What is global and what is local? A theoretical discussion around globalization (Jean-Sébastien Guy)

This article develops a new sociological understanding of the difference between global and local relating to the phenomena of globalization. Globalization itself is redefined as one of society’s self-description insofar as, following Niklas Luhmann’s theory, society is conceived as a cognitive system that can only handle information (about the world, about itself) only through its own specific operation (communication), so that globalization affects society solely when the latter communicates about the former. This effectively happens, it is argued, because communications about globalization convey an account of society’s current state, i.e. a description of society within society, hence fulfilling the system’s need for self-knowledge. The global value then coincides with the content of the particular self-description that globalization is, whereas the local value corresponds to the content of all other self-descriptions as seen from the previous perspective. Global and local are not spatial structures (levels, scales, places, distances, etc.), but different representations of space competing with each other in a process to determine within society, the reality that society is. In the second part of the article, the ideas of Roland Robertson about globalization are reinterpreted so as to provide support to this new understanding of the difference global/local. Robertson distinguished four images of world-order which can be taken as equivalent to four self-descriptions of society. Globalization is precisely one of them. Contrasts between images of world-order as imagined by Robertson himself can thus illuminate what the global and the local have in common and how they diverge from each other.