Globalization and Globalization Theory

Globalization is the process of world populations becoming interconnected and interdependent. Globalization creates four major transformations. First, globalization stretches social, political, and economic activities across the frontiers of communities, nations, regions, and continents. Second, globalization intensifies the magnitude of the flows and networks of trade, investment, migration, and cultural transmission. Third, with the development of new worldwide transport and communication systems, globalization speeds up global interactions and diffusion of goods, ideas, capital, information, and people. Fourth, the pace of the first three transformations deepens the impact of distant events on everyday life. This deepening involves the rise of an awareness that increasingly many parts of everyday life are connected with things that happen at a distance.

The conventional meaning of globalization involves two interconnected yet separate portrayals: the growth of a global economy and the rise of a global culture. Over the past two decades, however, globalization as a concept has become attached to diverse concepts such as crime, health, law, and trade. Globalization is tied to the growth of global trade—and to the establishment of a global economy. This global economy works in real time: Activities such as manufacturing take place without regard to the limitations of time and space.

Although globalization arose as a concept in the 1970s, the Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) coined the term global village in 1964 to denote faster and more intimate contact between individuals and communities brought about by the introduction of radio in the 1920s. Often globalization is confused with internationalization. But whereas in internationalization, “nation” remains the basic unit of understanding, in globalization the basic unit is the globe as a whole. Glocalization, a related concept, is the local expression of globalization or the simultaneous presence of universalizing and particularizing tendencies.