Local Literature

Although research on global phenomena dates to as early as the fifteenth century, the concept of

globalization has particularly become an integral part of the work of those who study the post-

Cold War era from different disciplinary perspectives, including economics, sociology, political

science, and international relations, among others. The end of the bipolar system that was based

on an ideological competition between the liberal Western bloc and the Soviet communist bloc

encouraged many scholars to claim that the world was entering a “new era” led by globalization.

A well-known work that popularized the term “globalization” was entitled The Lexus and the

Olive Tree (1999) and was authored by a journalist, Thomas Friedman, who defined

globalization as the establishment and intensification of – in particular, economic –

interdependencies among different nations, which, in his opinion, would contribute to the

prevention of violent conflicts. Skeptics, however, claim that globalization is no more than the

latest “fad.” Conflicts over territory, natural resources, culture and identity, power imbalances,

and all other social, economic, and political inequalities ensue without much change, which

renders it difficult to conclude that there is a new empirical reality that can be called

“globalization.” Studies that seek to analyze “the world-as-a-whole” gained popularity after

World War II – particularly in the 1960s and the 1970s – leading to the development of

several system theories in social sciences, such as (to name but a few) Niklas Luhmann's

theory of autopoietic social systems, modernization theory, the Dependency School, John

W. Meyer's world polity approach, and Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems analysis. The

circulation of the first pictures of the Earth by NASA, youth movements, and religious

movements contributed to the popularization of thinking about the world as a single place.
The term “globalization” is believed to have been published in its current meaning for the

first time in 1983 by an economist, in an article entitled “The Globalization of Markets” that

appeared in Harvard Business Review (Levitt 1983).