Globalization

GLOBALIZATION refers to the spread of new forms of nonterritorial social activity. Since the vast majority of human activities is still tied to a concrete geographical location, the more decisive facet of globalization concerns the manner in which distant events and forces impact on local and regional endeavors. In popular discourse, globalization often functions as little more than a synonym for one or more of the following phenomena: the pursuit of classical liberal or free-market policies in the world economy; the growing dominance of Western forms of political, economic, and cultural life; the proliferation of new information technologies; as well as the notion that humanity stands at the threshold of realizing one single unified community in which major sources of social conflict have vanished.

Globalization is the result of advances in communication, transportation, and information technologies. The impact of recent technological innovations is profound, and even those who do not have a job directly affected by the new technology are shaped by it in innumerable ways as citizens and consumers.

Globalization, in its rightist sense, also involves the growth of multinational corporations or transnational corporations, and international institutions that oversee world trade and finance play an increasingly important role in this era of globalization. Globalization shares a number of characteristics with internationalization and is used interchangeably with it, although some prefer to use globalization to emphasize the erosion of the nation-state or national boundaries. Globalization has become identified with a number of trends, most of which have developed since World War II. These include greater international movement of commodities, money, information, and people, and the development of technology, organizations, legal systems, and infrastructures to allow this movement.