The Bonn Handbook of Globality

Globality is considered a concept to symbolize the unity of the world, not the factual process of advancing globalization. It recognizes the unity of the earth and of mankind, but does not force the factual diversity in space and time under the parameters of one single theory. Globality is a starting point for the relational reflection about the effects of unprecedented interdependencies and contrasts, which constitute the world in the twenty-first century. In considering the world, the notion of globality offers space and perspective to accommodate the manifold implications of this “global turn.” Reconceptualizing key concepts and symbolizations of human interaction is the best possible approach to enhance our understanding about globality and its effects.

With reference to modern anthropology, the text argues why the selected lemmata/keywords for the encyclopedia should cover the areas of labor, politics, ethics, education, art, and religion. The text also explains how the encyclopedia should include the three modalities of concept formation in the humanities: understanding, interpretation, and application. The understanding seeks to reconstruct methodically what generates, characterizes, and regulates the interpreted phenomenon. The process of interpretation construes the self-perception either immanently or according to certain criteria. With regard to application, the criteria reflect scientific domains and in relation to successful action/a well-balanced course of action.

In my contribution I argue that globalization cannot be reduced to an economic process that takes place regardless of the participant’s conceptualizations of it. The very process of globalization as such has repercussions in the symbolic order where agents represent the meaning of sociopolitical events to themselves. In particular, this feature becomes manifest when reflecting on the fact that theories of globalization bear all the marks of the phenomenon they aim at characterizing. The global market of ideas, which globalization is, is inscribed in globalization as its symbolic counterpart, without which the phenomenon itself would have been something different. This leads me to the conclusion that an ontology of a plurality of worlds (or fields of sense, as I call them for technical reasons) is an apt way of making sense of the profound conceptual changes forced upon social scientists and philosophers alike when it comes to theorizing about globalization.

Today’s globalization is merely a technical, in other words economic, military, information technology-based scientific embodiment of the unfathomable universality of human beings. The text therefore first sketches out a few profiles of philosophical universal proposals and a few ancient voices of the historians. Against this backdrop, the text explains an initial greater-space theory of Franz Rosenzweig and after this the diagnosis of the contemporary globalization process, which we owe to Joachim Ritter. Finally, the text presents a counter-concept of Carl Schmitt that proceeded Ritter’s diagnosis by only a few years.

This chapter first states the concept’s basic assumptions in order for “globality” to be looked at from a historical perspective. It then recaptures in short the transformation of intercultural approaches to history, thereby reconstructing the—decreasing, but still persisting—dominance of Western perspectives and locating the advance of global perspectives on history. The three phases of globalization are being tracked, to define the object of study: globality. Finally, fundamental questions of research are shortly introduced—regarding the mere existence of a “global history”; a possible “natural” convergence of global societies; the effects of societies’ structures on economics and politics; the interrelations between globality, religions, and cultures; and the non-solvable tensions between, to some degree, opposing understandings of globality and globalization as structures or processes and the implications thereof.

Decisive for the meaning of “body” is whether it is understood in the context of a dualistic or of a monistic anthropology. According to Plato, body is the soul fallen out of the prison of God’s existence. For Descartes, who formulated the dualism between body and soul, body is reduced to a machine which stirs the human mind. Distinguished from these dualistic approaches are those concepts which start from the unity of life, from a bodily being which can only distinguish its internal aspects (soul, subject, person) and its external aspects (body, object). This phenomenological approach corresponds with the Judeo-Christian anthropology. The different concepts of the body generate different ethical consequences.

This chapter aims to identify the effects of the global turn on European research into the human brain and mind. On the basis of specific examples, it is concluded that the global turn has noticeably influenced European psychological and neuroscientific research. First, European research into human cognition has been strongly influenced by American science since the early twentieth century. These influences are still felt, and there is considerable exchange of ideas between North America and Europe. Second, research in cross-cultural psychology has shown that the cultural context may affect even fundamental mechanisms of perception and cognition. Lastly, European research has arguably gained from investigating non-European practices such as meditation in order to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of how the human brain and the mind work. Overall, these influences are currently evident in Europe, both within everyday psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Clothing is a defining anthropological feature of humans as opposed to animals. It can be understood in a functional way, serving as a protection from the irregularities of weather, fulfilling special functions, or expressing social rank or task. Also, it can be seen as a symbol, and then it has a cultural meaning in that it indicates certain sub-communities through traditional or established norms. Dress codes founded through tradition are probably embedded more strongly in individual and collective sets of values and beliefs than those established through convention. The functional meaning of clothing and its traditional-cultural meaning cannot be replaced by each other, but each demand separate consideration and a separate handling. Through global exchange, the clothing tradition is politically functionalized as, conversely, in the solely function-oriented understanding of clothing in secularized, deregulated, or open societies public dress is always regarded in a functional way. On a global level, different concepts confront each other in the communication system of clothing, which cannot be ignored or mediated, but demand new modes of intermediation.

