Name: Domae Rose Tagra Section: BPA 3-B Course Code: PA-ELEC 313

Activity 1

1. Meaning of Globalization
According to World Help Organization, globalization can be defined as ” the increased
interconnectedness and interdependence of peoples and countries. It is generally
understood to include two inter-related elements: the opening of international borders to
increasingly fast flows of goods, services, finance, people and ideas; and the changes in
institutions and policies at national and international levels that facilitate or promote such
flows.”
According to Karl Marx, Globalization is a transworld connectivity enhances
opportunities of revenue creating and surplus buildup (Karl Marx’s Theory of Globalization
| Ipl.org, n.d.)

2. Nature of Globalization
Globalization accepts and advocates the value of free world trade, freedom of access
to world markets and a free flow of investments across borders. It stands for integration
and democratization of the world's culture, economy and infrastructure through global
investments.
 Liberalization
It stands for the freedom of the entrepreneurs to establish any industry or trade or
business venture, within their own countries or abroad.
 Free trade
It stands for free flow of trade relations among all the nations. Each state grants MFN
(most favored nation) status to other states and keeps its business and trade away from
excessive and hard regulatory and protective regimes.
 Globalization of Economic Activity
Economic activities are be governed both by the domestic market and also the world
market. It stands for the process of integrating the domestic economy with world
economies.
 Liberalization of Import-Export System
It stands for liberating the import-export activity and securing a free flow of goods and
services across borders.
 Privatization
 Keeping the state away from ownership of means of production and distribution and
letting the free flow of industrial, trade and economic activity across borders.
 Increased Collaborations
Encouraging the process of collaborations among the entrepreneurs with a view to
secure rapid modernization, development and technological advancement.
 Economic Reforms
Encouraging fiscal and financial reforms with a view to give strength to free world
trade, free enterprise, and market forces.

3. Scopes of Globalization
Globalization is a term used to describe how trade and technology have made the world
into a more connected and interdependent place. Globalization also captures in its scope
the economic and social changes that have come about as a result.

4. Importance of Globalization

Globalization is important because it provides expansion to small and big

businesses. Internet and mobile technology have become the most important part of
globalization. Globalization is crucial to the economy because it allows more innovation,
which lowers product costs and provides buyers with a wide range of options. It allows
people all over the world to communicate and spread ideas.

5. Limitations of Globalization
 Environmental limit

The creation of a world common market means an increase in CO2 emissions and
pollution. Poisoning the planet damages environmental and atmospheric resources, and
this damage is probably irreversible. When we talk about the environmental limit, we
mean that the pollution generated by globalization can be so significant that it makes
impossible to inhabit certain physical spaces.

 Infrastructure and geographic limit

 Depletion of natural resources
 The extreme interdependence of markets and economic agents
  The Deindustrialization of developed countries in favor of developing countries and
its social consequences.

6. Theories of Globalization
 Theory of Liberalism:

Liberalism sees the process of globalization as market-led extension of

modernization. At the most elementary level, it is a result of ‘natural’ human desires for
economic welfare and political liberty. As such, trans planetary connectivity is derived from
human drives to maximize material well-being and to exercise basic freedoms. These forces
eventually interlink humanity across the planet. All people cannot be assumed to be equally
amenable to and desirous of increased globality in their lives. Similarly, they overlook the
phenomenon of power. There are structural power inequalities in promoting globalization
and shaping its course. Often they do not care for the entrenched power hierarchies
between states, classes, cultures, sexes, races and resources.

 Theory of Political Realism:

Advocates of this theory are interested in questions of state power, the pursuit of
national interest, and conflict between states. According to them states are inherently
acquisitive and self-serving, and heading for inevitable competition of power. Some of the
scholars stand for a balance of power, where any attempt by one state to achieve world
dominance is countered by collective resistance from other states.

Globalization has also cultural, ecological, economic and psychological dimensions that are
not reducible to power politics. It is also about the production and consumption of
resources, about the discovery and affirmation of identity, about the construction and
communication of meaning, and about humanity shaping and being shaped by nature.
Most of these are apolitical.

Power theorists also neglect the importance and role of other actors in generating
globalization. These are sub-state authorities, macro-regional institutions, global agencies,
and private-sector bodies. Additional types of power-relations on lines of class, culture and
gender also affect the course of globalization. Some other structural inequalities cannot be
adequately explained as an outcome of interstate competition. After all, class inequality,
cultural hierarchy, and patriarchy predate the modern states.

 Theory of Marxism:
 Marxism is principally concerned with modes of production, social exploitation
through unjust distribution, and social emancipation through the transcendence of
capitalism. Marx himself anticipated the growth of globality that ‘capital by its nature drives
beyond every spatial barrier to conquer the whole earth for its market’. Accordingly, to
Marxists, globalization happens because trans-world connectivity enhances opportunities of
profit-making and surplus accumulation.

Marxists reject both liberalist and political realist explanations of globalization. It is the
outcome of historically specific impulses of capitalist development. Its legal and institutional
infrastructures serve the logic of surplus accumulation of a global scale. Liberal talk of
freedom and democracy make up a legitimating ideology for exploitative global capitalist
class relations.

It also seeks to explore identities and investigate meanings. People develop global weapons
and pursue global military campaigns not only for capitalist ends, but also due to interstate
competition and militarist culture that predate emergence of capitalism. Ideational aspects
of social relations also are not outcome of the modes of production. They have, like
nationalism, their autonomy.

 Theory of Constructivism:

Globalization has also arisen because of the way that people have mentally
constructed the social world with particular symbols, language, images and interpretation.
It is the result of particular forms and dynamics of consciousness. Patterns of production
and governance are second-order structures that derive from deeper cultural and socio-
psychological forces. Such accounts of globalization have come from the fields of
Anthropology, Humanities, Media of Studies and Sociology.

Constructivists concentrate on the ways that social actors ‘construct’ their world:
both within their own minds and through inter-subjective communication with others.
Conversation and symbolic exchanges lead people to construct ideas of the world, the rules
for social interaction, and ways of being and belonging in that world. Social geography is a
mental experience as well as a physical fact. They form ‘in’ or ‘out’ as well as ‘us’ and they’
groups. Constructivists concentrate on the ways that social actors ‘construct’ their world:
both within their own minds and through inter-subjective communication with others.
Conversation and symbolic exchanges lead people to construct ideas of the world, the rules
for social interaction, and ways of being and belonging in that world. Social geography is a
mental experience as well as a physical fact. They form ‘in’ or ‘out’ as well as ‘us’ and they’
groups.

They conceive of themselves as inhabitants of a particular global world. National,

class, religious and other identities respond in part to material conditions but they also
depend on inter-subjective construction and communication of shared self-understanding.
However, when they go too far, they present a case of social-psychological reductionism
ignoring the significance of economic and ecological forces in shaping mental experience.
This theory neglects issues of structural inequalities and power hierarchies in social
relations. It has a built-in apolitical tendency.

 Theory of Postmodernism:

Some other ideational perspectives of globalization highlight the significance of

structural power in the construction of identities, norms and knowledge. They all are
grouped under the label of ‘postmodernism’. They too, as Michel Foucault does strive to
understand society in terms of knowledge power: power structures shape knowledge.
Certain knowledge structures support certain power hierarchies.

The reigning structures of understanding determine what can and cannot be known
in a given socio-historical context. This dominant structure of knowledge in modern society
is ‘rationalism’. It puts emphasis on the empirical world, the subordination of nature to
human control, objectivist science, and instrumentalist efficiency. Modern rationalism
produces a society overwhelmed with economic growth, technological control, bureaucratic
organization, and disciplining desires.

