Departments
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Week of 24 April 1998 |
Vol. I, No. 29 |
Feature
Article
ISEC gets major grants to study how global economy affects nations' cultures
by Eric McHenry
At a recent all-office meeting for Development and Alumni Relations, Vice President Christopher Reaske drew an amused response from those assembled when he put up the "Peter Berger" transparency: a chart devoted entirely to major grants received by the University Professor of sociology during the 1997-98 academic year.
Berger directs the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at BU. That his research is sufficiently funded to merit its own table in an overview of fiscal trends at the University is amusing, but hardly surprising. Berger is one of the world's premier social scientists, and can be credited for virtually all academic study of economic culture, his coinage. The Institute has sponsored investigations leading to roughly 30 book publications since he founded it in 1985.
Although its research is consistently underwritten in part by private foundations, the Institute has had a watershed year. Since last fall it has received over $1.5 million in grants, the preponderance earmarked for a comprehensive study called Globalization and Culture. Two American foundations are the Institute's principal benefactors: Pew Charitable Trusts and a group that chooses anonymity to avoid inundation with grant requests. Together their gifts total over $1 million.
Like the phenomenon it describes, globalization is a term that expands daily -- both in use and in implication. As this happens, more and more attention is inevitably drawn to a research center named the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture. Berger attributes the increasing willingness of private foundations to sponsor his research to a growing recognition of the issue's importance.
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Peter Berger
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"Globalization is not just a funny word that academics use," he says. "It's a reality. There is an increasingly interconnected world economic system that has enormous consequences for everybody -- some good, some bad, some neutral. To examine the ways in which this affects people's minds and behavior is, obviously, an interesting pursuit."
The study will place scholars in Chile, China, Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, South Africa, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United States -- countries in which Berger and his collaborators have connections to research institutions. Globalization and Culture codirector Samuel Huntington, who is the Albert J. Weatherhead University Professor at Harvard and the author most recently of Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, will join Berger in producing a major book analyzing the project's data.
"The book will contain chapters by the site directors from the different countries," says Berger. "Dr. Huntington and I will either jointly or separately give our own commentary. What that will look like I wouldn't want to predict right now. But naturally, since he's a political scientist and I'm a sociologist, we come at this with different perspectives. I know how important the political aspect is, but my primary interest is in how people reorganize their lives in the wake of globalization. How do they cope?
"After two years of research," Berger adds, "there will be much more material from each site than we can possibly put into one chapter of this book. So it's almost certain that most of the research directors from the particular countries will write additional books or articles."
Pew Charitable Trusts has provided further support specifically for "discussion and dissemination" of the data gathered during the project's two years of investigation, he says. Conferences are one way that money might ultimately be used.
An article by Berger about globalization and culture, which appeared in the fall 1997 issue of The National Interest, contains an anecdote involving a man in a Buddhist temple burning incense before an altar while talking on his cellular phone. Although the effects of globalization are often most conspicuous in developing nations or when juxtaposed with millennia-old institutions, Berger says they are no less significant in the context of the so-called first world.
"It's perhaps more visible in developing nations: people are riding around on camels, and suddenly an airport is built where their tents used to be. That's very dramatic," he says. "But it's not anomalous. Our American researcher is thinking of doing his study in Charlotte, N.C., which is developing very rapidly. There's lots of high-tech industry there, lots of development going on with global implications. At the same time, you still have agricultural areas and a very intact Southern evangelical Protestant culture. How does that interact with all of the computer engineers and the people who are on e-mail to China? How does it play out? It may be less dramatic in South Carolina than in Saudi Arabia, but it's there too."