Sexual Harassment: The Global and the Local

Abstract

Abigail Saguy’s What Is Sexual Harassment and Kathrin Zippel’s The Politics of Sexual Harassment are both concerned with how global social movements are refracted through national cultural and legal systems. Both find that new norms spread across countries, in this case originating in the United States and then spreading through feminists to Europe. But both find diffusion models wanting. The wider importance of these studies is hard to overestimate. In recent decades sociologists, political scientists, and economists have studied the diffusion of cultural and legal norms around the world: democratization, women’s rights, labor rights, cultural, and racial religious rights—a whole host of things going by the name of political liberalization. But they have also studied privatization, trade liberalization, antitrust, “good” corporate governance, stock markets, and central bank independence—a whole host of things going by the name of economic liberalization. Sexual harassment is an instance of a wider trend that has swept the globe. And this period of globalization is not the first. Before this, there was colonization, decolonization, mercantilism, the gold standard, Keynesianism, and emancipation. The many studies of this new wave show the spread of nominally similar policies, but they do not show what happens within countries. Many