GLOBALIZE WORLD

Globalize World



Globalize World

Introduction

We live in an increasingly global world. What happens in China or Mexico affects us here more and faster than ever. What we do here, from what we buy to how we vote, profoundly affects others around the globe. Their lives and cultures change; so do ours. Some push back. Some move here, contributing to our increasingly pluralistic society. Globalization is tied up with most of today's big issues: global warming, terrorism, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, swine flu, immigration, job outsourcing, the current recession, and more. 

Globalization

'Globalization' is commonly used as a shorthand way of describing the spread and connectedness of production, communication and technologies across the world. That spread has involved the interlacing of economic and cultural activity.  Rather confusingly, 'globalization' is also used by some to refer to the efforts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and others to create a global free market for goods and services(Mulgan 1998 pp.112-119). This political project, while being significant  - and potentially damaging for a lot of poorer nations - is really a means to exploit the larger process. Globalization in the sense of  connectivity in economic and cultural life across the world, has been growing for centuries. However, many believe the current situation is of a fundamentally different order to what has gone before. The speed of communication and exchange, the complexity and size of the networks involved, and the sheer volume of trade, interaction and risk give what we now label as 'globalization' a peculiar force.  (Romer 1986 pp.1002-37.)

With increased economic interconnection has come deep-seated political changes - poorer, 'peripheral', countries have become even more dependent on activities in 'central' economies such as the USA where capital and technical expertise tend to be located. There has also been a shift in power away from the nation state and toward, some argue, multinational corporations. We have also witnessed the rise and globalization of the 'brand'. It isn't just that large corporations operate across many different countries - they have also developed and marketed products that could be just as well sold in Peking as in Washington. Brands like Coca Cola, Nike, Sony, and a host of others have become part of the fabric of vast numbers of people's lives. 

Globalization involves the diffusion of ideas, practices and technologies. It is something more than internationalization and universalization. It isn't simply modernization or westernization. It is certainly isn't just the liberalization of markets. Anthony Giddens (1990: 64) has described globalization as 'the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa'. This involves a change in the way we understand geography and experience localness. As well as offering opportunity it brings with considerable risks linked, for example, to technological change. (Ritzer 1993).

Globalization, thus, has powerful economic, political, cultural and social dimensions. Here we want to focus on four themes that appear with some regularity in the literature: 

de-localization and supraterritoriality; 

the speed and power of ...