Heavenly Father,
You hold each of us in Your loving hands.
Come fill our hearts, minds and bodies afresh with
hope.
Help us to cast our worries upon You, so that we
can embrace our learning today.
Bless us as we study and grow together.
Come and anoint those who teach us to be
bringers of insight and knowledge.
Lord, watch over us all, keep us safe within Your
Almighty hand.
Amen.
Chapter 1
GLOBALIZATION:
a Contested Concept
GLOBALIZATION
• ‘Globalization’ emerged as the buzzword
of the 1990s, because it captured the
increasingly interconnected nature of
social life on our planet mediated by the:
• ICT revolution
•global integration of markets
GLOBALIZATION
• many people still have trouble recognizing
globalization for what it is:
•a complex and uneven dynamic linking the
local (and the national and regional) to the
global—as well as the West to the East, and
the North to the South.
GLOBALIZATION
•As an illustration of a more nuanced
understanding of globalization is the
thickening ‘GLOBAL–LOCAL NEXUS’—or
what some Global Studies scholars refer
to as GLOCALIZATION—let us consider the
world’s most popular sports event: the
men’s Football World Cup
GLOBALIZATION
•World Cup:
• Ultimate national contest pitting country against country in
the relentless pursuit of patriotic glory
• Allocation of tickets sold to the public
• Nationalities of spectators and tourists going to the host
country
• Money matters-expenditure vs. income
• Celebrated superstars ex. Jungkook, Al Fahad and Messi
GLOBALIZATION
• They are the products and catalysts
of globalization processes that make
more sense when considered as a
global– local nexus we call
‘glocalization’.
GLOBALIZATION
•Towards a definition of globalization
•The cliché that globalization (the process)
leads to more globalization (the condition)
does not allow us to draw meaningful
analytical distinctions between causes and
effects.
GLOBALIZATION
•3 different but related terms that Steger
suggests we adopt:
•globality
•global imaginary
•globalization as a set of social processes
GLOBALIZATION
•GLOBALITY signifies a social condition characterized by
tight global economic, political, cultural, and
environmental interconnections and flows that make
most of the currently existing borders and boundaries
irrelevant.
•different social manifestations of globality:
• values of individualism, competition, and laissez-faire
capitalism
• more communal norms and cooperative social systems
GLOBALIZATION
•GLOBAL IMAGINARY refers to people’s growing
consciousness of thickening globality
• The intensification of global consciousness destabilizes
and unsettles the nation-state framework within which
people have imagined their communal existence.
• The rising global imaginary is also powerfully reflected
in the current transformation of the conventional
ideologies and social values that go into the articulation
of concrete political agendas and programmes.
GLOBALIZATION
• Globalization is a spatial concept signifying A SET OF SOCIAL
PROCESSES that transform our present social condition of
conventional nationality into one of globality.
• The term ‘globalization’ suggests a sort of dynamism best
captured by the notion of ‘development’ or ‘unfolding’ along
discernible patterns.
• Such unfolding may occur quickly or slowly, but it always
corresponds to the idea of change, and, therefore,
globalization denotes transformation.
GLOBALIZATION
• Scholars not only hold different views with regard to
proper definitions of globalization, they also disagree on
its scale, causation, chronology, impact, trajectories, and
policy outcomes.
•The ancient Buddhist parable of the blind scholars and
their encounter with the elephant helps to illustrate the
academic controversy over the nature and various
dimensions of globalization.
GLOBALIZATION
GLOBALIZATION
GLOBALIZATION
•A central task for the new field of
global studies must be to devise
better ways for gauging the relative
importance of each dimension
without losing sight of the
INTERDEPENDENT WHOLE.
GLOBALIZATION
GLOBALIZATION
• 4 additional qualities or characteristics at the core of
globalization:
• First, it involves both the creation of new social networks and the
multiplication of existing connections that cut across traditional
political, economic, cultural, and geographical boundaries.
• As we have seen in the World Cup, today’s media combine
conventional TV coverage with multiple streaming feeds into digital
devices and social networking sites that transcend nationally based
services.
GLOBALIZATION
•The second quality of globalization is reflected in the
expansion and the stretching of social relations,
activities, and connections.
• Today’s financial markets reach around the globe, and electronic
trading occurs around the clock.
• Gigantic and virtually identical shopping malls have emerged on all
continents, catering to those consumers who can afford
commodities from all regions of the world—including products
whose various components were manufactured in different
countries.
GLOBALIZATION
•Third, globalization involves the intensification
and acceleration of social exchanges and
activities.
• As the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells has pointed out, the
creation of a global network society has been fueled by
‘communication power’, which required a technological revolution
powered chiefly by the rapid development of new information and
communications technologies.
• Examples: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
GLOBALIZATION
• Fourth, as we emphasized in our definition of the global
imaginary, globalization processes do not occur merely on an
objective, material level but they also involve the subjective
plane of human consciousness.
• Without erasing local and national attachments, the compression of the
world into a single place has increasingly made global the frame of
reference for human thought and action.
• Globalization involves both the macro-structures of a ‘global community’
and the micro-structures of ‘global personhood’.
• It extends deep into the core of the personal self and its dispositions,
facilitating the creation of multiple individual and collective identities
nurtured by the intensifying relations between the personal and the
global.
GLOBALIZATION:
short definition
•Globalization refers to the
expansion and intensification
of social relations and
consciousness across world-
time and world-space.
GLOBALIZATION:
very short definition
•Globalization
is about growing
worldwide
interconnectivity.
