Globalisation

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  • Created by: sikemi__
  • Created on: 29-05-21 10:55

Basic aspects of globalisation

  • Term first coined in 1960s but popularised in the 1990s
  • All about intergration
  • Varying definitions...
    • 'Intensification of worldwide social relations' (Giddens, 1991)
    • 'Primarily an economic process of integration that has social and cultural aspects. It involves goods and services, and the economic resources of capital, technology, and data' (Martin & King, 1990)
    • 'Environmental problems such as global warming, biodiversity loss, cross-border pollution, or over-fishing of the oceans are linked with globalisation' (Bridges, 2002)
  • In 2000, the IMF identified 4 basic aspects of globalisation...
    • Trade and transactions
    • Capital and investment movements
    • Migration and movement of people
    • The dissemination of knowledge
    • Political integration (currently questionable due to Brexit)
  • Three perspectves on globalisation...
    • Hyperglobalists (Ohmae, 1995) - argued that a fully integrated global ecoonmy is the reality
    • Sceptics (Hirst and Thompson, 1999) - argued that globalisation is a myth
    • Transformationalists (Castells, 1996; Giddens, 1990) - somewhere between the two, argue that globalisation has good and bad aspects (increases trade and wealth but also creates inequality). Also believe that globalisation doesn't make all places the same but leads to new forms of difference as global flows of people/ideas etc interact
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Economic globalisation

  • Increasing economic interdependence of national economies across the world
  • Can be described as the process of increasing economic integration between countries
  • Debatable depending on which viewpoint you take
  • Comprises of...
    • Globalisation of production - producing goods in a different location from their source to benefit from cheaper costs
    • Globalisation of markets - a union of different and separate markets into a massive single marketplace, all about exchange
    • Competition, technology, corporations and industries
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Political globalisation

  • Supranational institutions such as the EU, WTO, G8 and the International Criminal Court replace or extend national functions to facilitate international agreements
  • Multi-level governance is an approach in political science and public administration theory that primarily originated from studies on European integration
  • In multi-level governance there are many interacting authority structures at work in the emergent global political economy
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Cultural globalisation

  • Refers to transmission of mainly Western ideas, meaning and values around the world
  • This process is marked by the common consumption of cultures
  • The circulation of cultures enables individuals to partake in extended social relations that cross national and regional borders
  • Cultural globalisation involves the formation of shared norms and knowledge with which people associate their individual and collective cultural identities
  • Increasing interconnectedness
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Is globalisation over ambitious?

  • Covering a wide range of distinct political, economic and cultural trends
  • In popular discourse, globalisation often functions as little more than a synonym for one or more of the following phenomena:
    • Pursuit of classical liberal policies in the world economy (economic liberalisation)
    • Growing dominance of Western forms of political, economic and cultural life (westernisation and Americanisation)
    • Proliferation of new information technologies as well as the notion that humanity stands at the threshold of realising one single unified community (global integration)
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Space and time

  • 'Most contemporary social theorists argue that globalisation refers to fundamental changes in the spatial and temporal aspects of social existence, according to which the significance of space or territory undergoes shifts in the face of an acceleration in the temporal structure of crucial forms of human activity' (Schuerman, 2014)
  • Physical distance isn't always appropriate when thinking of geographical connections as 'it is typically measured in time. As the time necessary to connect distinct geographical locations is reduced, distance or space undergoes compression or "annihilation". Changes in the temporality of human activity inevitable generate altered experiences of space or territory' (Schuerman, 2014)
  • Harvey coined the term 'time-space compression' in 1989 to refer to any phenomenon that alters qualities of any relationship between space and time
  • Focused on the acceleration of economic activities which to him, led to the reconfiguration and destruction of spatial barriers and distances
  • Harvey (1990) argues that capital moves at a pace faster than ever before as production, circulation and exchange of capital happens at ever increasing speeds, particularly with aid of advanced communication and transportation technologies
    • E.g. a computer in Wall Street can transfer millions of dollars from one economy to another and gain millions of dollars in seconds
  • Harvey states that the compression of social time-space through economic activity that is the driving force behind globalisation according to Harvey
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History of the use of the term

  • 'Globalisation is a process rather than a political-economic condition that has recently come into being' (Harvey, 1995)
    • It happens in different places, ways and in different countries depending on their economic, social and cultural circumstances
  • Globalisation as integral to capitalist development
    • From 1492 onwards, and even before, the globalisation process of capitalism was well underway, and it has never ceased to be of profound importance to capitalism's dynamics
    • 19th and 20th century philosophy, literature and social commentary included numerous references to a widely shared awareness that experiences of distance and space are transformed by the emergence of high-speed forms of and communication that heighten possibilities for human interaction across geographical and political divides
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Contemporary globalisation

  • Contemporary analysts associate globalisation with detteritorialisation, according to which a growing variety of social activitiies takes place irrespective of the geographical locations of participants
  • However, a vast majority of human activities is still tied to concrete geographical locations e.g. effect of Brexit will be felt differently based on location/region
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Globalisation as a long term process (inequality)

  • Some contemporary theorists believe globalisation has taken a particularly intense form in recent decades
  • The impact of deterriolisation, social interconnectedness and social acceleration are not uniform or universal
  • We need to start thinking about the uneveness between places worldwide
  • There is a sizeable body of opinion and evidence that globalisation is not flattening the world economy by accentuating its uneveness e.g. migration of high skilled workers to ACs to work in low paid jobs
  • Both the architecture and the flows of the Internet and telephonic communication are highly spatially skewed and concentrated, overwhelmingly focused on and dominated by major global cities
  • Even having equal access to a ubiquitoius and flat ICT playing field does not imply an equal outcome among the players
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Anti-globalisation movement

  • Social movement critical of economic, political and cultural globalisation
  • Are they against all forms of globalisation or just economic?
  • 'The anti-globalisation movement advocates participatory democracy, seeking to increase popular control of political and economic life in the face of increasingly powerful corporations, unaccountable global financial institutions and US hegemony'
  • 'The term globalisation has been appropriated by the powerful to refer to a specific form of international economic integration, one based on investor rights with the interests of people incidental. That is why the business press, in its more honest moments, refers to the 'free trade agreements' as 'free investment agreements' (Wall St Journal)
  • Advocates of other forms of globalisation are described as anti-globalisation
  • The era after the 2008 financial crash led to increasing scepticism over the present and future of neoliberal globalisation
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