Lessons: Mobilization, Not Globalization

This chapter summarizes this book's findings, highlights its implications, and offers an outlook that puts these insights in a broader perspective. It explains that the book comparatively examines the structure of transnational human activity worldwide across eight types of mobility and communication. The findings reveal that proximity-induced regionalism is a major—and largely neglected—structural feature of these planet-scale interaction networks. These findings have implications for the specification of the meaning of “transnational”; the limited influence of the economic world-system's core-periphery structure; the persistence of segmentary differentiation in world society; the exaggeration of globalization; and challenging sociology's anthropocentrism. The chapter then argues for a multiparadigmatic Comparative Sociology of Regional Integration.