This mode of knowledge has authoritarian and expansionary logic that leads to a
kind of cultural imperialism subordinating all other epistemologies. It does not focus on the
problem of globalization per se. In this way, western rationalism overawes indigenous
cultures and other non-modem life-worlds. Postmodernism, like Marxism, helps to go
beyond the relatively superficial accounts of liberalist and political realist theories and
expose social conditions that have favored globalization. Obviously, postmodernism suffers
from its own methodological idealism. All material forces, though come under impact of
ideas, cannot be reduced to modes of consciousness. For a valid explanation,
interconnection between ideational and material forces is not enough.

 Theory of Feminism:
It puts emphasis on social construction of masculinity and femininity. All other theories
have identified the dynamics behind the rise of trans-planetary and supra-territorial
connectivity in technology, state, capital, identity and the like. Biological sex is held to
mound the overall social order and shape significantly the course of history, presently
globality. Their main concern lies behind the status of women, particularly their structural
subordination to men. Women have tended to be marginalized, silenced and violated in
global communication.

 Theory of Trans-formational:

This theory has been expounded by David Held and his colleagues. Accordingly, the
term ‘globalization’ reflects increased interconnectedness in political, economic and cultural
matters across the world creating a “shared social space”. Given this interconnectedness,
globalization may be defined as “a process (or set of processes) which embodies a
transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions, expressed in
transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction and power.”

While there are many definitions of globalization, such a definition seeks to bring together
the many and seemingly contradictory theories of globalization into a “rigorous analytical
framework” and “proffer a coherent historical narrative”. Held and McGrew’s analytical
framework is constructed by developing a three-part typology of theories of globalization
consisting of “hyper-globalist,” “sceptic,” and “transformationalist” categories.

 Theory of Eclecticism:

Each one of the above six ideal-type of social theories of globalization highlights
certain forces that contribute to its growth. They put emphasis on technology and
institution building, national interest and inter-state competition, capital accumulation and
class struggle, identity and knowledge construction, rationalism and cultural imperialism,
and masculinize and subordination of women. Jan Art Scholte synthesizes them as forces of
production, governance, identity, and knowledge.

Accordingly, capitalists attempt to amass ever-greater resources in excess of their

survival needs: accumulation of surplus. The capitalist economy is thoroughly monetized.
Money facilitates accumulation. It offers abundant opportunities to transfer surplus,
especially from the weak to the powerful. This mode of production involves perpetual and
pervasive contests over the distribution of surplus. Such competition occurs both between
individual, firms, etc. and along structural lines of class, gender, race etc.
 It has spurred globalization in four ways: market expansion, accounting practices,
asset mobility and enlarged arenas of commodification. Its technological innovation appears
in communication, transport and data processing as well as in global organization and
management. It concentrates profits at points of low taxation. Information, communication,
finance and consumer sectors offer vast potentials to capital making it ‘hyper-capitalism’.
Any mode of production cannot operate in the absence of an enabling regulatory apparatus.
There are some kind of governance mechanisms. Governance relates processes whereby
people formulate, implement, enforce and review rules to guide their common affairs.” It
entails more than government. It can extend beyond state and sub-state institutions
including supra-state regimes as well. It covers the full scope of societal regulation.

In the growth of contemporary globalization, besides political and economic forces, there are
material and ideational elements. In expanding social relations, people explore their class,
their gender, their nationality, their race, their religious faith and other aspects of their
being. Constructions of identity provide collective solidarity against oppression. Identity
provides frameworks for community, democracy, citizenship and resistance. It also leads
from nationalism to greater pluralism and hybridity.

Earlier nationalism promoted territorialism, capitalism, and statism, now these

plural identities are feeding more and more globality, hyper-capitalism and polycentrism.
These identities have many international qualities visualized in global diasporas and other
group affiliations based on age, class, gender, race, religious faith and sexual orientations.
Many forms of supra-territorial solidarities are appearing through globalization.
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