The Contemporary World

Objectives
• Differentiate the competing conceptions of globalization
• Develop a working definition of globalization for the course
• Narrate a personal experience of globalization
Why do you need to study the world?
• Your consumption habits are global.
• The world ‘out there’ is already here.
• You are already a citizen of the world whether you are aware of it or
not.
• Inevitable interaction with the world
• Cure to parochialism
• Benchmarking
 How do we
teach
Globalization?
Globalization is one of those
courses that seems so big in
scope that it is incredibly
difficult to get your brain
around. Figuring out the
balance between knowing
about the issues of
globalization while also
understanding the
interconnectedness of the
world is daunting. The goal,
like with World History is not to
teach it 'all'.

Photo by Kano Naizen / Public domain

Key questions
• Why do we need to study the
world?
• What is going on with our
world today
• What is globalization?
• What is/are being globalized?
• How do we make sense of
what is ‘out there’?
• Is globalization good or bad?
• Is it beneficial or detrimental?
• What does it mean to be a
citizen of the world?
There was a time when most
regions were economically self-
sufficient. Locally produced
foods, fuels and raw materials were
generally processed for local
consumption. Trade between
different regions was quite limited.

Today, the economies of most

countries are so interconnected
that they form part of a
single, interdependent global
economy.
Defining Globalization
• Business Dictionary

• The worldwide movement toward economic, financial, trade, and

communications integration.

• Globalization implies the opening of local and nationalistic perspectives to a

broader outlook of an interconnected and interdependent world with free
transfer of capital, goods, and services across national frontiers.
Defining Globalization (Economics)
• IMF
• The growing interdependence of countries world wide through the increasing
volume and variety of cross border transactions in goods and services and of
international service capital flows, and through the more rapid and
widespread diffusion of technology
• “Economic ‘globalization’ is a historical process, the result of human
innovation and technological progress. It refers to the increasing integration
of economies around the world, particularly through trade and financial
flows. The term sometimes also refers to the movement of people (labor)
and knowledge (technology) across international borders. There are also
broader cultural, political and environmental dimensions of globalization that
are not covered here.”
Defining Globalization (Economics)
• Kanter (2001)
• The world is becoming a global shopping mall in which ideas and products are
available everywhere at the same time

• Gilpin (2001)
• The integration of the world economy.”
Defining Globalization (Economics)
• Cox (1994)
• “the characteristics of the globalization trend include the internationalizing of
production, the new international division of labor, new migratory
movements from South to North, the new competitive environment that
accelerates these processes, and the internationalizing of the state… making
states into agencies of the globalizing world.”
Defining Globalization (Economics)
• Griffith University (2000)

• The process of developing, manufacturing, and marketing software

products that are intended for worldwide distribution.

• This term combines two aspects of the work: internationalization (enabling

the product to be used without language or culture barriers) and localization
(translating and enabling the product for a specific locale).
Defining Globalization (Economics)
• Open Internet Lexicon,14 (2006)
• In the translation/localization business marketplace, it refers to the whole
problem of making any product or service global, with simultaneous release
in all markets.
• E.g. Web site globalization means more than just making one web site respond to the
different language and regional requirements of the browser.
• Globalization includes the process by which site development, update
processes, and workflow are engineered to provide a comprehensive
framework for cost-effective multilingual site development and maintenance
- incorporating overseas offices, consultants, translators, etc.
• Sometimes achieved by neutralizing the cultural elements, superior global
sites are those that enrich the cultural elements appropriately in each locale.”
Defining Globalization (Economics)
• Henderson (2004)
• “…free movement of goods, services, labour and capital thereby creating a
single market in inputs and outputs; and full national treatment for foreign
investors (and nationals working abroad) so that, economically speaking,
there are no foreigners.”
Defining Globalization (Economics)
• Ritchie (1996)
• I will define globalization as the process of corporations moving their
money, factories and products around the planet at ever more rapid rates of
speed in search of cheaper labor and raw materials and governments willing
to ignore or abandon consumer, labor and environmental protection laws. As
an ideology, it is largely unfettered by ethical or moral considerations.”
Defining Globalization (Political Science)
• Scholte (2001)
• “Globalization refers to processes whereby social relations acquire relatively
distanceless and borderless qualities (delinked from territorial geography), so
that human lives are increasingly played out in the world as a single place.”
• “De-territorialization – or… the growth of ‘supraterritorial’ relations between
people.”
• Ohmae (1992)
• “globalization means the onset of the borderless world…”
Defining Globalization (Political Science)
• Beck (2000)
• “Globalization - however the word is understood - implies the weakening of
state sovereignty and state structures.”

