Paul James (academic)

Paul James (born 1958, Melbourne), is Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diversity at Western Sydney University, and Director of the Institute for Culture and Society where he has been since 2014. He is a writer on globalization, sustainability, and social theory.

After studying politics at the University of Melbourne James was a lecturer in the Department of Politics at Monash University, Melbourne before moving to Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2002 as Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diversity. At RMIT he led and secured funding for several successful initiatives, including the Global Cities Institute (Director, 2006–2013); the UN Global Compact Cities Programme (Director, 2007–2014); and the Globalism Institute (Founding Director, 2002-2007; now, the Centre for Global Research) that brought scholars including Tom Nairn, Manfred Steger, and Nevzat Soguk to RMIT.

He was appointed to a research position at the University of Western Sydney in 2014.

He was Director of the United Nations Global Compact Cities Programme, a UN International Secretariat with offices in Sydney, Melbourne and New York until 2014.

James is primarily known as a theorist of globalization, particularly how local and national communities alter under an emergent level of global integration. His work has been read as challenging the simple notion of 'global flows' presented by other writers such Zygmunt Bauman and Arjun Appadurai. Using a distinctive comparative method called 'constitutive abstraction' or 'engaged theory', he has contributed to theories of political culture, the changing nature of community, and the structures and subjectivities of social formation. He is author or editor of more than 30 books, including a Sage Publications series on globalization. The series, Central Currents in Globalization, is a collection of writings by key figures in the field of globalization. His collaborative work includes writing with other senior scholars such as Jonathan Friedman, Peter Mandaville, Tom Nairn, , Manfred Steger and Christopher Wise, amongst others. His main contribution in the field of global studies is the book Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism.

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