From globalization to post-globalization: enclaves of augmented modernity and prospects of social development

Abstract

The article presents an attempt to reconceptualize social development and to measure its level for societies facing the post-globalization as globalizing networks and flows paradoxically are localized in super-urban areas. The economic and social divide between the group of the largest cities and the rest of the world supports the idea that globalization has resulted not in the ‘world society’ or ‘worldwide sociality’ but rather in networked enclaves of globality where people experience borderless, multicultural, and mobile social life in the regime of augmented modernity. In the post-globalization age, the ‘core’ of socioeconomic order is dispersed into networks of enclaves of augmented modernity contrasting with exhausted modernity outside them. The nations’ prospects of social development depend on number, size, and influence of cosmopolitan super-urban areas attracting and generating transnational material, human, and symbolic flows. The super-urbanization index is elaborated to measure nations’ prospects under post-globalization conditions. Traditional indices of standard of living and quality of life have to be augmented in the new theoretical model and system of empirical indicators of social development under post-globalization conditions.