The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (19 page)

first Century, Jacques Delors (1996, p. i) states that education is `òne of the

principal means available to foster a deeper and more harmonious form of

human development and thereby to reduce poverty, exclusion, ignorance,

oppression and war.'' The World Bank has a different vision: ``Knowledge . . .

illuminates every economic transaction, revealing preferences, giving clarity to exchange, informing markets. And it is lack of knowledge that causes markets to

collapse, or never come into being'' (World Bank, 1999b, p. iii).

Thus, there are opposing assumptions about education that center on whether

it relates to utilities and market demand, or to the expansion of choice leading to self-determination. Evaluations aside, there are several considerations that suggest that the UNESCO model may be superior to the one proposed by the World

Bank. These considerations relate to the character of global interdependence,

and also how awareness of this interdependence empowers communities. High

rates of immigration and population movement accompany the transfer of

remittances, but also the transfer of information technologies (cable, telephones, radios, televisions, VCRs, computers). They also facilitate the diffusion of cultural values about knowledge. Immigrants have a unique perspective on how

knowledge and education in their host nation can bear on the educational needs

in their home nation.

A new understanding of diffusion is that formal education, like technology,

commodities, and foreign goods, adapts to local conditions (see Urry, chapter

one in this volume). This mutability and recontextualization involves the loca-

lization or, as Howes (1996) terms it, thè`creolization'' of institutions, products, and practices. In a general way, alternative uses and meanings come to be

conferred on institutions, products, and practices. Likewise, we can expect

that Western models of schooling will not always, or even often, be cloned

elsewhere.

The juxtaposition of universality and particularism is especially interesting in this regard. Consciousness of others' cultures ± their understandings, myths,

narrative possibilities ± is expanding, and so is personal and group access to

others' cultural products, social institutions and knowledge. As Auge (1994, p.

x) notes, we all participate in creating ``contemporaneous worlds'' with dis-

courses of consensus-seeking, community building, and interconnectedness.

Finding common grounds, with lessening spatial constraints, greatly enhances

our shared interests in identifying and acting on common objectives. In this sense we can speak and organize across national borders about justice and human

rights (see An-Naìm, chapter seven in this volume). This addresses the issue of

universalism.

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Judith R. Blau

This is not to suggest that cultural differences will become diluted. Existing

differences among locales can be intensified for several reasons. First, emigration and immigration patterns vary from place to place, with distinctive consequences. Because each ``module'' of migration is associated with multiple net-

works, all of which embed interpretations, ideas, and practices, locales have

many options. Contemporary global media help to exponentiate these options

(see Peters, chapter two in this volume). In other words, locales appropriate very distinctive commodities, knowledge, and culture from elsewhere, and people

construct their identities not only in terms of their locales, but also in terms of what they selectively choose from elsewhere. To be specific, every community

becomes a cosmopolitan hodgepodge, with a unique mix of cuisine, music, labor,

industry, ethnicity, religion, and so forth. Locales can keep the McDonalds and

Burger Kings at bay with sushi bars, Chinese take-out stores, frankfurter and

knish stands, and plantain and herring vendors. Each locale becomes a unique

configuration; this speaks to the issue of particularism.

Rethinking Politics

Accompanying globalization is the transformation of politics and political institutions. ``Cosmopolitan democracy,'' according to Archibugi et al. (1998), helps to capture the idea that the international order is becoming increasingly democratic in the sense that there are many chains of negotiation, multilevel and

multisited interconnections among population segments, and the expansion of

many kinds of exchanges. The expression `èverything is political'' conveyed in

the early 1990s that `èverything is contentious.'' But I will attempt to put a

different spin on what people might mean by that expression. Over recent

decades, I propose, there was a shift in deep-seated understandings about

social relations. This involves an emancipation of exchange relations from

their traditional asymmetries of power and privilege. In daily practice, this

notably means emancipation within intimate relations (Dozier and Schwartz,

chapter nine in this volume), but it also involves reconfigurations in organiza-

tions, and the declining significance of status ± but not class ± in everyday social relations.

`Èmancipation to what?'' There is no direct answer to that, but I suggest that

the processes underlying ``to what'' can be provisionally identified. Specifically, there is an increasing understanding that legitimacy is required of the process

itself and that legitimacy must be bilaterally or symmetrically negotiated. This is different from legitimacy that is authorized to some by others, that is demanded by some through fiat, or that is claimed as a matter of tradition. Additionally, such exchanges and transactions are decentralized as loosely coupled and multi-layered networks and structures, so that we can think of multiple sites as each

having different claims, stakes, and perspectives. The freedom accorded partici-

pants to exercise choice is not complete, since it is contingent on the process and, also, on others' choices. Unlike utility, which has a centered self and involves some certainty about means and ends, choice accompanies exchanges within

Bringing in Codependence

65

matrices of groups and individuals, and involves considerable ambiguities and

uncertainties.

How these processes work within the context of global market capitalism is

complex in interesting and paradoxical ways. For example, small producers in

poor nations that perform the work for large Western corporations are establish-

ing alliances with consumers and organizations from Western nations to exert

demands on corporate firms. This has been increasingly successful in cases

involving firms with brand-dependent reputations, such as Nike, Starbucks,

the Gap, Pepsi Cola, and many apparel manufacturers and petroleum companies

(see Stallings, 1995; Conroy, 1999). This is because actions can be coordinated

through far-flung networks that include not only the communities that are

adversely affected by corporate practices, but also consumer groups from afflu-

ent countries that are opposed to abusive corporate practices. Communities (say, in Brazil) and consumers (in Europe and the USA) together can create chains of

cooperation to bring public pressure to bear on companies around issues relating to sustainable communities, the environment, a living wage, child labor, health, and working conditions.