• Nikitin and Elliott (2000)

• “…globalization is… the establishment of the global market free from
sociopolitical control.”
Defining Globalization (Political Science)
• Khor (1995)
• Globalization occurs through and with regression, colonialism, and
destabilization. Globalization is what we in the Third World have for several
centuries called colonization.

• Neeraj (2001)
• “…it is nothing but ‘recolonisation’ in a new garb.”
Defining Globalization (Socio-Anthro)
• Larsson (2001)
• “is the process of world shrinkage, of distances getting shorter, things moving
closer. It pertains to the increasing ease with which somebody on one side of
the world can interact, to mutual benefit, with somebody on the other side of
the world.”

• Legrain
• The way in which people’s lives are becoming increasingly intertwined with
those of distant people and places around the world economically, culturally
and politically
Defining Globalization (Socio-Anthro)
• Robertson (1992)
• Globalisation as a concept refers both to the compression of the world and
the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole.

• Albrow & King (1990)

• all those processes by which the peoples of the world are incorporated
into a single world society
Defining Globalization (Socio-Anthro)
• Berger (2002)
• “…globalization is, au fond, a continuation, albeit in an intensified and
accelerated form, of the perduring challenge of modernization.
• On the cultural level, this has been the great challenge of pluralism: the
breakdown of taken-for-granted traditions and the opening up of multiple
options for beliefs, values and lifestyles.
• It is not a distortion to say that this amounts to the great challenge of
enhanced freedom for both individuals and collectivities.” (italics in original)
Defining Globalization (Socio-Anthro)
• Jameson (1998)
• As cultural process, globalization names the explosion of a plurality of
mutually intersecting, individually syncretic, local differences; the emergence
of new, hitherto suppressed identities; and the expansion of a world-wide
media and technology culture with the promise of popular democratization.
Defining Globalization (Socio-Anthro)
• Randolf David (2001)
• Globalization is changing the face of the human societies, shattering cultures
and social systems in much the same way as the Industrial Revolution and the
expansion of transformed Europe and its colonies 250 years ago.
Defining Globalization (Socio-Anthro)
• Giddens (1990)
• Globalisation is not a single set of processes and does not lead in a single
direction.
• It produces solidarities in some places and destroys them in others. It has
quite different consequences on one side of the world from the other.
• In other words, it is a wholly contradictory process.
• It is not just about fragmentation: I see it more as a shake-out of institutions
in which new forms of unity go along with new forms of fragmentation.
Defining Globalization (Socio-Anthro)
• Cuddy-Keane (2003)
• “Cultural globalization is distinguished by a consciousness of dwelling in the
world, and a conception of that world as a fluid, interconnected, conflicted,
and dynamic whole.”
Defining Globalization (Socio-Anthro)
• Appadurai (1996)
• globalization is a ‘world of things’ that have ‘different speeds, axes, points of
origin and termination, and varied relationships to institutional structures in
different regions, nations, or societies.’”
• DIMENSIONS: ethnoscapes, technoscapes, mediascapes, financescapes and ideoscapes
Defining Globalization (Socio-Anthro)
• Held, McGrew, Goldblatt & Perraton (1999)
• “…the widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide
interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life, from the
cultural to the criminal, the financial to the spiritual.”
Defining Globalization
• Tehranian (1998)
• “Elements of globalization include transborder capital, labor, management,
news, images, and data flows.
• The main engines of globalization are the transnational corporations (TNCs),
transnational media organizations (TMCs), intergovernmental organizations
(IGOs), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and alternative government
organizations (AGOs).
• From a humanist perspective, globalization entails both positive and negative
consequences: it is both narrowing and widening the income gaps among and
within nations, intensifying and diminishing political domination, and
homogenizing and pluralizing cultural identities.”
Defining Globalization
• Beerkens (2004)
• “The world-wide interconnectedness between nation-states becomes
supplemented by globalisation as a process in which basic social
arrangements (like power, culture, markets, politics, rights, values, norms,
ideology, identity, citizenship, solidarity) become disembedded from their
spatial context (mainly the nation-state) due to the acceleration,
massification, flexibilisation, diffusion and expansion of transnational flows of
people, products, finance, images and information.”
Defining Globalization
• Oman (1996)
• “‘Globalisation’ is the growth, or more precisely the accelerated growth, of
economic activity across national and regional political boundaries.
• It finds expression in the increased movement of tangible and intangible
goods and services, including ownership rights, via trade and investment, and
often of people, via migration.
• It can be and often is facilitated by a lowering of government impediments to
that movement, and/or by technological progress, notably in transportation
and communications.
• The actions of individual economic actors, firms, banks, people, drive it,
usually in the pursuit of profit, often spurred by the pressures of competition.
• Globalisation is thus a centrifugal process, a process of economic outreach,
and a microeconomic phenomenon.”
Defining Globalization
• Nayef R.F. Al-Rodhan and Gérard Stoudmann (2006)
• “Globalization is a process that encompasses the causes, course, and
consequences of transnational and transcultural integration of human
and non-human activities.”

