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Globalization – Meaning
Campbell et al. define globalization as a social process, which encompasses all the activities that strengthen and facilitate worldwide economic, social, and political, exchanges and interdependencies. They further elucidate that globalization is not an event, but rather an ongoing and continuous process and this process is social in nature involving human interactions and connections.
Another crucial aspect of the globalization process is that it is generative in nature, whereby it creates and expands networks, and these networks, in due course, transcend the traditional geographical, social, and political boundaries. In short, as Roland Robertson puts it, globalization can be defined as the compression of the world and one which eliminated the constraints of geography.
While most connect globalization strictly with the technological advances happening in the area of communications (internet, mobile phones, etc), it is much more than that and denotes all those activities, which make people, services, and goods available to consumers across the globe in a faster and efficient manner.
Globalization - Effects
Globalization, like any other phenomenon, has both positives and negatives. Economically, it has facilitated what is popularly termed as ‘free trade’, whereby today global trade faces reduced barriers. This on one hand, has increased the job opportunities in developing nations and has increased the customer choices, but, on the other hand, has stolen jobs from developed countries and also has led to exploitation of laborers in poor countries by the MNCs. Many argue that the gap between poor countries and the rich indeed had widened.
Cultural assimilation is another area which has had a mixed outcome. While interactions across cultures have flourished under globalization, the large scale migration of people across national boundaries has posed a unique challenge to the nation-state identity. Today multiculturalism is a common aspect of most societies and different nations deal with it differently. Different tactics like forced assimilation, persecution, and violence have been used by nation-states to deal with the situation, which has resulted in the extinction of certain cultures in some parts of the globe.
Thus, globalization though has many good things to offer, if not managed properly it could affect the people adversely. The question is not whether globalization is necessary or not as it is an integral part of today’s society. However, the real area of concern is how well this process can be managed, so that it yields the best results to maximum possible number of people.
Works Cited
Campbell, Patricia J., Aran MacKinnon and Christy R. Stevens. An Introduction to Global Studies. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2011.
