Globalization

Conceptual Overview

Scholte identifies what he terms four “redundant” concepts of globalization, i.e., ways of understanding this process that fail to recognize its distinctive character. First, this time period can be identified simply as a qualitative increase in the degree of internationalization, with nothing really distinctive from previous eras. Second, it might be identified with liberalization, in particular the deregulation of markets and the creation of an open, borderless world. Third, it can be identified as an increase in universalization—a transfer of objects, practices, and experiences to different parts of the world, implying growing homogenization, standardization, and convergence. Finally, it can be identified with Westernization—a particular type of universalization in which the values and practices of advanced Western societies are imposed on other parts of the world. Scholte argues that these redundant concepts fail to capture the distinctive characteristics of the current phase of globalization. Reducing globalization to internationalization fails to recognize the distinctive social character of the new period with the emergence of distinctive forms of community and communication. Similarly, to identify globalization with liberalization is to reduce it to a one-dimensional economic process when again it is the changing nature of social relationships that is crucial. Universalization and Westernization fail to capture the contested and diverse nature of globalization, the ways in which individuals, groups, social movements, and communities use the new possibilities open to them to contest and reshape particular Western and other practices. One alternative is to see globalization as consisting of multiple processes of translation between different arenas. An object or a practice taken from one setting to another is a process of translation where new and old meanings evolve, creating something new and different. Globalization should therefore be considered as something distinctive, sui generis, arising in a distinctive phase of human history.

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