ethnography in the world and ethnography of the world. He seemed to anticipate that with increasing globalization, technological advances, and new economic conditions, multi-sited methods would become the hallmark of ethnography for the nascent age. More than two decades later, I reflect on Marcus’s forecast. Anna Tsing has written perhaps the first monograph to fulfill Marcus’s ‘follow the thing’ model, as a style of ethnography of the world, while June Nash exemplifies his description of ethnography in the world system. Here I compare the merits and challenges of the two ethnographic styles through their works. I consider whether Marcus’s prediction has proven true. I conclude that both approaches are still relevant and, in fact, necessary complements to one another, just as post-capitalist and classic Marxist theories, far from being mutually exclusive, are vital tools for describing and understanding the world.
Puzzling Politics: A Methodology for Turning World-Systems Analysis Inside- Out
JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH, 2019
Can world-systems analysis illuminate politics? Can it help explain why illiberal regimes, outsider parties, and anti-immigrant rhetoric seem to be on the rise? Can it help explain any such national changes that seem destined to shift how nations relate to world markets? Leading surveys of historical sociology seem to say no. We disagree. While there are problems with Wallerstein's early mode of analyzing politics in the capitalist world-system from the outside-in, historical sociologists have been too quick to dismiss world-systems analysis. We propose an alternative inside-out approach anchored in a methodology for selecting what to study: those national political transformations which constitute puzzling instances within a given world-historical political process. We recommend promising theoretical lineages to guide empirical research on the selected puzzle: those that specify the elite social bases of politics. We thereby turn world-systems analysis inside-out. Our inside-out approach advances the project of world-systems analysis as a methodology, rather than a theoretical prescription in several ways. First, it addresses an important but largely overlooked question: how to select what to study. Second, it devises a methodology that can, but does not have to, pair with the methodology of incorporated comparisons. Third, it offers a methodology that stimulates, rather than forecloses, theoretical flexibility and fresh interpretations of politics and the world-economy. We illustrate the strengths of this new approach with three books, two of which won the best book award from ASA's Political Economy of the World System (PEWS) Section.
This paper is a contribution to ongoing discussion about improving the use of development assistance by starting from country realities and 'thinking and acting politically'. It is prompted by two concerns: 1) to build on the synergies that now exist between better country-context analysis and more innovative thinking about ways of working to facilitate desirable change; and 2) to combat the intrusion into this discussion of irrelevant academic controversies about basic concepts. It argues that the cause of better analysis for better action is not well served by a perspective driven by philosophical or methodological preoccupations rather than by relevant empirical findings. The paper has an Overview section and two further parts, intended for slightly different readerships. Part 1 is a table illustrating the proposition of the Overview: that a great deal of interesting learning is now to be had about viable forms of change-facilitation or reform entrepreneurship, and that this can be expressed clearly enough without reference to the 'structure-agency question' or any other heavy-duty sociological vocabulary. The table also illustrates that it is hardly possible to identify opportunities for change 'against the odds' without understanding the reasons why some patterns of behaviour are very persistent. Part 2 is for wonks. It makes a direct response to the substantial paper authored in 2012 by Hudson and Leftwich, which is strongly critical of certain trends in applied political economy analysis on the basis of concerns about 'agency' and over-use of 'rational choice' assumptions. Part 2 argues that the methodological arguments in the 2012 paper are not just a distraction, tending to polarise the community of practice on 'thinking and acting politically' in an unnecessary way. They are also not sound social science, reproducing some of the less defensible trends in academic sociology and politics since the 1980s. The errors include a systematic confusion between philosophical and empirical issues.
International Political Sociology: rethinking the international through dynamics of power
Setting the scene How to analyse and to describe the various ways power aggregates, concentrates and circulates in the world; a world which is politically fragmented, but where everyday lives are interconnected? This is one of the central interrogations that scholars of international political sociology seek to explore. Nowadays, most scholars remain dissatisfied with current forms of analysis of power that consider simply that the regulation by territorial states of questions of politics, economy and society is sufficient for analysing the flows of exchange and their world convolutions. Starting with states and the international system is a particular way of problematizing power and politics in terms of conjunctions (power politics), of homogenising them (politics is power), of reading historical trajectories through the lenses of a political order that is also a social order, and of transforming the state into an actor that subsumes its multitude and tries to regulate an 'inter-state' system along its interest and/or values. Once, one is ready to reject a world imagined as divided into mutually exclusive territorial states, without accepting too easily the idea of a long march towards a global world adjusting politics to the conditions of a global market, the problem of what the international today is, becomes a mesmerizing subject matter. The line of thought of International Political Sociology is born from this willingness to reopen the question of the international. In this chapter, I will argue that the roots of dissatisfaction concerning a vision of the international as an upper level regarding states and individuals lay in the assumptions of the traditional answers coming from the discipline of political science where international relations are conceived both as a specific sphere and as a separate level distinct from governmental politics, as well as, from the false alternative of a depoliticised global sociology, which is searching for a global social " whole " replacing the Hegelian dream of a world state by a more systemic approach of contradictions, but reducing always struggles to dysfunction. By contrast, the positioning of International Political Sociology scholars is distinctive. IPS thinks the international as the lengthening of chains of interdependences between actors that evolves either along centripetal or centrifugal dynamics. This allows first,
Rethinking World Bank influence: Governance reforms and the ritual aid dance in Indonesia, 2023
This chapter seeks to answer the question of what kind of conceptual framework can enable one, first, to contextualize and to unpack the World Bank’s engagement with a client government around policy change, second, to explain the implementation of, and challenges to, the reforms in practice that have been promoted by the World Bank (and adopted by a national government), and, third, to bring these first two issues into conversation to show how one impacts the other (and doesn’t). The answer to this question is based on a synthesis of five theoretical approaches. These approaches are rooted in: (a) political economy (specifically the “critical,” “international,” and “cultural” variants), (b) the literature on mechanisms of influence in global governance, (c) realist evaluation, (d) systems thinking, and (e) anthropology. In short, the first two of these set the macro framework and dynamics within which the work and influence of the World Bank is understood; the third (realist evaluation) directs attention to the logic of the reforms that will be unpacked; and the fourth (systems theory) and fifth (anthropology) help to flesh out the dimensions of interest when focusing on the context of implementation that is highlighted but not fully explained by realist evaluation. The essential characteristics of each of these approaches are discussed and integrated.
The Craft of the Social Scientist in the Global Arena Call for papers.pdf
Brill, 2023
Call for papers While an overwhelming number of studies have been conducted in the field of global studies, our goal here is to understand the methodological dimensions of the consequences, for social and political scientists – sociologists, anthropologists, human geographers, linguists –, to address the Global and its consequences linked to epistemological considerations. The empirical question is one of the most pressing and compelling ones since it addresses the very issue of ‘how’ globalization(s) work(s) and its impact on the craft of the Social scientists in terms of methodological and theoretical tools. Where and when is the global to be observed? What are the indicators of globalization and how to approach these processes? How to measure global flows? What are the relevant scales of observation? How is it possible to integrate various levels of analysis as the Global North/South relations or Eastern/Western divides and a discussion of glocal phenomena? What might constitute (a) global fieldwork(s)? What kind of data (macro and/or micro) should be mobilized? How to better situate social scientist’s positionality in the global economy of knowledge? These are the questions that our edited collection would like to address. This edited collection aims to present and discuss multi-scalar, multi-level and multi-sited methods commonly used to study the Global or its impacts. It will focus either on comparative objects that have major economic and cultural impacts or on issues, knowledge and goods that are left at the margin of globalization. Like the large field of research that is Global studies, these approaches are by definition multidisciplinary and simultaneously involve researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds and geographical areas. The book intends to discuss various possible approaches among which cosmopolitan sociology, connected history, world history, in light with the challenges posed, on one hand, by globalization and, on the other, the need for situated standpoints and knowledges claimed by feminist, postcolonial, decolonial, or post-western approaches for the last 30 years (Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis, 2002; Santos 2007; Mignolo 2000).