The etymology of the term competence and its connotations in the fields of psychology and education since the 1950s are outlined. The term’s global importance emerged through the reception of international school achievement comparisons such as the PISA studies. A closer look at the relevance attributed to competence reveals that it is used with considerable variety of meaning even within the scope of the same empirical set-up. A solely cognitive understanding, but also emphasis on motivational or emotional processes, on metacognitive aspects or additional educational goals can be found in underlying definitions. Measurements only partly fulfill the explicated criteria. As a result of this analysis, six open questions are raised which call for answers in the process of developing a well-needed standard definition.

Since the pivotal and highly contrasting treatises of Süßmilch (1741) and Malthus (1798), the history of demography has been characterized by a remarkable variety of theories and concepts which can be considered as answers and reactions to the divergent social and political developments in industrialized countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At present the worldwide population development is characterized by a “global demographic divide” between strongly growing regions and an increasing number of countries whose population tends to stagnate and decrease. This development may lead to significant shifts of economic and political power. In the long run, however, and according to the projections of the UN based on the “model of demographic transition,” it is expected that the population growth of the “more” and “less developed” regions will converge and stagnate, leveling off at approximately 11 billion people at the beginning of the twenty-second century. Whereas in the past, securing the food supply for the growing world population was considered a major problem, it can be assumed that in the future climate change and the destruction of the natural environment will be the major challenges which the global population will be confronted with.

Education and formation are necessary requirements to develop as an individual person or as a collaborative culture. Education is an individual phenomenon which concerns the being and becoming of a subject. However, education simultaneously is a collective phenomenon as well (e.g., language learning). It is used for conventional educational establishments. Traditionally, education targets the purchase of skills and patterns of behavior, of thinking, and of identification. Those prepare the adolescents for their gendered social role. Globalization had an enormous impact on the concept of education and formation. One key aspect of the global conflict lies within the debate of how education can be measured and how the quality of education can be explored in research studies.

Research on emotion is strongly routed in psychology, but many scientific disciplines including neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, and ethnology have contributed. Beginning with the pioneering work of Charles Darwin (1972), emotion research was a truly cross-cultural or global research endeavor. One of the most important discourses in emotion research revolved around the question whether human emotions are predominantly determined by genetically based biological features of the conditio humana or by the more contingent historical development of social rules. For both perspectives there is impressive evidence. The universalist perspective is backed by the fairly culture-independent ability of humans to recognize emotions in members of very different cultures. The culture-relativistic position is corroborated by ample evidence that different cultures feature very different social rules such as which kind of emotions and emotional expressions are considered adequate or permitted in specific situations. The last century has seen a dramatic shift in the emotion discourse. Whereas the leading emotion scholars in the nineteenth century were almost exclusively European, this geographical domination came to an end with a global turn during the World War II. From then on, emotion research (and psychology in general) was clearly dominated by the United States. Only in recent years do we observe a European comeback, and first signs of a truly globalized scientific discourse including scholars from hitherto underrepresented parts of the world.

Family structures prevailing in Germany during the past centuries are outlined, illustrating that the core family of father, mother, and child(ren) was only temporarily the dominant form of cohabitation. Over the past 50 years, participation of women in education and working life has undergone remarkable changes, but mothers are still largely held responsible for the outcomes of child care and education at present. The German population has become highly variegated due to large numbers of migrants from Southern European countries, especially from Turkey since the 1970s. Different educational goals and measures may lead to problems when members of the migrant population come in close contact with the social majority. In general, birth rates have decreased, while expectations regarding the way parents raise and educate their children have risen.

For Greek and Roman philosophers, the ideal friendship can only exist among virtuous people, who by their intercourse help one another to become morally perfect. While Christian authors transfer this concept of friendship to the relationship between God and mankind, in later centuries friendship is understood as social duty. Industrialization with its increasing social and educational differentiation causes social changes that influence the reality as well as the theory of friendship, so that it is no longer thought of as lasting for a life and concerning all aspects of life. In the wake of this weakening of friendship, sociology even criticizes the wish for friendship as a selfish attitude that should be replaced by participation in groups with shared interests. Modern philosophy tends to confirm the importance of friendship for the development of tolerance and social competence.

Taken from the terminology of grammar, gender has become an indispensable category of transdisciplinary analysis and has emerged as a high-impact factor in the ongoing struggle for equality and justice. The following essay traces the career and the changing implications of the term from its early usage in the US American women’s movement and in women’s studies of the 1960s and 1970s via its complex redefinitions through gender theory in the 1980s and 1990s to the current recognition of gender as an agent as well as an effect of globalization. Yet, the argument does not claim a general narrative of progress. Instead, it stresses the critical interventions by women of color who insisted on the weight of “race” and class and inserted a postcolonial perspective. Critically discussing the constraining effects of including gender into the agendas of global institutions and NGOs, the essay concludes that while globalization has enabled emancipatory local gender policies, it has, at the same time, tended to counteract their sustainable success.

Happiness is an episodic or periodical concept, which can describe both a subjective sentiment and an objective fulfillment. Against the background of today’s pluralism, this leads to the question as to whether one should follow a subjective understanding of happiness or measure it by objective standards. The rational desire model offers a solution: in order to rate happiness, the component of the fulfillment of desire is filtered by rational criteria. Meanwhile, most of the empirical attempts to systematize the quality of life collapse at the hurdle of describing the decisive point.

