1. Topic 1 Introduction to Globalization Studies:
Concepts and Theories

2. Themes: How can be conceptualize globalization?
What are the distinctive processes of globalization?
What is Globalization?

3. Key Concepts of Globalization
Postmodernism was the concept of the 1980s, while globalization was the concept of the 1990s and the new millennium.
David Harvey: the word "Globalization" was first used in mid 70s by American Express.

4. Key Concepts of Globalization (Cont’)
The term then spread out quickly in the financial and business press.
It replaces the term "internationalization" and "transnationalization".

5. Internationalization:
increasing interwovenness of national economies through international trade. – nation state

6. Transnationalization:
the increasing organization of production on a cross-border basis by multinational organizations. – crossing nation-states

7. Globalization:
nation-state is no longer important. Globalization is not equal with the geographical integration of national economies, but making of new spatial scales.

8. Antony Giddens' conceptualization:
"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.
This is a dialectical process because such local happenings may move in an obverse direction from the very distanciated relations that shape them.

9. Local transformation is as much a part of globalization as the lateral extension of social connections across time and space."
The most important concept: the concept of time/space compression.
What happen in a local area is not only closely related to the outside world, but intensively affected each other.

10. The shrinking of the world to a "global village" - a virtual disappearance of space through time.
Today people can have social relations and even organized community relations regardless of space.
It allows the emergence of "imagined" communities, cultures and even systems of authority and social control that cross borders.

11. The most common features: the transnationality of production, commerce, ownership, consumption, socio-cultural reproduction, and politics.
Other features: increased volatility of market; organizational decentralization of firms, flexibility of production; privatization of public finance; and increased social inequality and social exclusion.

12. Roland Robertston: new experience as “global consciousness”.
Manuel Castells: a new epoch of “network society” or “global informational society”.
Elements of globalization: transborder capital, labor, management, news, images, and data flows.

13. In Short:
Globalization is a compression of time and space which privileges the capitalist economies over non-capitalist and socialist societies.
After all, globalization is first and foremost a political contest.
Its hegemonic project is neoliberal capitalism.
Yet, it is a never complete and contradictory process- an uneasy correlation of economic forces, power relations and social structures.

14. Conceptualizing Globalization
Modernization Theories: linear progress to be modern
Backdrop: the fear of socialism and the liberation of colonialism in the time of cold war.
President Truman in his inaugural address of 1949 announced the Point Four Program of Development Aid.
It became the policy of the US to aid the underdeveloped countries.
Every country becomes western countries- western oriented model

15. Conceptualizing Globalization (Cont’)
Universalizing value: measured objectively- level of education, occupation, income, wealth, information and capability of consumption.
The world is divided into First World and Third World, or developed countries and developing countries.
Modernization is a social process to incorporate all kinds of countries into the same model of western countries.

16. Conceptualizing Globalization (Cont’)
It believes that all societies at different speeds, are moving towards the same direction, that is the path of modernity.
Modernization is very ideological, and is criticized as Euro-centric.
Modernization, after all, is an attempt to preach American or western way of life.

17. Dependency and World System Theories
Dependency theories criticized the modernization theory.
It brings the structure of unequal relationships between rich and poor countries back into the picture
The main argument: capitalist development actually created greater gap between First World and Third World countries, making them further dependent on First World countries for survival or development.

18. Dependency and World System Theories (Cont’)
Countries develop at an uneven pace in relation to one another.
And even inside the backward countries themselves, advanced and primitive features of economy and society co-exist.
The original version of dependency and underdevelopment theory is then further developed by Gunder Frank and many others.

19. Dependency and World System Theories (Cont’)
The dependency theory has been a world system approach, and the distrust of a global capitalist system:
a. The subordination of the local economy to the structure of advanced capitalist countries. -- only produced primary goods for the industrial West.
b. External orientation-- an extreme dependency on overseas markets, both for capital and technology sourcing and for production outlets.

20. Long History Perspective
Gundar Frank: globalism was fact of life already existed since at least 1500 for the world.
The perception of a major new departure is (mis)informed by a Eurocentric point of view.

21. Long History Perspective (Cont’)
We are mis-guided into thinking that our world is only just now undergoing a belated process of “globalization”.
Globalization in Question: globalization is not a new social or historical force.
In reviewing the historical evidence of world trade and capital flows, the level international economy in the present era is not unprecedented.

22. 1. In terms of amount of good and services that cross frontiers-- The percentage of all goods and services that are produced world-wide reached 33% in Today it is about 31%.
2. In relation to total world output-- the percentage share of world production subject to transnational corporate control has remained relatively stable in the past one hundred year.

23. 3. In term of global reach of world capitalism over the five continents-- the percentage of two continents, Latin America and Africa, in world trade and foreign capital flows had actually been declined.
The expansive phase of capitalism: only a phase of deepening, but not widening capitalist integration.

24. Distinctive Processes of Globalization
1) as a spatial and economic process: whether contributed to the end of geography and the rise of a borderless world or not;
2) as a process of political economy: something qualitatively new, or the process had been happened five hundred years ago

25. Distinctive Processes of Globalization (Cont’)
3) as a socio-cultural process: whether leads to social polarization, social exclusion, community fragmentation, consumption homogeneity and identity crisis.
4) As a cultural critique: whether as a neo-liberal ideology or a myth of market power.

26. ** Is globalization merely a catch-all buzzword, an overstated process or merely an ideology?