Globalization Explained: Economics, Markets, Examples, Trade, Facts, Benefits (1999)

Globalization (or globalisation) is the process of international integration arising from the interchange of world views, products, ideas and other aspects of culture.[1] Advances in transportation, such as the steam locomotive, steamship, jet engine, container ships, and in telecommunications infrastructure, including the rise of the telegraph and its modern offspring, the Internet, and mobile phones, have been major factors in globalization, generating further interdependence of economic and cultural activities.[2][3][4] Though scholars place the origins of globalization in modern times, others trace its history long before the European Age of Discovery and voyages to the New World. Some even trace the origins to the third millennium BCE.[5][6] Large-scale globalization began in the 19th century.[7] In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the connectivity of the world's economies and cultures grew very quickly. The word globalization is a very recent term, only establishing its current meaning in the 1970s, which "emerged from the intersection of four interrelated sets of "communities of practice": academics, journalists, publishers/editors, and librarians".[8] In 2000, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) identified four basic aspects of globalization: trade and transactions, capital and investment movements, migration and movement of people, and the dissemination of knowledge.[9] Further, environmental challenges such as global warming, cross-boundary water and air pollution, and over-fishing of the ocean are linked with globalization.[10] Globalizing processes affect and are affected by business and work organization, economics, socio-cultural resources, and the natural environment. Academic literature commonly subdivides globalization into three major areas: economic globalization, cultural globalization and political globalization. The journalist Thomas L. Friedman popularized the term "flat world", arguing that globalized trade, outsourcing, supply-chaining, and political forces had permanently changed the world, for better and worse. He asserted that the pace of globalization was quickening and that its impact on business organization and practice would continue to grow.[25] Economist Takis Fotopoulos defined "economic globalization" as the opening and deregulation of commodity, capital and labor markets that led toward present neoliberal globalization. He used "political globalization" to refer to the emergence of a transnational elite and a phasing out of the nation-state. "Cultural globalization", he used to reference the worldwide homogenization of culture. Other of his usages included "ideological globalization", "technological globalization" and "social globalization".[26] Manfred Steger, professor of Global Studies and research leader in the Global Cities Institute at RMIT University, identifies four main empirical dimensions of globalization: economic, political, cultural, and ecological, with a fifth dimension - the ideological - cutting across the other four. The ideological dimension, according to Steger, is filled with a range of norms, claims, beliefs, and narratives about the phenomenon itself.[27] Lechner and Boli (2012) define it as more people across large distances becoming connected in more and different ways.[28] Paul James asserts that the concept of globalization 'emerged from the intersection of four interrelated sets of "communities of practice": academics, journalists, publishers/editors, and librarians.[29] He notes the term was used "in education to describe the global life of the mind"; in international relations to describe the extension of the European Common Market; and in journalism to describe how the "American Negro and his problem are taking on a global significance".[29] James has also argued that four different forms of globalization can be distinguished that complement and cut across the solely empirical dimensions.[30] According to James, the oldest dominant form of globalization is embodied globalization, the movement of people. A second form is agency-extended globalization, the circulation of agents of different institutions, organizations, and polities, including imperial agents. Object-extended globalization, a third form, is the movement of commodities and other objects of exchange. The transmission of ideas, images, knowledge and information across world-space he calls disembodied globalization, maintaining that it is currently the dominant form of globalization. James holds that this series of distinctions allows for an understanding of how, today, the most embodied forms of globalization such as the movement of refugees and migrants are increasingly restricted, while the most disembodied forms such as the circulation of financial instruments and codes are the most deregulated. Globophobia has been used incorrectly to refer to the fear of globalization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization