Recent discussions about globalization processes emphasize two apparently contradictory characteristics of such processes: homogenization and universalization, on one hand, and their contribution to an ever more complex and uncontrollable world, on the other. Indeed, the economic power of globally organized transnational corporations increasingly translates into a standardization of mass culture and universal tendencies of wasteful consumption of natural resources. Contrastingly, due to the unequal distribution of wealth, among other factors, the same pressures of homogenization provoke an increasingly diverse spectrum of strategies to cope with these pressures, which leads to an increasingly complex patchwork of social relations. National and regional institutions and traditions in fact play an often neglected mediatory role in filtering and transforming the effects of globalization.
Such observations point to the possibility that the alternative between an increasingly homogenized “flat world” and an increasingly complex network of social relations may be insufficient to capture the dynamics of globalization processes. Evidently, globalization comprises the transcultural diffusion, integration and transformation of a broad variety of means of social cohesion, ranging from goods to language, to belief systems and political institutions. Globalization thus results from a variety of processes, all characterized by the tension between unification and growing complexity.
Jürgen Renn and Malcolm D. Hyman
The Globalization of Knowledge in History
http://www.edition-open-access.de/studies/1/index.html
http://www.edition-open-access.de/media/studies/1/Studies1.pdf
Chapter 1
The Globalization of Knowledge in History: An Introduction
by Jürgen Renn and Malcolm D. Hyman
Globalization Processes of Knowledge
by Jürgen Renn, Matteo Valleriani, Helge Wendt, Sonja Brentjes, Jochen Büttner, Matthias Schemmel
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/projects/DEPT1_400Renn-Globalization
Globalization is understood as the global or potentially global diffusion of any means of social cohesion, be it economic, political, technical, cultural, or epistemic. Globalization can therefore be traced back to the beginnings of human history. Its processes typically involve several layers, such as the migration of populations, the spread of technologies, and the dissemination of languages, religious ideas, or of political and economic structures. Recent discussions about globalization processes emphasize two apparently contradictory characteristics of such processes: homogenization and universalization, on the one hand, and their contribution to an ever more complex and uncontrollable world, on the other. The contrast between the tendency toward an ever “flatter” and an increasingly “fractal” world suggests that comprehensive globalization processes result from a superposition of these various layers, with knowledge playing a pivotal role in orchestrating the interaction of these layers, also by shaping the identity of the historical actors. By studying the globalization of knowledge in history, an epistemological framework has been elaborated that enables the systematic analysis of historical processes of technology transfer, the spread of epistemic frameworks, the dynamic relation between local and global knowledge traditions, and the globalization of modern science. It makes use of a classification of different forms of knowledge, of different forms of representation, as well as of transmission and transformation processes. The concept of the mental allows here the conceptualization of context-dependent reasoning mechanisms that are not mathematized or otherwise structured as a deductive system.