• Human activities encompass the linguistic, cultural, economic, and political aspects of
human life (along with many others) that are a part of the human and social sphere

• Non-human activities
• the spread of bacteria and non-human diseases such as bird flu
• natural disasters such as tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and hurricanes
Defining Globalization
• Manfred Steger
• “the expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness
across world-time and across world-space”
• “the term globalization applies to a set of social processes that appear to
transform our present social condition of weakening nationality into one of
globality.”
Globalization
“…a set of complex, sometimes contradictory, social processes that are changing
our current social condition based on the modern system of independent nation-
states.
…a multidimensional set of social processes that create, multiply, stretch, and
intensify worldwide social interdependencies and exchanges while at the same
time fostering in people a growing awareness of deepening connections between
the local and the distant.
…the unprecedented compression of time and space as a result of political,
economic, and cultural change, as well as powerful technological innovations.
[emphasis supplied].”

Source: Steger, M.B. (2005). Ideologies of globalization. Journal of Political Ideologies (February 2005) (10) 1,
11-30.
Attributes of Globalization
• Globalization has various forms of connectivity such that it can be
economic, political or culture.
• Globalization allows for the expansion and stretching of social
relations.
• Globalization intensifies and accelerates social exchanges and
activities.
• Globalization occurs worldwide.
Types of globalization
1. Economic
Countries that trade with many others and have few trade barriers are
economically globalised.

2. Social
A measure of how easily information and ideas pass between people in
their own country and between different countries (includes access to
internet and social media networks).

