Leslie Sklair: Globalisation is a relatively new idea in the social sciences, though some commentators argue that, while the term is new, what the term denotes is an ancient, or at least not novel, set of phenomena. The central feature of the idea of globalisation that is current in the social sciences is that many contemporary problems cannot be adequately studied at the level of nation-states, that is, in terms of national societies or international relations, but need to be theorised in terms of global (transnational) processes, beyond the level of the nation-state.

Fathom: In what areas have researchers into globalisation focused in order to assess whether it is a real phenomenon?

	Ready Reference
	globalisation capitalism The Social Science Encyclopedia

Sklair: Globalisation researchers have focused on two new phenomena that have become significant in the last few decades: one, qualitative and quantitative changes in economic structures through processes such as the globalisation of capital and production; and two, transformations in the technological base and subsequent global scope of the mass media.

For these reasons, it is increasingly important to analyse the world economy and society
globally as well as nationally. The standard resolution of the difficulties this conclusion raises for concrete empirical research is an often rather vague injunction to "think globally, act locally," which appears to be as popular with the major transnational corporations (as we shall see) as it is with sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, environmentalists and the rest. I suspect that most theory and research on transnational communities proceeds in a similar fashion. Global system theory has its own version of "think globally, act locally," where it is an expression of how the global capitalist system operates to maximise profits.

Fathom: How does your conception of globalisation differ from other researchers' work?

Sklair: Most attempts to survey the field, while differing radically in their interpretations of the facts, agree that globalisation represents a serious challenge to the state-centrist assumptions of most previous social science. The apparently "natural" quality of societies bounded by their nation-states, the difficulty of generating and working with data that cross national boundaries, and the lack of specificity in most theories of the global--all these conspire to undermine the critique of state-centrism. Thus, before the idea of globalisation has become firmly established, the sceptics are announcing the limits and, in some extreme cases, the myth of globalisation.

Globalisation, in the words of some authors and commentators, is nothing but globaloney!

	Thinking Point
	Do you think globalisation is a new phase of capitalism? Provide arguments for and against this interpretation.

I have a good deal of sympathy with the sceptics, and my own work, paradoxically, has been an attempt to limit drastically the theoretical scope of the concept of globalisation and its concrete application in the sphere of empirical research. By this I mean my research focus on globalisation as a new phase of capitalism.

Thus, globalisation is an extremely important phenomenon and one that has to be confronted in theory and research if we are to have any grasp of the contemporary world. Therefore, I attempt to research the extent of globalisation empirically in a dynamically changing capitalism on a world scale.

Another way in which my research differs from others is that its unit of analysis is not the nation-state. Global system theory is based on the concept of transnational practices, practices that cross state boundaries but do not necessarily originate with state agencies or actors. This conceptual choice offers, as it were, a working hypothesis for looking at one of the most keenly contested disagreements between globalisation theorists and their opponents, namely, the extent to which the nation-state is in decline. The concept of transnational practices (my basic unit of analysis) is an attempt to make more concrete the issues raised by such questions in the debate over globalisation.

Fathom: How does global system theory relate to global capitalism?

Sklair: Analytically, transnational practices operate in three spheres: the economic, the political and the cultural-ideological. The whole is what I mean by "the global system." Today, the global system is not synonymous with global capitalism, but the dominant forces of global capitalism are the dominant forces in the global system.

To put it simply, my argument is that individuals, groups, institutions and even whole communities, local, national or transnational, can exist, perhaps even thrive, as they have always done outside the orbit of the global capitalist system, but that this is becoming increasingly more difficult.