The starting point is the idea that there is no neutral term of medicine. But, neither national nor international health organizations do not make this transparent. Rather, they work implicitly with a conception of “Western medicine” or biomedicine. Cultural anthropology approaches criticize those terms because these definitions do not apply to non-Western societies which do not differentiate between the body and mind. The article explains first the genesis of biomedicine in European history. In the present it is characterized by three principles, biologization, sacralization, and pluralism. Second, the present-day concept of biomedicine will be culturally compared with non-European medical systems within a global framework. It will be seen that also the European concepts of disease vary considerably. Third, in a final step, the global turn in the study of health and medicine will be worked out.

The relevance of intelligence for society is based on the prediction of criteria that are relevant for success and performance in the society by means of intelligence test scores. The biopsychological and genetic foundation of intelligence is regarded as a further basis for its global relevance. Moreover, it is noted that conventional intelligence tests do not require test-performing individuals to identify themselves with the goals of the tests. The detachment of the work objectives from the immediate goals of the individuals is a central characteristic of modern industrial societies that are based on the division of labor. Thus, conventional intelligence tests fit well to the functionalistic perspective of industrialized societies. A possible critique of the cultural values behind conventional intelligence tests should therefore also be extended to the conventional workplace requirements of industrial societies.

This chapter gives an overview of important philosophical accounts of knowledge. It starts with Plato’s idea of knowledge as a certain true judgement with an account which stands as the origin of the famous tripartite analysis of knowledge as justified true belief in modern epistemology. Descartes’ concept of knowledge as clear and distinct perception is introduced and shown that it leads to a radical and universal skepticism regarding empirical knowledge of the external world. It is argued that twentieth-century philosophy of cognition and philosophy of science has been more open to accepting concepts of knowledge in which epistemic justification of beliefs is fallible. Furthermore, recent trends in philosophical theories of knowledge, such as naturalistic approaches in epistemology as well as virtue epistemology and social accounts of knowledge, are described and connections to the global turn in cultural sciences are drawn.

After an exposure of basic concepts for the definition of stages of life, such as maturation, the influence of critical life events, the role of developmental tasks, and socialization of some prescientific models of life’s phases (e.g., Confucius, Shakespeare) are outlined. Already the prescientific models show what functions (also) scientific life stage and life phase models (can) have, e.g., deviations from a “normal state” attract a desire to intervene, whether through education, counseling, or psychotherapy. Then some modern scientific life-cycle orientated models for phases and stages of life (Charlotte Bühler, Robert J. Havighurst, Erik H. Erikson) are described. These models consider individual development—as a lifelong project—embedded in cultural processes. This leads to a “broader concept of development” where individual differences and differential changes come into the focus. Lifetime development is an interplay between society, history, culture, and biology with important practical, political, economic, ethical implications.

Human nutrition and the changing food situation have become more and more influenced by global forces. This relates to globally interconnected value chains, trade, production systems, the science system, as well as tastes and nutrition behavior in a more urbanized world. The chapter reviews the determinants of these global change patterns in broad terms since the 1880s and the global policy responses that shape the pattern and outcomes in terms of nutritional improvement and lack thereof. It concludes that nutrition must be addressed simultaneously by institutional and technological innovations on the supply side and with incentives and information for behavioral change on the demand side to achieve food security and health.

In all literate societies, the skill of reading is of pivotal importance. It regulates the ability to participate in societal activities and may trigger social exclusion (e.g. in the form of functional illiteracy). Research into reading is carried out by various disciplines—among them literary studies, linguistics, book science, neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Considering the history of reading, a new chapter was opened at the beginning of the twenty-first century by digitization, which has led to considerable changes in reading habits at a textual, a distribution and a participatory level. The technological advances have, however, also brought along specific views, assessments and predictions, such as the ‘end of reading’, which in many cases result in an undifferentiated speculation on the future of this central skill.

This chapter examines the ways in which certain processes of globalization and the academic global turn shaped notions of sexuality. In a first part, this piece briefly reflects on the histories and theories of human sexuality and illustrates how this concept took various turns during the last two centuries. This overview is followed by a second section which focuses on the global turn by discussing certain aspects of the encounter of European and Middle Eastern “sexualities”, thereby showing how various complex processes involved effectively (re-)shaped notions of sexuality. The paper concludes by addressing both the potential and the challenges of research on the interrelation of sexuality and globality.

The concept of sports has become an ever-present reality in all parts of the world. Since ancient times, the meaning of sports for the personal well-being and development of people has always been closely linked to public and even political interests. With the global turn, sports have become a global reality, symbolized in the Olympic Games and other major events. In the course of this evolution, economic and political aspects of sports have become matters of public debate. The future of sports remains linked to societal and political processes, and yet, sports will remain a basic pillar of human development and its physical dimension.

The present paper seeks to show that “subjectivity”—even though the notion itself has been shaped only at the end of the eighteenth century—has always been a major topic of philosophy of nearly all centuries. In our case, the “subjective” is the collective term for all that which eludes the objectifying grasp of science. History of philosophy shows many attempts to subordinate everything subjective to the objective approach of science. However, down to the present day, it also shows a common convincement existing in all areas of human life, in religion and politics, aesthetics, as well as science, technology, and the life-world, aiming to assert subjectivity as an equal point of view next to objective thought. Only the two combined reveal the truth of things.

Argumentation or reasoning is the act of rendering theses rationally justified or plausible, through appeal to specific premises and the use of logical inferences. The principal forms of logical inference are deductive, inductive, and abductive. The chapter outlines some common argumentative fallacies and discusses important modes of argumentation, such as the use of universalizing arguments, wedge arguments, arguments from authority, and arguments from analogy, arguing through thought experiments and allegories. In the light of the modern global turn, the focus of research in the theory of reasoning and argumentation has shifted to the examination of how fundamental theses can be justified, as well as questions about how to engage in argumentation with people whose worldviews differ markedly from our own. Yet reasoning as a method of rational conviction still plays a decisive role in the comprehension, clarification, and critical questioning of one’s own positions, as well as that of others.

Reflections on changes, which the book has been exposed to due to the digital revolution, oscillate between a substantialist seriousness of concern and commitment (“The book will never die”) and an ironic lack of seriousness (“the book never ends to end”). Based on the eras of book creation (rotulus, codex, printed books, e-books) and the media (papyri, parchment, paper, hardware ), two conceptual figures demonstrate the possible alternatives to replace what Victor Hugo has labeled the killing of the book and Georg Friedrich Knapp the so-called recurrent extension, which includes metaphoric variants and verbal ones (catachrestic ones).

Collective identity builds on individual identity and refers to perceived or experienced continuities as well as ruptures in collectives. The global turn has made multiple memberships as well as plural and flexible identities a normal state. Individuals can belong to several, indeed a multitude of collectives and can change their identity. A watershed is the historically extremely new consciousness of globality and a common humanity. The current global issue of collective identity is whether humanity as a world collective can develop a consciousness of being a community with the same fate on a small planet. Different peoples do not live in different worlds but differently in one world. The main identity issues revolve around global citizenship, cosmopolitanism, and a common humanity in the age of the Anthropocene.

The modern concept of critique was originally formed mainly by Kant but was subsequently taken over and modified by the tradition of Hegel, Marx, and the Frankfurt School. This article considers Kant’s concept of critique in some detail, including his historical and autobiographical conception that metaphysics passes from dogmatism to skepticism to critique. It also sketches the modification of the concept by Hegel, Marx, and the Frankfurt School into one of social critique, a theory of social ideology. Neither of these concepts of critique was concerned with relations between societies or cultures (with the global). However, the article argues that both of them can and should be developed in such a direction. For the concept of social ideology applies just as much to competition between societies as it does to competition between classes within a single society. And even Kant’s conception of history as a progression from dogmatism to skepticism to critique lends itself to transformation into a powerful critical explanation of Western society’s intolerant attitude toward other societies and into a program for reforming it.

English is not a world language; it is the world language today. English has more speakers than any other language has ever had, including native speakers in Europe, North America, and Oceania, second-language speakers in former British colonies such as India and Nigeria, and foreign language speakers in countries such as Russia and China. As many of the 6000 languages currently spoken around the globe are seriously endangered, and several become extinct each year, the number of speakers of English constantly rises. Compared to linguae francae in the past, e.g., Latin, which were spoken only by elites, English is spoken by more people in more countries and in more domains, among them popular music, advertising, banking, and the Internet. In the domains of education and science, the dominance of English is increasingly seen critically as it may lead to linguistic and conceptual domain loss in non-English-speaking countries.

The significance of the German language has altered with time. This analysis highlights how German developed from an early and oral means of communication in the Middle Ages into an important written language of science and scholarship and into a lingua franca in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It also examines the consequences of the global turn for the usage of German. While especially the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century saw a considerable international demand for German, scientific/scholarly interest decreased with the two World Wars; German suffered a loss of prestige and has gradually been substituted by English as the ultimate and global language of communication. Means such as citation indices and questionnaires suggest that disciplines vary in their application of German. As the author concludes, on a national level (in Germany, Austria and Switzerland), German is nevertheless still a significant language (especially of everyday life) and will remain influential in the long run albeit the increasing use of English words and phrases.

The term graphism is supposed to bridge the dichotomy between writing and image that always arises in Western languages. The current interest it raises in media philosophy, social anthropology, and cultural and literary studies is related to the search for a new concept of writing that tries to overcome both shortcomings of the received view and fundamental problems in the idea of culture linked to it. This chapter presents the crucial thoughts by the French paleontologist, archaeologist, and anthropologist Leroi-Gourhan and discusses theorists referring to his approach such as Derrida, the British social anthropologist T. Ingold, and the German philosopher S. Krämer. Moreover, it addresses the use of the term in recent studies on doodles and the affinity between praxeological studies in history of science, following the German philosopher of science, H.-J. Rheinberger, and studies on the genesis of texts and writing processes.

