Globalization: Encyclopedia II - Globalization - Meanings

Globalization - Meanings

"Globalization" can mean:

• Globalism, if the concept is reduced to its economic aspects, can be said to contrast with economic nationalism and protectionism. It is related to laissez-faire capitalism and neoliberalism.
• It shares a number of characteristics with internationalization and is often used interchangeably, although some prefer to use globalization to emphasize the erosion of the nation-state or national boundaries.
• Making connections between places on a global scale. Today, more and more places around the world are connected to each other in ways that were previously unimaginable. In Geography, this process is known as complex connectivity, where more and more places are being connected in more and more ways. Arjun Appadurai identified five types of global connectivity:
  • Ethnoscapes: movements of people, including tourists, immigrants, refugees, and business travellers.
  • Financescapes: global flows of money, often driven by interconnected currency markets, stock exchanges, and commodity markets.
  • Ideoscapes: the global spread of ideas and political ideologies. For example, Green Peace has become a worldwide environmental movement.
  • Mediascapes: the global distribution of media images that appear on our computer screens, in newspapers, television, and radio.
  • Technoscapes: the movement of technologies around the globe. For example, the Green Revolution in rice cultivation introduced western farming practices into many developing countries.

Although Appadurai's taxonomy is highly contestable, it does serve to show that globalization is much more than economics on a global scale.

• In its cultural form, globalization has been a label used to identify attempts to erode the national cultures of Europe, and subsume them into a global culture whose members will be much easier to manipulate through mass media and controlled governments. In this context, massive legal or illegal immigration has been allowed, mainly in European countries.
• The formation of a global village — closer contact between different parts of the world, with increasing possibilities of personal exchange, mutual understanding and friendship between "world citizens", and creation of a global civilization.
• Economic globalization — there are four aspects to economic globalization, referring to four different flows across boundaries, namely flows of goods/services, i.e. 'free trade' (or at least freer trade), flows of people (migration), of capital, and of technology. A consequence of economic globalization is increasing relations among members of an industry in different parts of the world (globalization of an industry), with a corresponding erosion of National Sovereignty in the economic sphere. The IMF defines globalization as “the growing economic interdependence of countries worldwide through increasing volume and variety of cross-border transactions in goods and services, freer international capital flows, and more rapid and widespread diffusion of technology” (IMF, World Economic Outlook, May, 1997). The World Bank defines globalization as the "Freedom and ability of individuals and firms to initiate voluntary economic transactions with residents of other countries".
• In the field of Management, globalization is a Marketing or Strategy term that refers to the emergence of international markets for consumer goods characterized by similar customer needs and tastes enabling, for example, selling the same cars or soaps or foods with similar ad campaigns to people in different cultures. This usage is contrasted with internationalization which describes the activities of multinational companies dealing across borders in either financial instruments, commodities, or products that are extensively tailored to local markets. Globalization also means cross-border management activities or development processes to adapt to the emergence of a globalized market or to seek and realize benefit from economies of scale or scope or from cross-border learning among different country-based organizations.
• In the field of software, globalization is a technical term that combines the development processes of internationalization and localization.
• For anti-captalist groups, globalization is a catch-all term for the alleged negative effects of for-profit multinational corporations and the use of legal and financial means to circumvent local laws and standards, in order to leverage the labor and services of unequally-developed regions against each other.
• The spread of capitalism from developed to developing nations.
• "The concept of Globalisation refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole" - Benedikt Kiesenhofer

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Meanings", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki