Globalization
Globalization is the process of increasing interdependence and integration among the economies, markets, societies, and cultures of different countries worldwide. This is made possible by the reduction of barriers to international trade, the liberalization of capital movements, the development of transportation, and the advancement of information and communication technologies. The term globalization first appeared in the early 20th century. It developed its current meaning sometime in the second half of the 20th century, and came into popular use in the 1990s to describe the unprecedented international connectivity of the post–Cold War world.
The origins of globalization can be traced back to the 18th and 19th centuries, driven by advances in transportation and communication technologies. These developments increased global interactions, fostering the growth of international trade and the exchange of ideas, beliefs, and cultures. While globalization is primarily an economic process of interaction and integration, it is also closely linked to social and cultural dynamics. Additionally, disputes and international diplomacy have played significant roles in the history and evolution of globalization, continuing to shape its modern form. Though many scholars place the origins of globalization in modern times, others trace its history to long before the European Age of Discovery and voyages to the New World, and some even to the third millennium BCE. Large-scale globalization began in the 1820s, and in the late 19th century and early 20th century drove a rapid expansion in the connectivity of the world's economies and cultures. The term global city was subsequently popularized by sociologist Saskia Sassen in her work The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo.
Globalization describes the growing interdependence of the world's economies, cultures, and populations, brought about by cross-border trade in goods and services, technology, and flows of investment, people, and information. Countries have built economic partnerships to facilitate these movements over many centuries.
Economically, globalization involves goods, services, data, technology, and the economic resources of capital. The expansion of global markets liberalizes the economic activities of the exchange of goods and funds. Removal of cross-border trade barriers has made the formation of global markets more feasible. Advances in transportation, like the steam locomotive, steamship, jet engine, and container ships, and developments in telecommunication infrastructure such as the telegraph, the Internet, mobile phones, and smartphones, have been major factors in globalization and have generated further interdependence of economic and cultural activities around the globe.
Between 1990 and 2010, globalization progressed rapidly, driven by the information and communication technology revolution that lowered communication costs, along with trade liberalization and the shift of manufacturing operations to emerging economies. In 2000, the International Monetary Fund identified four basic aspects of globalization: trade and transactions, capital and investment movements, migration and movement of people, and the dissemination of knowledge. Globalizing processes affect and are affected by business and work organization, economics, sociocultural resources, and the natural environment. Academic literature commonly divides globalization into three major areas: economic globalization, cultural globalization, and political globalization.
Proponents of globalization point to economic growth and broader societal development as benefits, while opponents claim globalizing processes are detrimental to social well-being due to ethnocentrism, environmental consequences, and other potential drawbacks.
Globalization, characterized by the increased flow of goods, services, capital, people, and ideas across borders, leads to greater global interdependence by integrating national economies, societies, and cultures. This process, intensified since the 1980s by technological advancements and reduced trade barriers, has profound effects on businesses, cultures, politics, and living standards worldwide.
Etymology and usage
The word globalization was used in the English language as early as the 1930s, but only ever in the context of education, and the term failed to gain traction. Over the next few decades, the term was occasionally used by other scholars and media, but it was not clearly defined. One of the first uses of a term resembling the more common meaning and usage of the modern word was by French economist François Perroux in his essays from the early 1960s. Theodore Levitt is sometimes inaccurately cited as having invented the term in the mid-1980s, although he can more confidently be credited with popularizing the term and bringing it into the mainstream business audience during that time.Though often treated as synonyms, in French, globalization is seen as a stage following mondialisation, a stage that implies the dissolution of national identities and the abolishment of borders within the world network of economic exchanges.
Since its inception, the concept of globalization has inspired competing definitions and interpretations. Its antecedents date back to the great movements of trade and empire across Asia and the Indian Ocean from the 15th century onward.
In 1848, Karl Marx noticed the increasing level of national interdependence brought on by capitalism, and predicted the universal character of the modern world society. He states:
Sociologists Martin Albrow and Elizabeth King define globalization as "all those processes by which the people of the world are incorporated into a single world society." In The Consequences of Modernity, Anthony Giddens writes: "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." In 1992, Roland Robertson, professor of sociology at the University of Aberdeen and an early writer in the field, described globalization as "the compression of the world and the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole."
In Global Transformations, David Held and his co-writers state:
Held and his co-writers' definition of globalization in that same book as "transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions—assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact—generating transcontinental or inter-regional flows" was called "probably the most widely-cited definition" in the 2014 DHL Global Connectiveness Index.
Swedish journalist Thomas Larsson, in his book The Race to the Top: The Real Story of Globalization, states that globalization:
Paul James defines globalization with a more direct and historically contextualized emphasis:
Globalization is the extension of social relations across world-space, defining that world-space in terms of the historically variable ways that it has been practiced and socially understood through changing world-time.
Manfred Steger, professor of global studies and research leader in the Global Cities Institute at RMIT University, identifies four main empirical dimensions of globalization: economic, political, cultural, and ecological. A fifth dimension—the ideological—cutting across the other four. The ideological dimension, according to Steger, is filled with a range of norms, claims, beliefs, and narratives about the phenomenon itself.
James and Steger stated that the concept of globalization "emerged from the intersection of four interrelated sets of 'communities of practice' : academics, journalists, publishers/editors, and librarians." They note the term was used "in education to describe the global life of the mind"; in international relations to describe the extension of the European Common Market, and in journalism to describe how the "American Negro and his problem are taking on a global significance". They have also argued that four forms of globalization can be distinguished that complement and cut across the solely empirical dimensions. According to James, the oldest dominant form of globalization is embodied globalization, the movement of people. A second form is agency-extended globalization, the circulation of agents of different institutions, organizations, and polities, including imperial agents. Object-extended globalization, a third form, is the movement of commodities and other objects of exchange. He calls the transmission of ideas, images, knowledge, and information across world-space disembodied globalization, maintaining that it is currently the dominant form of globalization. James holds that this series of distinctions allows for an understanding of how, today, the most embodied forms of globalization such as the movement of refugees and migrants are increasingly restricted, while the most disembodied forms such as the circulation of financial instruments and codes are the most deregulated.
The journalist Thomas L. Friedman popularized the term "flat world", arguing that globalized trade, outsourcing, supply-chaining, and political forces had permanently changed the world, for better and worse. He asserted that the pace of globalization was quickening and that its impact on business organization and practice would continue to grow.
Economist Takis Fotopoulos defined "economic globalization" as the opening and deregulation of commodity, capital, and labor markets that led toward the present neoliberal globalization. He used "political globalization" to refer to the emergence of a transnational élite and a phasing out of the nation-state. Meanwhile, he used "cultural globalization" to reference the worldwide homogenization of culture. Other of his usages included "ideological globalization", "technological globalization", and "social globalization".
Lechner and Boli define globalization as more people across large distances becoming connected in more and different ways.
"Globophobia" is used to refer to the fear of globalization, though it can also mean the fear of balloons.