Globalization

Globalization is not a single concept

Globalization … is a concept that has been defined variously over the years, with some connotations
referring to progress, development and stability, integration and cooperation, and others referring to
regression, colonialism, and destabilization.

In 1995, Martin Khor, President of the Third World Network in Malaysia, referred to globalization as
colonization.

Theories of Globalization
The World-System Theory-Immanuel Wallerstein

In the 1950s, the dominant theory was modernization theory; its problem was that some countries
were not developing/ modernizing as predicted ...

 evidence did not fit the theory  hence...

World System Theory developed out of attempt to explain

the failure of certain states to develop

 Looking at Latin America, their economies could not compete, global capitalism forced certain countries
into under-development

 Trade is asymmetrical

 Poor countries are dependent on rich states

Immanuel Wallerstein (The Modern World System, 1976)

“Globalization represents the triumph of a capitalist world economy tied together by a global division of
labor.”

• A world-system is a "multicultural territorial division of labor in which the production and exchange of
basic goods and raw materials is necessary for the everyday life of its inhabitants."

Key Structure of the capitalist world-system

The division of the world into three great regions, or geographically based and hierarchically organized tiers

• The Core

• The Periphery

• The Semi-Periphery

The powerful and wealthy "core" societies dominate and exploit weak and poor peripheral societies

 unequal exchange

 capital accumulation
 States are used by class forces to pursue their interest, in the case of core countries.

The idea that governments and international institutions can make the system ‘fair’ is an illusion (because
they always reflect interests of capitalists).

"GLOBALIZATION" refers to some assertedly new, chronologically recent, process in which states are
said to be no longer primary units of decision-making, but are now, only now, finding themselves
located in a structure in which something called the "world market," a somewhat mystical and surely
reified entity, dictates the rule."

Theories of Global Capitalism

The Transnational Practices (TNP)
Leslie Sklair

 rejects both state-centrism (realism) and globalism (the end of the state)

 existence of a global system

TRANSNATIONAL PRACTICES (TNP),practices that cross-state boundaries but do not originate with state
agencies or actors.

TNPs operate in three spheres

 the economic,

 the political, and

 the cultural-ideological.

The whole is the global system.

Transnational practices (TNPs) which originate with non- state actors and cross-state borders.

TNPs at three levels (Leslie Sklair):

 the economic, whose agent is transnational capital;

 the political, whose agent is a transnational capitalist class (TCC);

 the cultural-ideological, whose agent is cultural elites.

His theory involves the idea of the TCC as a new class that brings together several social groups who see
their own interests in an expanding global capitalist system:

 the executives of transnational corporations;

 ‘globalizing bureaucrats, politicians, and professionals’, and

 ‘consumerist elites’ in the media and the commercial sector (Sklair 2000).
 Global Capitalism By:William Robinson
World Economy

Each country developed a national economy that was linked to others through trade and finances
in an integrated international market.

Global Economy

Globalization of the production process itself, which breaks down and functionally integrates what
were previously national circuits into new global circuits of production and accumulation.

Transnational class formation takes place around these globalized circuits. Like Sklair, Robinson
analyzes the rise of a Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) as the class group that manages these globalized
circuits.

Emergent transnational state (TNS) apparatus -William Robinson

However, in distinction to Sklair, for whom state structures play no role in the global system, Robinson
theorizes an emergent transnational state (TNS) apparatus.

This Transnational State (TNS) is a loose network comprised of supranational political and economic
institutions together with national state apparatuses that have been penetrated and transformed by
transnational forces.\

The Network Society-Manuel Castells

A network society is a society whose social structure is made of networks powered by microelectronics-based
information and communication technologies.

This new economy is:

1. informational, knowledge-based;

2. global, in that production is organized on a

global scale; and

3. networked, in that productivity is generated

through global networks of interaction.

The Internet constructs a new symbolic environment, global in its reach, which makes “virtuality a
reality”.

Castells argues that globalization is a network of production, culture, and power that is constantly
shaped by advances in technology, which range from communications technologies to genetic engineering.

Globalization represents a new ‘age of information’.

The development of new information technology (IT), in particular, computers and the Internet,
representing a new technological paradigm and leading to a new ‘mode of development’ that Castells terms
‘informationalism’.
 Informationalism refers to a technological paradigm that replaces and subsumes the previous
paradigm of industrialism (Castells 1996).

From metallurgy to transportation, industrialism was marked by a revolution in materials engineering

triggered by the Industrial Revolution.

Informationalism, on the other hand, is connected with the information revolution that begins after World War
II, covering developments associated with computer science and its various expressions in electronics and
telecommunication networks.

