INTRODUCTION

TO THE STUDY OF
GLOBALIZATION
PREPARED BY:
MARIA CORAZON N. DE FRANCISCA
 WHAT IS GLOBALIZATION

A Simple Globalization Definition

Globalization means the speedup of movements and exchanges

(of human beings, goods, and services, capital, technologies or
cultural practices) all over the planet. One of the effects of
globalization is that it promotes and increases interactions between
different regions and populations around the globe.
https://youmatter.world/en/definition/definitions-globalization-definition-benefits-effects-examples/
 WHAT IS GLOBALIZATION
An Official Definition of Globalization by the World Health
Organization (WHO)

According to WHO, globalization can be defined as ” the increased

interconnectedness and interdependence of peoples and countries. It is
generally understood to include two inter-related elements: the opening
of international borders to increasingly fast flows of goods, services,
finance, people and ideas; and the changes in institutions and policies at
national and international levels that facilitate or promote such flows.”
https://youmatter.world/en/definition/definitions-globalization-definition-benefits-effects-examples/
 WHAT IS GLOBALIZATION
What Is Globalization in the Economy?

According to the Committee for Development Policy (a subsidiary body of the

United Nations), from an economic point of view, globalization can be defined as:
“(…) the increasing interdependence of world economies as a result of the
growing scale of cross-border trade of commodities and services, the flow of
international capital and the wide and rapid spread of technologies. It reflects the
continuing expansion and mutual integration of market frontiers (…) and the
rapid growing significance of information in all types of productive activities and
marketization are the two major driving forces for economic globalization.”
https://youmatter.world/en/definition/definitions-globalization-definition-benefits-effects-examples/
 WHAT IS GLOBALIZATION
Globalization is the word used to describe 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. But the term gained
popularity after the Cold War in the early 1990s, as these cooperative
arrangements shaped modern everyday life.-
https://www.piie.com/microsites/globalization/what-is-globalization
 WHAT IS GLOBALIZATION
Globalization is actually the idea that there will be no national boundary in the world of
business and commerce and all the trade will operate on an international scale.
Recognizing the cultural diversity of the world to build a harmonious world is another
agenda of globalization.
People have derived benefits from the geographical locations of one another since ages.
This has been done by way of migration, trade and business relations. Likewise, even
today the same phenomenon continues on a large scale by introduction of free trade
agreements and novel developments in the international relations which enable the
states to benefit from each other’s interests. This process of inter-state integration and
interaction is called globalization.
 WHAT IS GLOBALIZATION

Globalization, the word means to make “global”, meaning making

global ties or making something or usage of something accessible and
not restricted to a single territory. The process is leaving a significant
impact on the international community and on its environment,
politics, society and economic development. Besides, globalization
has made gradual changes in the health sector and individual well-
being of societies.
 The Need For Globalization
Not all things are in abundance everywhere, but they can be in abundance at a
particular place. For example if somebody is growing vegetables in their land
and they have more than their consumption requirement then they would want to
sell them to make the most of the yield and others will buy from them to escape
the costly market rates. This is exactly how globalization works. Countries even
go a step ahead by availing themselves of the cheap labor opportunities abroad.
For example, a Japanese automobile company manufactures its automobile parts
in say Pakistan, assembles them in Bangladesh and sells the finished cars in the
other countries. Japan would only see which States can offer the most
economic friendly results without compromising the quality.
https://www.basic-concept.com/c/basic-concept-of-globalization-with-definition-and-advantage
 THEORIES OF
GLOBALIZATION
 1. Theory of Liberalism

Liberalism sees the process of globalization as market-led

extension of modernization. At the most elementary level, it
is a result of ‘natural’ human desires for economic welfare
and political liberty. As such, trans planetary connectivity is
derived from human drives to maximize material well-being
and to exercise basic freedoms. These forces eventually
interlink humanity across the planet.
They fructify in the form of:
(a) Technological advances, particularly in the areas of transport,
communications and information processing, and,
(b) Suitable legal and institutional arrangement to enable markets and liberal
democracy to spread on a trans world scale.
 But its supporters neglect the social forces that lie behind the creation of
technological and institutional underpinnings. It is not satis­fying to
attribute these developments to ‘natural’ human drives for economic
growth and political liberty. They are culture blind and tend to overlook
historically situated life-worlds and knowledge structures which have
promoted their emergence.
 2. Theory of Political Realism
Advocates of this theory are interested in questions of state
power, the pursuit of national interest, and conflict between
states. According to them states are inherently acquisitive and
self-serving, and heading for inevitable competition of power.
Some of the scholars stand for a balance of power, where any
attempt by one state to achieve world dominance is countered
by collective resistance from other states.
 Another group suggests that a dominant state can bring stability to
world order. The ‘hegemon’ state (presently the US or G7/8) maintains
and defines international rules and institutions that both advance its own
interests and at the same time contain conflicts between other states.
Globalization has also been explained as a strategy in the contest for
power between several major states in contem­porary world politics.
 At some levels, globalization is considered as antithetical to territorial
states. States, they say, are not equal in globalization, some being
dominant and others subordinate in the process. But they fail to
understand that everything in globalization does not come down to the
acquisition, distribution and exercise of power.
 Globalization has also cultural, ecological, economic and psychological
dimensions that are not reducible to power politics. It is also about the
production and consumption of resources, about the discovery and affir­mation of
identity, about the construction and communication of meaning, and about
humanity shaping and being shaped by nature. Most of these are apolitical.
 Power theorists also neglect the importance and role of other actors in generating
globalization. These are sub-state authorities, macro-regional institutions, global
agencies, and private-sector bodies. Additional types of power-relations on lines
of class, culture and gender also affect the course of globalization. Some other
structural inequalities cannot be adequately explained as an outcome of interstate
competition. After all, class inequality, cultural hierarchy, and patriarchy predate
the modern states.
 3. Theory of Marxism

Marxism is principally concerned with modes of production, social

exploi­tation through unjust distribution, and social emancipation
through the transcendence of capitalism. Marx himself anticipated the
growth of globality that ‘capital by its nature drives beyond every
spatial barrier to conquer the whole earth for its market’. Accordingly,
to Marxists, globalization happens because trans-world connectivity
enhances opportu­nities of profit-making and surplus accumulation.
 Marxists reject both liberalist and political realist explanations of
globalization. It is the outcome of historically specific impulses of capitalist
development. Its legal and insti­tutional infrastructures serve the logic of
surplus accumulation of a global scale. Liberal talk of freedom and democracy
make up a legitimating ideology for exploitative global capitalist class
relations.
 The neo-Marxists in dependency and world-system theories examine capitalist
accumulation on a global scale on lines of core and peripheral countries. Neo-
Gramscians highlight the significance of underclass struggles to resist
globalizing capitalism not only by traditional labor unions, but also by new
social movements of consumer advocates, environmentalists, peace activists,
peasants, and women. However, Marxists give an overly restricted account of
power.
 There are other relations of dominance and subordination which relate to state,
culture, gender, race, sex, and more. Presence of US hegemony, the West-centric
cultural domination, masculinism, racism etc. are not reducible to class
dynamics within capitalism. Class is a key axis of power in globalization, but it
is not the only one. It is too simplistic to see globalization solely as a result of
drives for surplus accumulation.
 Italso seeks to explore identities and investigate meanings. People develop
global weapons and pursue global military campaigns not only for capitalist
ends, but also due to interstate competition and militarist culture that predate
emergence of capitalism. Ideational aspects of social relations also are not
outcome of the modes of production. They have, like nationalism, their
autonomy.
 4. Theory of Constructivism
 Globalization has also arisen because of the way that people have mentally constructed
the social world with particular symbols, language, images and interpretation. It is the
result of particular forms and dynamics of consciousness. Patterns of production and
governance are second-order structures that derive from deeper cultural and socio-
psychological forces. Such accounts of globalization have come from the fields of
Anthropology, Humanities, Media of Studies and Sociology.
 Constructivists concentrate on the ways that social actors ‘construct’ their world: both
within their own minds and through inter-subjective communication with others. Conver­
sation and symbolic exchanges lead people to construct ideas of the world, the rules for
social interaction, and ways of being and belonging in that world. Social geography is a
mental experience as well as a physical fact. They form ‘in’ or ‘out’ as well as ‘us’ and
they’ groups.
 Constructivists concentrate on the ways that social actors ‘construct’ their world: both
within their own minds and through inter-subjective communication with others. Conver­
sation and symbolic exchanges lead people to construct ideas of the world, the rules for
social interaction, and ways of being and belonging in that world. Social geography is a
mental experience as well as a physical fact. They form ‘in’ or ‘out’ as well as ‘us’ and
they’ groups.
 They conceive of themselves as inhabitants of a particular global world. National, class,
religious and other identities respond in part to material conditions but they also depend on
inter-subjective construction and communication of shared self-understanding. However,
when they go too far, they present a case of social-psychological reductionism ignoring the
significance of economic and ecological forces in shaping mental experience. This theory
neglects issues of structural inequalities and power hierarchies in social relations. It has a
built-in apolitical tendency.
 5.Theory of Postmodernism
 Some other ideational perspectives of globalization highlight the signifi­cance of structural
power in the construction of identities, norms and knowledge. They all are grouped under
the label of ‘postmodernism’. They too, as Michel Foucault does strive to understand
society in terms of knowledge power: power structures shape knowledge. Certain
knowledge structures support certain power hierarchies. he reigning structures of
understanding determine what can and cannot be known in a given socio-historical
context. This dominant structure of knowledge in modern society is ‘rationalism’. It puts
emphasis on the empirical world, the subordi­nation of nature to human control, objectivist
science, and instrumentalist efficiency. Modern rationalism produces a society
overwhelmed with economic growth, technological control, bureaucratic organization,
and disciplining desires.
 This mode of knowledge has authoritarian and expan­sionary logic that leads
to a kind of cultural imperialism subordinating all other epistemologies. It
does not focus on the problem of globalization per se. In this way, western
rationalism overawes indigenous cultures and other non-modem life-worlds.
 Postmodernism, like Marxism, helps to go beyond the relatively superficial
accounts of liberalist and political realist theories and expose social conditions
that have favored globalization. Obviously, postmodernism suffers from its
own methodological idealism. All material forces, though come under impact
of ideas, cannot be reduced to modes of consciousness. For a valid
explanation, interconnection between ideational and material forces is not
enough.
 6. Theory of Feminism
 It puts emphasis on social construction of masculinity and femininity.
All other theories have identified the dynamics behind the rise of
trans-planetary and supra-territorial connectivity in technology, state,
capital, identity and the like.
 Biological sex is held to mold the overall social order and shape
significantly the course of history, presently globality. Their main
concern lies behind the status of women, particularly their structural
subordination to men. Women have tended to be marginalized,
silenced and violated in global communication.
 7. Theory of Trans-formationalism
 This theory has been expounded by David Held and his colleagues.
Accord­ingly, the term ‘globalization’ reflects increased
interconnectedness in political, economic and cultural matters across
the world creating a “shared social space”. Given this
interconnectedness, globalization may be defined as “a process (or set
of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial
organization of social relations and transactions, expressed in trans­
continental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction
and power.”
Theory of Trans-formationalism

 While there are many definitions of globalization, such a

definition seeks to bring together the many and seemingly
contradictory theories of globalization into a “rigorous analytical
framework” and “proffer a coherent historical narrative”. Held
and McGrew’s analytical framework is constructed by developing
a three-part typology of theories of globalization consisting of
“hyper-globalist,” “sceptic,” and “transformationalist” categories.
 The Hyperglobalists purportedly argue that “contemporary globalization defines
a new era in which people everywhere are increasingly subject to the disciplines
of the global marketplace”. Given the importance of the global marketplace,
multi-national enterprises (MNEs) and intergov­ernmental organizations (IGOs)
which regulate their activity are key political actors. Sceptics, such as Hirst and
Thompson (1996) ostensibly argue that “globalization is a myth which conceals
the reality of an interna­tional economy increasingly segmented into three major
regional blocs in which national governments remain very powerful.”
 Finally,transformationalists such as Rosenau (1997) or Giddens (1990) argue
that globalization occurs as “states and societies across the globe are experi­
encing a process of profound change as they try to adapt to a more
interconnected but highly uncertain world”.
 8. Theory of Eclecticism

Each one of the above six ideal-type of social theories of globalization

highlights certain forces that contribute to its growth. They put
emphasis on technology and institution building, national interest and
inter-state compe­tition, capital accumulation and class struggle,
identity and knowledge construction, rationalism and cultural
imperialism, and masculinize and subordination of women. Jan Art
Scholte synthesizes them as forces of production, governance,
identity, and knowledge.
 Accordingly, capitalists attempt to amass ever-greater resources in excess
of their survival needs: accumulation of surplus. The capitalist economy is
thoroughly monetised. Money facilitates accumulation. It offers abundant
opportunities to transfer surplus, especially from the weak to the powerful.
This mode of production involves perpetual and pervasive contests over
the distribution of surplus. Such competition occurs both between
individual, firms, etc. and along structural lines of class, gender, race etc.
 Their contests can be overt or latent. Surplus accumulation has had
transpired in one way or another for many centuries, but capitalism is a
comparatively recent phenomenon. It has turned into a structural power,
and is accepted as a ‘natural’ circumstance, with no alternative mode of
production.
 ACTIVITY 2-THEORIES OF
GLOBALIZATION-(60 points)
A. Analyze the pictures found in Slide#12,16,20,23,26,28,32,35 and answer the
following questions:
1. Describe the picture in ONE WORD
2. How is this picture related to the theories of globalization?
3. Which of these theories do you believe most? Cite concrete examples.