Political Sociology in Light of Globalization: New Perspectives and Future Directions

In this essay, I examine political sociology under the light of the process of globalization and argue that it needs to change its focus and expanse to sustain itself in the new global society. I argue that political sociology as a field is marked by its own western traditional understanding of bases of power. I critically examine the three traditional approaches to understanding power in sociology: pluralism, elite theory and Marxist theory of power and points to the strength and weaknesses of each approach. I draw upon examples from politics in the Muslim world to point to the inability to a western centered political sociology to account for the religious basis of political power. The contemporary global politics, I argue, is held in the shadows of 1989, with the demise of Soviet Union and the consolidation of capitalism into one global system—and the resistance to this has increasingly become fragmented. For a fully rounded analysis of the contemporary political situation in the global society, political sociology will have to include new bases of power along with the historical conceptions and it will have to bridge its nation-centric concepts into more transnational concepts to capture changing nature of global politics. The main question for political sociology is, as Harold Laswell has it, who gets what, when and how. This approach is different from political science approach because political sociology look