JOIE

For our next meeting, we will read a new paper by Hugh Louch, Eszter Hargitai and Miguel Centeno that employs longitudinal data on the volume of telephone calls between countries as a means of studying change in global hierarchies during a period of ongoing globalization. Taking a structural perspective, the authors contribute to the discussion of globalization in at least two ways --- by articulating and testing the predictive power of different arguments about globalization that are often conflated, and by using data on information flows (which theories of globalization tell us are at the heart of the process, but which researchers have seldom analyzed). Because the paper was prepared for a lay audience, its brevity and ease of reading belies the volume of very technical work that lies behind it. The paper is also the cutting edge of an extremely ambitious project that Professor Centeno is planning, so this will be an opportunity both to discuss this first product and have an input into the design of research to come.