3. Political
The amount of political co-operation there is between countries.
Metaphors of Globalization
Solid and Liquid
Flows
Solid
• Solidity
• social relationships and
objects that have remained
where they were created
because of limited
mobility;
• barriers that prevent or
make difficult the
movement of things.
• 2 classifications
• Natural
• Man-made
Liquid
• Liquidity – refers to the
increasing ease of movement of
people, things, information, and
places in the contemporary
world.
• In continuous fluctuation
• Movement is difficult to stop
Flows
• The movement of people, things,
places, and information brought
by the growing “porosity” of
global limitations (Ritzer, 2015)
A liquid world?
• Ritzer (2015)
• Globalization is a transplanetary or a set of processes involving increasing
liquidity and the growing multidirectional flows of people, objects, and
information as well as the structures they encounter and create that are
barriers to, or expedite, those flows.
• Zygmunt Bauman
• Liquid phenomena are quick to change (e.g. global finance)
• Liquid phenomena are difficult to stop (e.g. the viral posts on social media)
• Liquid phenomena make political boundaries more permeable to the flows of
people and things (e.g. interracial marriages, transnational crimes, and
worldwide diseases)
Causes of Globalization
1. Improved Communications
2. Improved Transport
3. Free Trade Agreements
4. Global Banking
5. The Growth of MNCs
Causes of globalization
• 1. Improved Communications
• The development of communication
technologies such as internet, email
and mobile phones have been vital to
the growth of globalisation because
they help MNCs to operate
throughout the world.
• The development of satellite TV
channels such as Sky and CNN have
also provided worldwide marketing
avenues for the concept and products
of globalisation.
Causes of globalization
• 2. Improved Transport
• The development of
refrigerated and container
transport, bulk shipping and
improved air transport has
allowed the easy mass
movement of goods throughout
the world. This assists
globalisation.
Causes of globalization
• 3. Free Trade Agreements
• MNCs and rich capitalist
countries have always
promoted global free trade as a
way of increasing their own
wealth and influence.
• International organisations
such as the World Trade
Organisation and the IMF also
promote free trade.
Causes of globalization
• 4. Global Banking
• Modern communication
technologies allow vast amounts
of capital to flow freely and
instantly throughout the world.
• The equivalent of up to $US1.3
trillion is traded each day
through international stock
exchanges in cities such as New
York, London and Tokyo.
Causes of globalization
• 5. The Growth of MNCs
• The rapid growth of big MNCs
such as Microsoft, McDonalds and
Nike is a cause as well as a
consequence of globalisation.
• The investment of MNCs in
farms, mines and factories across
the world is a major part of
globalisation.
• Globalisation allows MNCs to
produce goods and services and
to sell products on a massive scale
throughout the world.
EFFECTS OF GLOBALIZATION
Changed Food Supply

• Food supply is no longer tied to

the seasons.
We can buy food anywhere in the
world at any time of the year.
Division of Labour
• Because MNCs search for the
cheapest locations to
manufacture and assemble
components, production
processes may be moved from
developed to developing
countries where costs are lower.
Less Job Security
• In the global economy jobs are
becoming more temporary and
insecure.
• A survey of American workers
showed that people now hold 7 to
10 jobs over their working life.
Damage to the Environment
• More trade means more
transport which uses more fossil
fuels and causes pollution.
• Climate change is a serious
threat to our future.
Cultural Impact
• Websites such as YouTube
connect people across the planet.
As the world becomes more
unified, diverse cultures are being
ignored.
MNCs can create a monoculture Replacing
as they remove local competition
and thereby force local firms to
close.
Increase in anti-Globalisation Protests
• There is a growing awareness of
the negative impacts of
globalisation. People have begun
to realise that globalisation can be
challenged by communities
supporting each other in business
and society and through public
protest and political lobbying.
Homogeneity
• Refers to the increasing sameness in the world as cultural inputs,
economic factors, and political orientations of societies expand to
create common practices, same economies, and similar forms of
government.
Mcdonaldization of Society (George Ritzer, 2008)
• It is the process by which western societies are dominated by the
principles of fast food restaurants.
• Involves the global spread of rational systems such as :
• Efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control.
Benefits
• Increased world output and wealth
• specialization, large scale division of labor
• Increased consumer welfare
• lowered price, increased quantity
• The role/responsibility of the govt is reduced
• Peace
• less likely to engage in war due to trade, because we are tied up with other
countries because we rely on them for goods
• Long-run benefits for everyone
•
Costs
• Inequalities, wider gap between rich and poor
• Spread of economic shock is faster
• Externalities, pollution, acid rains\, water salinity,
• Exploitation
• comparative advantage- manufactured goods are usually produced in
countries with lower environmental standards
• Poverty
• Job losses? Structural change, structural unemployment
Conclusions
• Globalization is reality.
• Globalization: a contested concept’
• Globalization is the debate and the debate is globalization.
• The perspective of the person who defines globalization shapes its definition.
• Overall, globalization is a concept that is not easy to define
• Globalization is complex and multifaceted as it deals with either economic,
political, or social dimensions.
• Globalization is a complex phenomenon that occurs at multiple levels.
• It is an uneven process that affects people differently.
• Globalization and the contemporary world has a shifting nature.
• Globalization as it is, is a social process.
• Globalization with its suffix “;tion” denotes change. A change into something desired
or planned.