Knowledge transfer goes far beyond the communicative mediation of information. It must not be taken for the linear transmission that the conceptual metaphor insinuates. For new knowledge and skills to be integrated with taxonomies or cultural narratives, they need to be identified, comprehended, and meaningfully interlaced in any kind of transfer. With the distinguishing feature of “globality,” the spread of knowledge across boundaries or borders is brought to the center of attention and puts greater emphasis on the adjustment of knowledge to existing, thematic, and hierarchically structured epistemological structures. New shades of meaning are added, while omissions or changes are inevitable. Under the auspices of globality, particularly the disciplines of the humanities need to reconceptualize and contextualize concerns such as commodification, digitization, modularization, knowledge ecology, culture/knowledge, and language/skills.

We suggest to define “language” within the Saussurean triad of “human speech/language” (French langage), “language” (French langue), and “speaking/speech/discourse” (French parole, now also discours). Aristotle’s old characterization of human speech as “conventionally significant spoken sound,” which is still valid today, demonstrates awareness of the “essential” language universals (semanticity, exteriority, historicity, creativity, alterity), regardless of modern speculations about their biological and cultural properties. From an empirical perspective, though, language is only accessible through discourse data from historically developed individual languages. In the article it is shown that globality does not require further ontological reflections about the very nature of language but instead asks for empirical research of completely new, especially Internet-based, discourse competencies and performances (e.g., “texting,” “chatting,” “skyping”). Finally, it is argued that the crosslinguistic uniformity of recently developed language games and new discourse/text traditions does not necessarily imply a reduction of linguistic diversity in the era of globalization. The more speakers wish to communicate in their traditional languages, the more likely they will be to find proper means and ways to realize this goal in the future.

Manners shape interpersonal interactions, support, opposition, confusion, and coexistence in all of their facets—at work and at home as well as in communicative spheres and the spaces of interaction in public and personal life. Behavioral habits are used to discipline, distinguish, and civilize interpersonal interactions. Like conventions, manners can vary subculturally and interculturally. Digitization, the article argues, transforms behavioral habits globally. But like globalization as such, digitization will not create (more) equality or make good on its initial promises of egalitarianism and democracy. Rather, it will create a digital divide, in other words inequality, in interpersonal relations. Human beings’ dependency on one another will be at least partially replaced by human beings’ dependency on machines and media. The effect of the global turn on manners remains a matter of continuous observation and sociological study.

The history of media is coinciding with the history of civilization. Techniques of data processing, communication, and information are found throughout human culture. Nevertheless caesuras interrupt this process continuously, as new mechanizations like book printing or the reproduction of pictures by photography and last but not least the substitution of analogical procedures by digital ones. The new paradigms imply new extensions, in a global sense leading to the worldwide network of all communications and in a technological sense the multidimensionality of the hypermedia, switching from text to image, sound, symbols, and even objects. But the implication of a constant and global flow of information whose ideal of simultaneity lacks a similar local possibility of omnipresence.

The present chapter focuses on the relation between nonverbal communication and globality. Firstly it describes, from a historical perspective, the theoretical development concerning body language, starting with its inclusion in ancient rhetoric unto the creation of the concept of “nonverbal communication” in the middle of the twentieth century. According to the worldwide increase of intercultural contact and interaction caused by the effects of globalization, the chapter reveals and discusses in which way, as a result of this, the increased crossing-over of cultural coded habits, in addition to changing individual body consciousness, challenges humanity as well as scholars in the study of the nonverbal sphere, addressing also the areas of electronic media and Internet-based communication.

After a remark on the logic of meaning variance, part I explicates the chapter’s heading concepts. As a human faculty, reason is distinguished from rationality, being a quality of human products. The systematical role of reason is historically described from classical antiquity until modern times. Globality of reason in the sense of its being universal is emphasized. Subjectively in distinction from objectively rational human actions are explained. Part II shows, how functions and tasks of reason as well as the moments of rationality underlie the global turn. Especially the concepts of practical reason, e.g., justice, change under empirically altering conditions. The goal of reason’s activity is to design globally valid theories. As a consequence hereof, part III claims to qualify received concepts and theses of reason by their local conditions.

Remembrance is a basic skill which forms and shapes the identity of a human being significantly. Remembering is the base of cultural life and, at the same time, is an individual and a collective force which shall not be conceived independently. In the German-speaking area, the term erinnern is commonly used in public in the context of a common remembering of historical events, specifically of the Holocaust, but we can spot three dimensions of the culture of remembrance in a hardly comprehensible and understandable area of memory studies: the material, the social, and the mental dimension. Today, the national and ethnocentric cultures of remembrance gain serious competition in the course of Europeanization and globalization that could lead to equalization and manipulation of remembrance. “Remembrance of the suffering of others” from an ethical perspective can be considered a benchmark for democratic and global exchange of cultures of remembrance.

As regards communicating, human beings are creatures kat exochen, which interpret and create signs both consciously and unconsciously. The creation of meaning and the discovery of significance have played, and continue to play, a central role in life. Technically, interindividual communication has served in particular to make the world of signs meaningful, standardized, and formalized.A media-related archeological consideration of the historical development of sign worlds shows that the regions of the Mediterranean (Egypt, southern Europe) and the Near East must be considered jointly right from the start; thus there has always been a global dimension, which has always been reflected in the literature and used as a basis for scholarship. Globality has been present in semiotics from the beginning.

