Thinking the World. Concept Formation for Global Studies

Global social change calls for a constant attention to concept formation. The Western lexicon from nineteenth-century sociology that the social sciences inherited is limited in scope and adequacy. New challenges come from either non-Western traditions, or subaltern knowledges, or new social actors. At the same time, new histories that were ignored and new data that were not gathered yet need to be adequately assessed. This chapter answers the following question: how should research about large-scale/long-term processes of social change be conducted once agreed upon the world as a single yet multilayered spacetime of analysis, in order to cope with the asymmetrical power relations that materialize colonial history through heterarchies of class, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, knowledge, cosmology, and ecology? To answer this question, the chapter faces one major issue among the many this formulation raises: concept formation. The argument develops as follows. Exploring the historical and epistemological origins of the problem. Analyzing the “global” as a single unit of analysis against the nation-state. Rethinking the meaning of data and histories in a global sociological perspective. Proposing a more advanced understanding of the taken-for-granted understanding of the “abstract”–“concrete” movement. Thinking differently the relation between concept and data, or between concept and histories; rethinking the relation between concepts and concepts across cultural and linguistic boundaries; unthinking the notion of “relation.” Formalizing six methodological directions toward a new protocol of concept formation for global social sciences.