Topic 1 Introduction to Globalization Studies:

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Topic 1Introduction to Globalization Studies

• Concepts and Theories

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Themes

• How can be conceptualize globalization?
• What are the distinctive processes of
  globalization?
• What is Globalization?

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Key Concepts of Globalization

• Postmodernism was the concept of the 1980s, while
  globalization was the concept of the 1990s and
  the new millennium.
• David Harvey the word "Globalization" was first
  used in mid 70s by American Express.

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Key Concepts of Globalization (Cont)

• The term then spread out quickly in the financial
  and business press.
• It replaces the term "internationalization" and
  "transnationalization".

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Internationalization

• increasing interwovenness of national economies
  through international trade. nation state

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Transnationalization

• the increasing organization of production on a
  cross-border basis by multinational
  organizations. crossing nation-states

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Globalization

• nation-state is no longer important.
  Globalization is not equal with the geographical
  integration of national economies, but making of
  new spatial scales.

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Antony Giddens' conceptualization

• "Globalization can thus be defined 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 is a dialectical process because such local
  happenings may move in an obverse direction from
  the very distanciated relations that shape them.

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• Local transformation is as much a part of
  globalization as the lateral extension of social
  connections across time and space."
• The most important concept the concept of
  time/space compression.
• What happen in a local area is not only closely
  related to the outside world, but intensively
  affected each other.

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• The shrinking of the world to a "global village"
  - a virtual disappearance of space through time.
• Today people can have social relations and even
  organized community relations regardless of
  space.
• It allows the emergence of "imagined"
  communities, cultures and even systems of
  authority and social control that cross borders.

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• The most common features the transnationality of
  production, commerce, ownership, consumption,
  socio-cultural reproduction, and politics.
• Other features increased volatility of market
  organizational decentralization of firms,
  flexibility of production privatization of
  public finance and increased social inequality
  and social exclusion.

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• Roland Robertston new experience as global
  consciousness.
• Manuel Castells a new epoch of network society
  or global informational society.
• Elements of globalization transborder capital,
  labor, management, news, images, and data flows.

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In Short

• Globalization is a compression of time and space
  which privileges the capitalist economies over
  non-capitalist and socialist societies.
• After all, globalization is first and foremost a
  political contest.
• Its hegemonic project is neoliberal capitalism.
• Yet, it is a never complete and contradictory
  process- an uneasy correlation of economic
  forces, power relations and social structures.

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Conceptualizing Globalization

• Modernization Theories linear progress to be
  modern
• Backdrop the fear of socialism and the
  liberation of colonialism in the time of cold
  war.
• President Truman in his inaugural address of 1949
  announced the Point Four Program of Development
  Aid.
• It became the policy of the US to aid the
  underdeveloped countries.
• Every country becomes western countries- western
  oriented model

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Conceptualizing Globalization (Cont)

• Universalizing value measured objectively- level
  of education, occupation, income, wealth,
  information and capability of consumption.
• The world is divided into First World and Third
  World, or developed countries and developing
  countries.
• Modernization is a social process to incorporate
  all kinds of countries into the same model of
  western countries.

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Conceptualizing Globalization (Cont)

• It believes that all societies at different
  speeds, are moving towards the same direction,
  that is the path of modernity.
• Modernization is very ideological, and is
  criticized as Euro-centric.
• Modernization, after all, is an attempt to preach
  American or western way of life.

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Dependency and World System Theories

• Dependency theories criticized the modernization
  theory.
• It brings the structure of unequal relationships
  between rich and poor countries back into the
  picture
• The main argument capitalist development
  actually created greater gap between First World
  and Third World countries, making them further
  dependent on First World countries for survival
  or development.

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Dependency and World System Theories (Cont)

• Countries develop at an uneven pace in relation
  to one another.
• And even inside the backward countries
  themselves, advanced and primitive features of
  economy and society co-exist.
• The original version of dependency and
  underdevelopment theory is then further developed
  by Gunder Frank and many others.

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Dependency and World System Theories (Cont)

• The dependency theory has been a world system
  approach, and the distrust of a global capitalist
  system
• a. The subordination of the local economy to the
  structure of advanced capitalist countries. --
  only produced primary goods for the industrial
  West.
• b. External orientation-- an extreme dependency
  on overseas markets, both for capital and
  technology sourcing and for production outlets.

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Long History Perspective

• Gundar Frank globalism was fact of life already
  existed since at least 1500 for the world.
• The perception of a major new departure is
  (mis)informed by a Eurocentric point of view.

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Long History Perspective (Cont)

• We are mis-guided into thinking that our world is
  only just now undergoing a belated process of
  globalization.
• Globalization in Question globalization is not a
  new social or historical force.
• In reviewing the historical evidence of world
  trade and capital flows, the level international
  economy in the present era is not unprecedented.

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• 1. In terms of amount of good and services that
  cross frontiers-- The percentage of all goods
  and services that are produced world-wide reached
  33 in 1913. Today it is about 31.
• 2. In relation to total world output-- the
  percentage share of world production subject to
  transnational corporate control has remained
  relatively stable in the past one hundred year.

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• 3. In term of global reach of world capitalism
  over the five continents-- the percentage of two
  continents, Latin America and Africa, in world
  trade and foreign capital flows had actually been
  declined.
• The expansive phase of capitalism only a phase
  of deepening, but not widening capitalist
  integration.

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Distinctive Processes of Globalization

• 1) as a spatial and economic process whether
  contributed to the end of geography and the rise
  of a borderless world or not
• 2) as a process of political economy something
  qualitatively new, or the process had been
  happened five hundred years ago

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Distinctive Processes of Globalization (Cont)

• 3) as a socio-cultural process whether leads to
  social polarization, social exclusion, community
  fragmentation, consumption homogeneity and
  identity crisis.
• 4) As a cultural critique whether as a
  neo-liberal ideology or a myth of market power.

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• Is globalization merely a catch-all buzzword,
  an overstated process or merely an ideology?