“Conceptual transfer” was originally treated merely on a monocultural level, which was rather the case with the dictionary project Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. This excluded the dimension of conceptual transfers across large linguistic and cultural boundaries. However, in recent years, it has been acknowledged that the phenomena of conceptual transfer have to be studied on an intercultural level along with transfer processes of Western knowledge. East Asia, for example, can be regarded as a well-working transfer factory, where not only a West-East movement took place, but starting from the Japanese language transferring new concepts into the Chinese- and Korean-speaking areas also a West-East-East movement can be described as a global turn of Western concepts.

At first glance, the concept of translation appears simple, but in fact it is very complex. Fundamental questions concern the relationship between the original text and the new, translated text, between comprehensibility and fidelity and between the implications and consequences of a deceptively everyday confrontation with the other.This chapter traces salient aspects of what translating has meant throughout the history of Western society while comparing it to diverging cultural practices, with the aim of illustrating today’s challenges.

The article starts with an overview of four core mechanisms in the formation of world society: Communication, migration, observation, and knowledge. The first three can be seen as dynamic factors bringing about and transferring variants in world society; (world) knowledge is a kind of storage for temporary results of these dynamic operations. In the second part, the argument looks at semantics, concepts and theories, and their accumulation over 2000 years which prepare the idea and structural realization of world society as the most extensive social system which includes all sociality into its purview. In the third part, we introduce the “Eigenstructures of world society,” self-reinforcing structures which prepare world society as they are the result of the emergence of this system. The argument presents six candidates for Eigenstructures: Functional differentiation, small world networks, formal organizations, epistemic communities, global interaction systems, and world events. They all demonstrate the unity of structure formation and self-description characteristic of world society.

Writing is an only seemingly self-explanatory everyday term. In the ancient Egyptian culture, for example, no distinction was made between “writing” and “drawing/painting,” and we know this terminology similarly from the Greek culture. Exactly this terminological width was also practiced in the Mayan culture. If the substantial difference between writing and painting was not terminologically expressed, this could mean that in this cultural perspective, the emblematic was in focus as the common denominator. We can operate with the differentiation between writing in a narrower sense and writing in a broader sense. Specific to writing in a narrower sense is a certain phonetic dimension of coding. The meaning of the language contacts for the phonetization of the signs, and thus the development of writing in a narrower sense, is an example of the high culture-poetical meaning of cultural diversity.

Architecture can develop a binding quality for a transcontinental or even worldwide civilization if religious, political, economic, infrastructural, and social identities are entirely or partially existent, and if a common method and style of building is ensured. This occurred for the first time in the Roman Empire, and it has been taking place in a much more far-reaching and yet Eurocentric manner since the colonial period. With the development of modern transportation and trade on a global level, motives and opportunities increasingly arose for a common, global architecture and therefore also the international operations of large architecture firms. The skyscraper, developed in the USA in around 1900, has—alone or in clusters—today become the defining symbol of global architecture in the name of capitalist competition.

Our concept of border was shaped in particular by European history. Nevertheless, we apply it to phenomena outside the Western world which have their own complex history and for which other cultures and languages have created their own terms and concepts. Moreover, a closer view reveals that in other cultures throughout history, concepts of different origin have met and mingled and that without saying the terms used are always accompanied by specific cultural connotations. Here, the complex and temporary nature of borders is exemplified by a region in the heart of Asia, which today is not organized as a nation-state and which rarely has obtained the attention of general research on borders and border areas but spread over various states and Chinese provinces. The Tibetan Plateau is an example of the complexity and historical dynamics of borders and border areas.

There are cyclical and linear conceptions of development. During the last centuries and within Western civilization, linear conceptions have dominated. The idea of development has acquired the connotation of progress, of outgrowing poverty. This implies a narrow instead of a broad research agenda where economic development becomes the main issue. Among current researchers, institutions and property rights serve to define economic freedom or capitalism, which promotes prosperity and growth. According to Smith, we need the invisible hand to make actors responsive to the wants of others. According to Mises, we need private property in the means of production in order to benefit from scarcity prices and a rational allocation of resources. According to Hayek, the mobilization of knowledge requires economic freedom and decentralized decision-making. Otherwise, there is development failure.

As a functional separation in the performance of tasks and activities, division of labor is a basis of the economic and social structuring of the population and also a driving force of global social change. Originally, it was probably a gender-specific form. Later, the result of ongoing functional specialization trades workers with self-contained work complexes. Predominantly, artisanal forms of division of labor have been fundamentally updated in the course of industrialization through technical innovations as well as by advances in economic organization. An adverse effect has been the anonymous dependence of workers within repetitive routine jobs in mass production. Increasingly, the embedding of work processes into socially acceptable structures has become a basic challenge. The global turn has fundamentally changed the structure and mode of division of labor by transnational integration of work processes and work units, particularly in the form of network developments. The regional structures of the division of labor and its shifts are almost fateful for the location-based population. Socially decisive is the reconciling of new forms of division of labor with the interests of stakeholders.

