Globalization and Law in Everyday Life

Globalization and Law in Everyday Life

Since the early 1980s, a vast scholarly literature has explored the subject of globalization in its many manifestations. As a part of this burgeoning field of inquiry, law and society researchers have discovered numerous aspects of transnational legal behavior that are worthy of attention. Their research has offered new explanations for sociolegal change that previously eluded scholars who too narrowly focused on the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis. Nevertheless, law and society research has focused primarily on transnational interactions and global actors and has paid less attention to the implications of globalization for a topic that has long been central to the law and society field: the role of law in the everyday lives, interactions, and consciousness of ordinary people. This entry addresses the connections that law and society researchers can draw between these two subjects.

In the diverse and often contested scholarship on globalization, the one thing that all writers agree upon is that the term itself means different things to different scholars.

Law School

Law, Ruth

Law School

David Harvey noted that an essential feature of globalization is "time-space compression" (1990: 240). Anthony Giddens cautioned against the common assumption that globalization is essentially an economic phenomenon and argued instead that it has arisen from the transformation of the technologies of communication. "Globalization is political, technological and cultural, as well as economic. It has been influenced above all by developments in systems of communication, dating back only to the late 1960s" (2003: 10). Consistent with this emphasis on the communicative aspects of globalization, Arjun Appadurai contended that it is best understood in terms of "global cultural flows" that can be studied along five related dimensions: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes.

A body of theory has thus emerged that suggests globalization is not simply economic "development" or...