Distinct features of the new symbolic environment

 SPACE OF FLOWS, in which informational flows bring physical spaces closer through networks

 TIMELESS TIME in which technology is able to manipulate the natural sequence of events, and

 REAL VIRTUALITY based on a hypertext reality and global interconnection which bends space and time
relations.

CENTRAL THEME (Global Network Society)

The division of the world into those areas and segments of population

 switched on to the new technological system

 and those switched off or marginalized

digital divide

For Castells, the advancement of the Information Age does not necessarily mean that the world has
become flat; rather, with technological advance, he argues, come new global forms of exclusion and inclusion,
fragmentation and integration.
THEORIES OF SPACE, PLACE AND GLOBALIZATION
‘Time-space distanciation’ Anthony Giddens

Giddens defines time-space distanciation 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’ – social relations are ‘lifted out’ from local contexts of interaction and restructured
across time and space (1990: 64)

Global Risk Society Anthony Giddens

In Runaway World, Giddens provocatively argues that globalization has led to the creation of a “global
risk society.”

human social and economic activities, especially in modernity, produce various risks such as pollution,
crime, new illnesses, food shortages, market crashes, wars, etc., and societies have become more responsible
for managing these risks that their activities intentionally or, more often than not, unintentionally produce.
‘Time-space compression’ BY:David Harvey
 time-space compression is the process whereby time is reorganized in such a way as to reduce the
constraints of space, and vice-versa.

 time–space compression refers to the way the acceleration of economic activities leads to the destruction
of spatial barriers and distances.

Theories of Global Culture

Tomlinson 1999; Nederveen Pieterse 2004

There are three main bodies of theory regarding the effects of globalization on local culture:

1. homogenization,

2. hybridization and

3. heterogeneity or polarization.

Homogenization

 Homogenization is the name given to the process whereby globalization causes one culture to consume
another.

 Homogenization theories see a global cultural convergence and would tend to highlight the rise of world
beat, world cuisines, world tourism, uniform consumption patterns and cosmopolitanism (Appadurai).

Hybridization

 Hybridization occurs when people mix cultural forms, genres or styles to create something new

Heterogeneity

 Heterogeneity approaches see continued cultural difference and highlight local cultural autonomy,
cultural resistance to homogenization, cultural clashes and polarization, and distinct subjective
experiences of globalization

The Global Village by:Marshall McLuhan

 His insights were revolutionary at the time, and fundamentally changed how everyone has thought about
media, technology, and communications ever since. McLuhan chose the insightful phrase "global village" to
highlight his observation that an electronic nervous system (the media) was rapidly integrating the planet --
events in one part of the world could be experienced from other parts in real-time, which is what human
experience was like when we lived in small villages.

 The late Marshall McLuhan, a media and communication theorist, coined the term “global village” in 1964
to describe the phenomenon of the world’s culture shrinking and expanding at the same time due to
pervasive technological advances that allow for instantaneous sharing of culture (Johnson 192).

 McLuhan's second best known insight is summarized in the expression "the medium is the message", which
means that the qualities of a medium have as much effect as the information it transmits.
McDonaldization BY:George Ritzer
McDonaldization theory is defined as “the process whereby the principles of the fast-food restaurant are
coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society and the world” (Ritzer, 1993:19).
The Four Main Dimensions of McDonaldization

 Efficiency - The optimum method of completing a task. The rational determination of the best mode of
production. Individuality is not allowed.

 Calculability - Assessment of outcomes based on quantifiable rather than subjective criteria. In other
words, quantity over quality. They sell the Big Mac, not the Good Mac.

 Predictability - The production process is organized to guarantee uniformity of product and standardized
outcomes. All shopping malls begin to look the same and all highway exits have the same assortment of
businesses.

 Control - The substitution of more predictable non-human labor for human labor, either through
automation or the deskilling of the work force.

Glocalization By: Roland Robetson

Roland Robertson’s concept of glocalization suggests that the global is only manifest in the local.

GLOCALIZATION means that ideas about home, locality and community have been extensively spread around
the world in recent years, so that the local has been globalized, and the stress upon the significance of the local
or the communal can be viewed as one ingredient of the overall globalization process (Robertson 1995).

“Disjuncture and Difference in the

Global Cultural Economy” BY: Arjun Appadurai (1990)
Landscapes or Dimensions of Cultural Flows (Arjun Appadurai)

 Mediascapes are about the flows of image and communication.

 Ethnoscapes are concerned with the flows of individuals around the world.

 Ideoscapes deal with exchanges of ideas and ideologies.

 Technoscapes refer to flows of technology and skills to create linkages between organizations around the
world.

 Financescapes relate to the interactions associated with money and capital.

Appadaurai uses the suffix SCAPE to connote the idea that these processes have fluid, irregular, variable shapes