The concept of environment encompasses more than the biosphere. It refers to the interaction between human life and the biosphere. As such, it is global and universal. The theoretical evolution of the concept of ecology as a dimension of theoretical biology in a spatial context has predated the increasing awareness in Western countries about the limited resources on earth and the need to protect them. Once this perspective was related to the demands of developmental progress in the global South, the idea of sustainable development resonated. Under the leadership of the United Nations, the concept of sustainable development turned into a political concept, thus giving voice, focus, and direction to the global turn in environmental matters.

This chapter deals with habitation, which belongs to the basic needs of human beings, besides eating and drinking. The way households live is an important indicator of their prosperity, providing information on which house or flat in which neighborhood is affordable for them and their preferences. While poor households have to choose from the accommodation that is available to them, for financially well-situated households the decision on where to live is mainly a matter of lifestyle. Do they prefer to live in a large flat in a gentrified area of a city or in a house in the suburbs with a large garden? In the focus of interest is gentrification, which describes the preference of middle and upper class households to live close to the city centers of large cities where they can benefit from all advantages of the city center, for example, theater, opera, cinema, and a wide range of upscale shops and restaurants.

The German word Heimat, widely considered untranslatable, has peculiar connotations of coziness and harmony, a heritage of the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century. During the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era, Heimat was chiefly used as a legal term for residency or right of settlement. In modern philosophy and sociology, the concept of home is defined as a basic quality of man as a territorial being. Today, Heimat is seen as an individual achievement, as a cultural construct that is present in all cultures, and as an affective attachment to a particular environment (topophilia). In traditional societies, this feeling is rooted in a specific geographical area. In an age of migration, aspects of Heimat such as language, religion, costumes, or cherished objects are transferred from their original setting to new homes. Creating favorable environments for the growth of feelings of Heimat should be a priority for political decision-makers.

This chapter revolves around the origin and the development of the terminology of intellectual property in the past centuries. Starting with the first initiatives toward the establishment of rights to incorporeal goods in the early eighteenth century, it labels central developmental steps in the German as well as the European and the Anglo-American legal systems, covering a broad range of national tendencies and their impact on the global framework of intellectual property regulations. As the contrasting developments in the different legal traditions are identified, the legal philosophical and political importance of intellectual property as well as its implementation as a technical term and legal doctrine is discussed. This chapter concludes with an outlook at further fields of research in the area of intellectual property, especially regarding the adequate realization of intellectual property protection as well as the creation of a general set of rules on a European or possibly global level.

Landscape (Landschaft) is one of the most principal, widely used, and, hence, very imprecisely defined concepts in European policy and intellectual history of the last century. Due to the resulting ambiguity of possible semantic assignments, a precise definition of landscape seems to be illusory. This can be explained considering several reinterpretations as well as novel interpretations of the term during historical processes. These are illustrated by the semantic development of the term landscape in German-speaking countries and compared to concepts of landscape in other European countries (England, France, and Hungary). Because the notion of landscape seems to be highly compatible to some spatial concepts of non-European countries, in some cases it has been connected and modified to an existing concept or incorporated even by creating a new word. This is revealed by the example of Japan.

Migration and mobility are among the oldest expressions of human evolution and interaction. The paper discusses different concepts and experiences of mobility and migration, including voluntary and enforced forms. It reflects on the dimension and impact of mobility and migration of individual life, the society of origin, and the receiving societies of migrants. The paper also looks into new aspects of mobility in the digital age, and presents the most recent findings on migration and mobility, one of the most dynamic and contentious issues of our time.

The article develops three perspectives on the notion and object of modernity. First, it reconstructs the conceptual history of “modernity” as well as its position within the classic theories of modernization and the proclamations of postmodernity. Second, it takes a look at the most important concepts of globalized modernity and global society. Third, it deals with the conclusions, which can be drawn from the cultural dimension of the concept of modernity, and with the precarious opportunities to overcome the semantic disposition of modernity.

Nature deserves a closer look when dealing with globalization. After giving an introduction on humanities’ views on nature and the ambiguity of this keyword, contemporary public perceptions and empirical findings from the Nature Awareness Studies are presented, followed by a reflection on human-nature relationship in former times. The analysis of the global turn in the understanding on nature then focuses on what goes beyond the change in human-nature relationship already induced by industrialization: environmental damage and loss of nature in the course of globalization require internationally concerted measures, and the term biodiversity is analyzed in its function as a new label for nature in the course of international negotiations and policy-making. Benefits and disadvantages of this major shift in communication and understanding of nature are discussed here.

The chapter reconstructs the roots and developments of the idea of progress from Christianity to the global age. Crucial was the shift from an understanding of time as recurrence (tradition) to a linear conceptualization of a prospective future in the sense of a permanent revolution (modernity). In postmodernity, this alternative is reproduced in terms of globalization as a climax of all-leveling modernity, i.e., progress as retrogression on the one hand and globality as an advent of new transcendence consciousness and a rehabilitation of the idea of progress in the world society.

In the federal republic, the social security system is constitutionally founded and includes material security against risks such as illness, accident, loss of earnings during unemployment, supply in case of disability and death of the breadwinner, and pensions, including a long-term care. Positions of life are generated that meet welfare requirements. However, the structural changes of families, the demographic change due to an aging of the population, and the impact of cross-border mobility bring fundamental shifts in welfare demand and financing problems. Within the global modernization process, the creation and promotion of social security has become an internationally recognized fundamental problem. Considerable differences between states can be seen as an expression of available economic resources and the respective political and sociocultural conditions. The development toward a modern social service state should not only be seen from the distribution perspective, with the inclusion of international aid programs. An order of social security, which avoids the risk to degenerate into an all-encompassing welfare bureaucracy, has to offer opportunities for societal self-organization synonymous with self-responsible solutions.

