The word globalization was used in the English language as early as the 1930s, but only 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.[1] One of the first usages of the term in the
meaning resembling the later, common usage was by French economist François Perroux in his essays
from the early 1960s (in his French works he used the term "mondialisation" (literarly worldization in
French), also translated as mundialization).[1] Theodore Levitt is often credited with popularizing the
term and bringing it into the mainstream business audience in the later in the middle of 1980s.[1]
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 inside the world
network of economic exchanges.[12]
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.[13][14]
In 1848, Karl Marx noticed the increasing level of national inter-dependence brought on by capitalism,
and predicted the universal character of the modern world society. He states:
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to
production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from
under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries
have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. . . . In place of the old local and national seclusion and
self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.[15]
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."[2] 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."[16] 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."[17]
In Global Transformations, David Held and his co-writers state:
Although in its simplistic sense globalization refers to the widening, deepening and speeding up of global
interconnection, such a definition begs further elaboration. ... Globalization can be on a continuum with
the local, national and regional. At one end of the continuum lie social and economic relations and
networks which are organized on a local and/or national basis; at the other end lie social and economic
relations and networks which crystallize on the wider scale of regional and global interactions.
Globalization can refer to those spatial-temporal processes of change which underpin a transformation in
the organization of human affairs by linking together and expanding human activity across regions and
continents. Without reference to such expansive spatial connections, there can be no clear or coherent
formulation of this term. ... A satisfactory definition of globalization must capture each of these elements:
extensity (stretching), intensity, velocity and impact.[18]
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.[19]
Swedish journalist Thomas Larsson, in his book The Race to the Top: The Real Story of Globalization,
states that globalization:
...is the process of world shrinkage, of distances getting shorter, things moving closer. It pertains to the
increasing ease with which somebody on one side of the world can interact, to mutual benefit, with
somebody on the other side of the world.[20]
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.[21]
