Xavier Rambla Sociologia

Las investigaciones sobre la globalización han mostrado sobradamente su carácter pluriescalar. Los agentes sociales actúan en las escalas globales por encima del estado, pero también a través de varias escalas; y los estados participan en todo ello de varios modos (vésase Saskia Sassen y Susan Robertson, p.ej.)

Uno de los nuevos fenómenos de este tipo parece ser la proliferación de planes educativos internacionales. Además del Programa de Educación para Todos, coordinado por UNESCO, destacan la Estrategia 2020 de la Unión Europea y las Metas Educativas de la Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos Además, varios países emergentes que tienen una organización federal han adoptado la misma herramienta de política educativa para coordinar a todas la autoridades educativas de su territorio: Brasil, China, India y Unión Sudafricana.

En los últimos meses este proceso parece haber influido en la reconstrucción de varios países tras las revueltas en los países árabes. Al menos, la OEI ha firmado un acuerdo con la Liga Árabe para la Educación y la Cultura que apunta en este sentido.

Many scholars stress the role of collective projects in socio-economic development. In their view, although social change produces many unexpected and undesired effects, collective projects can make a difference in crucial social transformations. Elites, political organisations, civil societies and social movements create and propose these projects. These assumptions are normally associated with Antonio Gramsci’s views in the 1920s and 1930s, and may be labelled as the “production of society” (Touraine, UAB library code:  301 Tou) or “theories of social becoming” with a high historical coefficient (Sztompka: code in UAB library 301.17 Szt ).

Post-development theorists and historical institutionalists draw on this approach to spell out the political clues of big social transformations that either favour or hinder the dimensions of human development such as well-being, schooling, health and so on. For instance, Arturo Escobar attributes the flaws of many programs to their inspiration on grand narratives of development biased by Western worldviews. Similarly, Peter Evans finds out a powerful mechanism in deliberative development triggered by participatory institutions and collective mobilisation.

Remarkably, the historical coefficient (or historicity) does not necessarily make reference to the Nineteenth or event former centuries but to a set of properties of all past and present societies. These theories emphasize that societies are dynamic networks of relations instead of fixed realities, that changes are multi-dimensional instead of products of mainstream trends, that events play a decisive role in all conjunctures depending on the views, aims and power resources of the social agents who intervene. Coherently, most of them also rely on agent-based analyses of the social order.

As to some particular analyses of Social Change and Globalisation, the authors who research the power relations that shaped financialisation clearly share these assumptions.

A long tradition of scholars portrays socio-economic development as a line of stages from primitive economies and closed social orders towards postindustrial economies and open societies. In sociology, the work of Ronald Inglehart (2006, UAB library code:301.175 Ing)  has recently contributed to this line of analysis by portraying a sequence of economic, political and cultural changes that lead to economic growth, stable democracy and postmaterialist values. In economics Douglass North has pointed at a hypothetical trend of social changes from closed-access to limited- and finally open-access social orders. Michael Spence also outlines the change of economic structures from low-value to high-value industries in a similar way.

Besides discussing their potential and lots of associated controversies, it is important to notice that these theories retrieve an old understanding of change in social theory, which could be roughly labelled as a Hegelian view. In essence, they assume that social reality entails an internal mechanism that triggers the mainstream changes that most social entities undergo; therefore, it is plausible to derive predictive hypotheses on the likely outcomes of a given conjuncture. These are theories with a low historical coefficient (see Sztompka: code in UAB library 301.17 Szt).

These authors may endorse both structure-based and agency-based explanations of the social order. On the one hand, Inglehart predicts the lines of probable change depending on the (dis)integration of economic, political and cultural structures. The stages of development are the outcome of these societal attributes. On the other hand, for North closed, limited-access and open-access societies are emergent institutional equilibria produced by similarly rational individuals who respond  to different incentives. Then, these equilibria become a fixed reality that patterns following change.

In 2010 the Multidimensional Poverty Index was published for the first time. This indicator takes income into account, certainly, but it also synthesizes relevant information about education (schooling and enrolment), health (child mortality and bad nutrition) as well as an array of possible material deprivations (concerning electricity, drink water, sanitation, cooking fuel and others). Remarkably, it reports on the worldwide inequality between such regions as Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia, on the poorer side, and others like the OECD and some Asian countries, in the richer one, with big regions like Latin America standing somewhere in the middle. But the MPI also unveils rampant divides within all these countries regardless of their average status as underdeveloped, intermediate, emergent or developed.

By reading official data carefully and looking at some bibliographical sources, students in the Social Structure and Change at UAB (2010-11) have convincingly shown that these internal inequalities also affect European societies. For instance, they have produced sound reports of gender disparities concerning labour and income in the better-off countries (e.g. the Netherlands), destitution affecting some minorities such as the Roma in Slovakia, multidimensional child poverty in the UK, or crucial institutional effects of welfare regimes on patterns of household poverty in Estonia and Spain.

Despite inequalities and wars, world average health and income has dramatically improved for the last two hundred years. See these two videos about the relationship between public health and socio-economic development, for instance.

However, the 2010 Human Development Report clearly shows that many people still lack a minimum income, drop out of school very early, live in very poorly conditioned dwellings and live less years than others.

Do these problems depend on per capita income? Partially, but some exceptions are very significant. For example, in India the state of Kerala has achieved quite good health indicators with a low income per capita. The question, then, is why.

Recently, the film Inside Job denounced the hidden interests of the Wall Street corporations and a group of scholars who eventually provoked the financial crash in 2008. According to the film, by inventing and accrediting new complex financial assets, they compelled the whole industry to engage in very risky practices that created a huge bubble. Afterwards, most of them have disguised their role in the story, and hardly anybody has been prosecuted.

The essays of students in the Social Structure and Change course (2010-11) convincingly show how this global trend resonated in quite varied ways in many countries. Thus, some countries tried to avail of the bubble to become financial hubs (at a huge cost depending on the size of their fiscal resources), while others shaped an apparently thriving macro-economic scenario by tolerating a housing boom. Even more, some middle-income countries engaged in speculation to compensate for important macro-economic contradictions, and some global banks and funds actively collaborated with them.

Sociological and economic analysts have suggested two sorts of causes to account for these social changes, and their devastating effects. On the one hand, some authors blame key mistakes in the institutional design of financial markets and national legislations for the whole problem. The rules of the game underwent a dramatic transformation in the 1970s- 1980s, but the resulting arrangements were not careful enough with the information on which complex financial assets relied on. On the other, some authors signal at lobbying, moral hazards, ideological campaigns and many aspects of corporate power. Thus, they analyse “neoliberalism” or the “transnational capitalist class” as the emergence of powerful social agents who imposed these arrangements and benefited from them.

Therefore, these analyses are retrieving the old sociological discussions on social order and conflict. Nowadays, the classical assumption that states contain full and distinct social structures has been challenged by gobalisation studies, but the never-ending debate on the causal importance of cohesion and division is once again at the front page of sociological concerns.