The starting point for this book was a workshop entitled âTransnationalization of problems and agendas: Theoretical and empirical challengesâ that took place in Nottingham during the 2017 Joint Sessions of the European Consortium for Political Research.1 If the aim of the workshop was a better understanding of transnationalization processes, its driver was dissatisfaction with two specific aspects of research in this area. The ambition for this book is to transform dissatisfaction into fruitful theoretical and empirical statements.
The first source of dissatisfaction was academiaâs indiscriminate use of the words âglobalâ and âglobalizationâ in relation to issues or problems, and the major risk of oversimplification this entails. The globalization category becomes largely meaningless when it is taken for granted. The word âglobaloneyâ has even been coined to suggest the emptiness of many of its uses, as if combining the adjective âglobalâ with any kind of social fact magically produces a deeper understanding and testifies to the theoretical modernity of its user. In the field of social problems studies, the adjunction of the term âglobalâ to certain issues since the 1990s indicates a growing attention to issues considered to have considerable impacts on billions of people, beyond borders (Chirico, 2018; Glynn, Hohm, & Stewart, 1996; Mazur, 2007; Seitz & Hite, 1991/2012; Snarr & Snarr, 1998/2012). Concurrently, it demonstrates the increasing interdependency of countries in contemporary societies. From this perspective, a successful undergraduate textbook defines two types of global issues:
First, there are those issues that are transnational onesâthat is, they cross political boundaries (country borders). These issues affect individuals in more than one country. A clear example is air pollution produced by a factory in the United States and blown into Canada. Second, there are problems and issues that do not necessarily cross borders but affect a large number of individuals throughout the world. Ethnic rivalries and human right violations, for example, may occur within a single country but have a far wider impact. (Snarr & Snarr, 1998/2012, p. 2)
While this type of definition points to a crucial reappraisal in social sciences, namely the fact that problems long studied within national social systems deserve a broader approach,2 it only tells part of the story. Authors giving useful depictions of âthe most important environmental, economic, social, and political concerns of modern lifeâ (Seitz & Hite, 1991/2012, cover) or âexamining major problems around the worldâ (Mazur, 2007, cover) compile long lists of âglobal issues,â from weapons proliferation to the regulation of the atmospheric commons.3 In doing so, they attempt to establish an objective hierarchy of problems, overlooking the struggles around the recognition of some issues and leaving other issues out altogether, regardless of how critical they may be for some social actors. Textbooks are regularly re-edited to include additional chapters about ânewâ (though not necessarily more important or more global) problems and the choice of issues usually appears reasonable and coherent. Why? It is worth noting that the issues labeled as globalâislamophobia, the instability and fluidity of conjugality, or animal abuse and well-being, for exampleâare selected because they have been socially defined as important, debated in TV studios or at political rallies, and supported and challenged by spokespersons. In short, they have already been transformed from âissuesâ into âsocial problems.â Meanwhile, other issues may have an enormous impact on particular groups or multiple countries and yet remain under the radar, due to a lack of voices expressing them. To go back to the first example in the definition quoted above, the effects of industrial smoke crossing borders will only be discussed if they are visible enough to be detected, if their negative impacts on public health are known, if some interpretive categories such as âpollutionâ or âindustrial hazardâ are available, and if claims-makers challenge the situation. The existence of an âissueâ is never enough in itself. Issues do not speak. Claims-makers do.
Thus, our claim is that a political sociology of the âglobalizationâ of problems must explore the processes by which, among the enormous variety of issues that are not unique to one country, some, and only some, trigger attention, discussion, and policy action.4 Global issues are not global in essence, waiting to be identified by clever academics. They are the products of networks of interdependencies, of communication systems. They gain the status of âproblemsâ in the media and public opinion through the cross-border actions of claims-makers. This critical stance is not specific to global issues. It was already at the heart of the constructivist approach to social problems as it distanced itself from a reified perspective of problems. However, it would seem that this insight got lost somewhere along the way to globalization.
The second source of dissatisfaction behind our collective work was the strange absence of synergy between âthe social construction of public problemsâ paradigm institutionalized by Gusfield (1963) and Spector and Kitsuse (1977) on the one hand, and the powerful agenda setting tradition deriving from the seminal research by Cobb and Elder (1972) and McComb and Shaw (1972) on the other. Each approach has contributed rich case studies and theoretical developments that illuminate different aspects of the globalization of problems. The agenda setting approach has developed impressive international comparisons (Princen, 2009) and, more recently, has examined the influence of national agendas on each other, questions that are underdeveloped in the social construction approach. It has produced solid materials for understanding the interdependencies between media agendas, opinions, and policies. Conversely, social constructionists have paid much more attention to the actions, peculiarities, and trajectories of claims-makers, as well as to the process of news production, while the proponents of agenda setting focus on the journalistic output. If it is too much to describe these two research communities as being in conflict or in a state of mutual ignorance, their relationship does bring to mind a famous French song from the 1960s: âJe tâaimeâŚmoi non plusâ (I love youâŚneither do I). We want to explore the possible convergences and bridges between the social construction and agenda setting approaches,5 as well as with other scholarly traditions within political and social sciences that deal with globalization issues, such as international relations, policy transfer studies, global health studies, media studies, sociology of science, and expertise. This book can therefore also be considered an attempt to supply a provisional synthesis of poorly connected research fields studying the multifaceted processes that go into globalizing problems, agendas, and policies.
The Making of Global Problems
This book considers that issues are not global simply by virtue of existing in several countries, in a tightly interconnected world, but as a result of processes. It engages with three related research questions.
Firstly, it tries to clarify the category of âglobal problemsâ to enable an academically sound exploration of the international dimension of public problems. What can be defined sociologically as a âglobal problemâ? If we start from the position that issues are not global per se, that they cannot cross borders or impact people in more than one country in and of themselves, the answer to this question is not straightforward. In line with the constructivist approach, we would argue that âglobalâ is a putative rather than an objective condition, even though some problems in certain circumstances are more likely to become global than others. Based on the agenda setting approach, we also assume that global issues have been framed as such and put on the agenda of global or international organizations. If problems appear to be more global nowadays, historians and sociologists can remind us that attempts to handle social problems and to build social policies at an international scale characterize some periods (the second half of the nineteenth century, from 1945 onward) and institutions (such as the ILO or the WHO). The effort to define âglobal problemsâ thus consists less in explaining how they appeared out of the blue fifty years ago than in making sense of how some kinds of issues came to be considered to require management across national borders, giving birth to a new cognitive category of âglobal problems.â Inspired by a social history of ideas, we argue that this inte...