CONTEMPORARY R2

• UNIT 1: INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF GLOBALIZATION
• Aspects of Globalization

  • Economic globalization – is the process through which national economies have, to a greater or lesser extent, been absorbed into a single global economy
  • Cultural globalization – is the process whereby information, commodities, and images that have been produced in one part of the world enter into a global flow that tends to ‘flatten out’ cultural differences between nations, regions, and individuals
  • Political globalization – is the process through which policy-making responsibilities have been passed from national governments to international organizations
• HISTORY OF GLOBALIZATION (1500s-present)
• THEORY AND UNDERLYING PHILOSOPHIES OF GLOBALIZATION
• Factors on the Intensification of Globalization

  • Technological changes
  • Reduction of barriers to trade and investment
  • Industrialization of significant parts of the developing world
  • End of Cold War and “Pax Americana” (1992-2001)
• Unevenness of Globalization

  • Geographical impact of globalization
  • Mobility of goods and factors of production
• Various positions on Globalization (Held et al., 1999)

  • HYPERGLOBALISM – the view that new, globalized economic and cultural patterns became inevitable as a result of fast-paced innovations in information and communication technology in the 20th century, and that globalization makes states obsolete, producing a “borderless world”
  • SCEPTICS VIEW – Globalization either does not exist at all or is not what others think it is
  • TRANSFORMATIONALIST VIEW – or the “third way,” Globalization brought profound changes―transformations―as a result of technological innovation and increased interconnectedness, but takes care to specify these changes closely rather than bundling them up as “globalization”
• Definitions of Globalization

  • Involves the rapid spread of economic activity, political interactions, migration, culture, and ideas across national borders, often in de facto defiance of national sovereignty (Ethridge & Handelman, 2015)
  • The intensification of worldwide social relations that link distant localities in a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa (Giddens, 1990)
  • The integration of national economies into the international economy through trade, direct foreign investment, short-term capital flows, international flow of workers and humanity generally, and flows of technology (Bhagwati, 2004)
  • The processes through which sovereign nation-states are crisscrossed and undermined by transnational actors with varying prospects of power, orientations, identities, and networks (Beck, 2000)
  • A process or set of processes which embody the transformation of the spatial organization of social relations and transactions (Held et al., 1999)
  • A reconfiguration of social geography marked by the growth of transplanetary and supraterritorial connections between people (Scholte, 2005)
  • A process of time-space compression―literally, a shrinking world―in which the sources of even very local developments, from unemployment to ethnic conflict, may be traced to distant conditions or conditions (McGrew, 2017)