The discovery of space as an object and tool of research since the early 1990s is generally referred to as the “spatial turn.” Coinciding with this renewed focus on space was the political collapse of the bipolar global system in 1989, which had been predicated on a clear territorial division of the world and, at the same time, with the rapid intensification of global networks in the course of globalization. The purported novelty of globalization lies above all in the impression that the cycles of space-time compression have accelerated and the quality of networking has intensified. This is why the “global turn” and the “spatial turn” are strongly intertwined. As a political consequence of the “spatial turn,” Western states are increasingly abandoning the sole primacy of territory and are including new spatially relevant strategies for responding to threats triggered by globalization and for maintaining national sovereignty.

The worldwide process of urbanization is ongoing, and since 2007, more than 50% of the world’s population now lives in towns. To characterize the current idea of a town, an integrated approach with sociological, historical, cultural, architectural, spatial planning, juridical, and economic views is necessary. Even though some historical concepts of the early twentieth century like Garden City and the Charter of Athens are still influencing the structure and patterns of the ancient European town, extensive demographic and economic transformations are the main present drivers of their developments. Due to these drivers, different forms of suburbanization and urban sprawl as well as metropolization and regionalization characterize the current urban development on a global scale. Besides this, functional and structural diversifications and future challenges of urban planning will especially result from climate change, more participatory oriented forms of governance and new paradigms for a post oil society in general.

This chapter gives an overview on the development of cities, from the early Jericho, i.e., 10,000 years ago until today. The first rapid change of the urban landscape resulted from industrialization and the building of railways in the early nineteenth century. The growth of cities at this time was accompanied by their functional change, where barter and monetary economy belonged to the central features. Nowadays, cities are chiefly characterized by their administrative sizes, ranking from small cities with 5000 to 20,000 to megacities with 1,000,000 and more inhabitants, up to global cities such as London, New York, and Tokyo, which are determined on qualitative grounds; they are the world centers of finance, politics, and culture. In this paper I discuss the spatial and social structure of cities in poor and rich countries.

Concepts of “wealth” as a condition of well-being and affluence, which allows freedom of action and a good quality of life, have undergone several changes in the course of time since antiquity. Aristotle sees euporía (being well-supplied) primarily as material wealth and eudaimonía as “living well.” Cicero’s concept of the common good, which was based on the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, was adopted in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era, particularly his combination of the common good with laws. In Roman times, scholars developed a concept of a benevolent emperor who works for the good of the people and produced an image of a monarch who is committed to the common good, which influenced emperors up to medieval kings, to the Renaissance and the Early Modern Era. In the Jewish and Christian tradition, caring for others has a higher priority than general wealth. Charitable institutions aimed to help suffering people in the community. In the thirteenth and fourteenth century, the residents of cities took on the role of providing support for the poor, and they managed the hospitals and poorhouses. Luther and Erasmus of Rotterdam called for a prince who focuses on common welfare and should be a diaconal administrator of his region. In the Early Modern Period, the perception of poverty and its treatment changed: Now, poverty was understood as the result of changeable social structures, and eliminating poverty was seen as the ideal of the new welfare policies, especially in response to problems of industrialization. In current political science publications, increasing wealth is still cited as one of the most important national objectives; however, there are also efforts to balance out the wealth of different nations. Nowadays, wealth does not just mean economic support but also high life expectancy, low child mortality, good medical care, education, access to methods of communication, water supply, social and political participation, and much more.

In this chapter we address the changes of work values resulting from economic globalization in Western and non-Western societies. Firstly, we explicate the terms work, gainful employment, and work values in their historical and current meaning. Secondly, we analyze how new requirements in a globalized economy change the meaning of work and work values in Western societies. Also generational differences will be discussed. Thirdly, we examine how the increasing contact between different cultures leads to globally interchanged work values and attitudes. Western societies export some of their work values into other cultures, while traditional local values persist. Finally, we discuss the consequences for work and organizational psychology with reference to personnel selection, training, leadership, and work design.

The term is discussed on the basis of different German etymological and historical dictionaries. They show that the term “Weltmarkt” (world market) is closely connected to the term “Weltwirtschaft” (global economy); also the term “Welthandel” (world trade) shows affinities to the other two. The contents of the term “Welthandel” seem to have been more important than the actual word “Weltmarkt,” since it first appeared only in the early nineteenth century. Other languages, which probably borrowed the term from German, corroborate this, as in the most prominent case of the English term “world market.”The world market should be understood as a process whose origins lay in world trade, which underwent a fundamental transformation, along with the geopolitical displacement of its centers, during the “long nineteenth century.” Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this process may be largely characterized as completed, and the term has achieved the fullest extent of its development. Thus a high level of concentration may be observed, and one can see how the domestic markets of national economies are gradually dissolving.