Traditional national politics are also undergoing transformation, with devolu-

tion and privatization of programs and the decline of ``high politics,'' earlier configured around class divisions and distinctive ideologies accompanying those

divisions (see chapters 18, by Savage, 19, by Klandermans, and 20, by Minkoff,

in this volume). The difference between Conservative and Liberal/Labour, or

between right and left, are confusing nowadays because they do not explain

much about either voters or office holders. These distinctions within the USA

are particularly confusing because they are confounded with an emergent polit-

ical neoliberalism, the retrenchment and cutbacks in welfare and other pro-

grams, and the ascendance of a ideology that each individual bears

entrepreneurial risks. The emerging inequalities are a consequence of the ways

in which ``risk-taking'' has been ``valorized'' (that is, subsidized). As a con-

sequence, those without the initial resources ± and the subsidization ± to take

risks are put at risk.

In the early decades of the twentieth century in the USA, social diversity was

decoupled from the economy and the workplace in a way that suppressed

people's identities. Immigrant workers, by taking on American identities, solved problems for factory owners, corporate managers, and foremen. In a sense, that

was what late nineteenth and early twentieth-century assimilation was all about.

Assimilation is no longer a desirable solution, nor even a practical one. There are high rates of migration; new immigrants, at least in the USA, are primarily

people of color who do not pass as white; people's communities involve long-

chained connections around the world; and group identities have partially dis-

placed identities bound up with the nation-state (see Kymlicka, 1995). Abstract

allegiances to the nation-state have been displaced by more concrete ties to

groups and locales, introducing into the social fabric a new social realism and

heterogeneity.

The assimilationist paradigm has, to a great extent, been replaced by the

paradigm of diversity, and this, in turn, is accompanied by a shift in social

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Judith R. Blau

theory away from the individual, and toward the group and group relations,

as publics, or as civil society. However, where these considerations run aground, at least in considering the American case, is around the issue of race. Black±

white inequalities are usually considered as a home-grown problem, but I will

explore the possibility that the social construction of race in the USA might be compared with other post-national, late twentieth-century formations.

Race

Colonial experiences involved the construction of `àlterity,'' or the construction of the Other as inferior, but also as exotic and erotic (Said, 1979). Yet globalizing experiences of the past decades involve dehierarchization of difference, the

decline of categorical thinking about groups, and the affirmation of diversity.

The US case is atypical because, though imperialistic at times, it was not a

colonial power in the classic sense. Itself a colony, it became a nation of

immigrants. However, initial settlers and early nineteenth-century immigrants

defined the nation as `Ànglo'' and conferred on new immigrants from South,

Central and Eastern Europe racial equality in exchange for their abandoning

their cultural and linguistic practices. Through assimilation and the suppression of difference, immigrants became Americans. In contrast, whites reified differences between themselves and blacks, and also Native Americans.

About a century ago Frank Boas (1906) maintained that race does not exist ±

that it is a mere social construction of racists. However, Boas underestimated, as we now understand, the tenacity of social constructions. Glazer's (1997)

recent argument that blacks are simply one grouping within many in a highly

diverse society is not very helpful; it ignores how powerful and persisting are

the forces of racial exclusion. Recognizing this, Omni and Winnant (1986),

and critical race theory generally, describe the disparities between American

whites and blacks as being ideologically constructed through racialization.

This descriptive account implies that the plane of transformation will be on

cultural grounds. Wellman (1993, p. 222) is more concrete: ``White racism is

what white people do to protect the special benefits they gain by virtue of their skin color.''

Why do whites do what they do? One conjecture, based on my interpretation

of W. E. B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk (1903), is that excluded racial

minorities possess a deep-seated and complex culture, which is a consequence

of adapting to exclusion while simultaneously being members of society. As a

consequence, blacks understand mainstream culture from a perspective that

whites do not, and can also navigate between black and the white-defined

culture with a fine-tuned understanding of the differences. From this perspective, whites do what they do because they feel threatened by what they imagine those

who are excluded might know, and, also, then, what they fear about those they

have excluded.

A related interpretation of the persistence of racism can be derived from

Appadurai's (1996) insightful argument, in which he compares being white in

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67

America with other contemporary ethnic solidarities. With the transition out of

modernity, ethno-nationalisms emerge as solidarity formations around ``hot''

first-order identities involving, for example, ethnicity, language, religion, and descent. As examples of such ``hot'' identities, he cites movements in Bosnia,

Serbia, Sri Lanka, Namibia, Punjab, and Quebec. Such nationalisms serve to

protect groups against corporate capitalism and to preserve societal integrity as it is defined by religious values, ethnic identity, and primary solidarities. The pursuit of community aptly describes groups and nations that seek such social-political alternatives to capitalism, such as Iran, but also ones that etch out

strong identities in their adversarial relations with proximate groups. These

include Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs, but also the Israelis and Palestinians, and the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. Such groups mobilize around