Beyond Nation-State Paradigms: Globalization, Sociology, and the Challenge of Transnational Studies

Abstract

Globalization has made it increasingly necessary to break with nation-state centered analysis in macrosociologies. Social structure is becoming transnationalized, and an epistemological shift is required in concurrence with this ontological change. A new interdisciplinary transnational studies should be predicated on a paradigmatic shift in the focus of social inquiry from the nation-state as the basic unit of analysis to the global system as the appropriate unit. Sociology's fundamental contribution to a transnational studies should be the study oftransnational social structure. This article does not establish a new transnational paradigm. Rather, it surveys and critiques nation-state-centrism in extant paradigms, provides a rationale for a new transnational approach, and proposes a research curriculum of a new transnational studies that may contribute to paradigmatic reconceptualization.