Sociology · Ch 11 — Globalisation and Social Change
Introduction
Introduction
No account of twenty-first-century social change can avoid globalisation — you have already brushed up against the term in earlier chapters, discussing rural society, Indian industry, and Mumbai's ambitions as a 'global city'. Outside the classroom too it turns up constantly, in newspapers, on television, in ordinary conversation. Yet it resists a single, tidy definition: economists tend to foreground capital flows, political scientists the changing role of governments, and so on — the process is broad enough that no single discipline can explain it alone. Sociology's own contribution is what is often called the sociological imagination — the habit of tracing connections between the personal and the structural, the small scale and the large, the neighbourhood and the planet.
That habit generates a distinctive set of questions: how does a remote village's peasant feel the effects of global change? What has happened to middle-class job prospects? What does it mean for the corner grocer when large transnational retailers are allowed in? Why have shopping malls spread across Indian towns, and how has globalisation reshaped how young people spend their free time?
Some of the shifts are visible on a kitchen shelf. Since April 2001, when India lifted quantitative restrictions on imports, a Chinese pear or an Australian apple competing for space at the local fruit stall is unremarkable, and so is imported orange juice or frozen ready-to-fry chips at the neighbourhood store — small, cumulative changes in what a household eats and drinks. The same trade-opening policy, however, plays out very differently depending on where you stand: it may simply mean more choice for an affluent urban consumer, while spelling a livelihood crisis for a producer undercut by cheaper imports.
Among the clearest examples: silk spinners and twisters in Bihar lost work once cheaper Chinese and Korean silk yarn arrived; large foreign fishing vessels operating in Indian waters have squeezed out local fishing communities, affecting the women who sort, dry, and sell the catch; gum collectors in Gujarat lost income to cheaper imported gum from Sudan; and rag-pickers in Indian cities lost ground once other countries began exporting their waste paper here.
These changes feel intensely personal — they alter individual lives and habits — even though they trace back to public-policy decisions, including India's commitments to the World Trade Organisation. Given how unevenly globalisation's costs and benefits fall, it is unsurprising that opinions about it — whether it is a net good, a net harm, or nothing especially new at all — remain sharply divided.