A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Globalization

Leo McCann

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526448279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: Business

In Globalization, the author explores the various intermingled aspects that make up the processes and controversies of globalization; he discusses the history and rise of the concept, sceptical and critical ideas about it, the debates around a global culture, and the implications of globalization for work, business, management and organizations. Conceived by Chris Grey as an antidote to conventional textbooks, each book in the ' Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap ' series takes a core area of the curriculum and turns it on its head by providing a critical and sophisticated overview of the key issues and debates in an informal, conversational and often humorous way. Suitable for students of international business and anybody interested in the concept of globalization.

1 Globalization – The Rise

Globalization is simultaneously an effect and a cause.

(Jan Arte Scholte, 2005: 4)

Globalization means different things to different people. It would probably be pointless (and treading a very well-worn path) to try to find a definition that works for everyone, especially given the broadness of a term that attempts to capture and explain forces, structures and processes that influence the whole of humanity. Many books on globalization start with a discussion of prior attempts to define the term (see, for example, Martell, 2010: 11–16, or Steger, 2013: 9–16), noting how globalization encompasses and influences a huge range of dimensions, including economic, cultural, political, linguistic and organizational. According to Ritzer (2010: 2):

globalization is a transplanetary process or set of processes involving increasing liquidity and the growing multidirectional flows of people, objects, places and information as well as the structures they encounter and create that are barriers to, or expedite, those flows …

This definition uses metaphors of movement and blockage, in keeping with other definitions which conceptualize globalization as the increased ability for people and processes to move and operate internationally or globally. Other famous globalization writers describe a metaphorical shrinkage of the world via technological, economic and political developments which somehow bring the population of the world into closer contact. These include the ‘compression of the world and the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole’ (Robertson, 1992: 8) and the ‘intensification of worldwide social relations’ (Giddens, 1991: 64). Although economics and international business clearly play a major role in globalization, the phenomenon is not solely about economics. Instead, globalization is a multifaceted set of phenomena that arguably influences almost all dimensions of life (Steger, 2013), making human society across the world increasingly interconnected and interdependent.

The term or concept of ‘globalization’ shot to prominence in the mid-to-late 1980s (Held et al., 1999: 1; Martell, 2007: 173). From around this point forward, the forces, processes and images of global integration seemed ubiquitous across the worlds of business, politics, academia, journalism and entertainment. They have arguably remained so ever since. To introduce the purpose and content of this book, this opening chapter explores the various meanings of the term, discusses where it came from, and begins to unpack some of its contested debates and interpretations.

Probably the most significant event that contextualizes the explosion of interest in ‘globalization’ is the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union across 1989–91 (Ray, 2007: 3). These dramatic political and economic changes suggested a sudden and irrevocable opening of political and economic relations around much of the world. The political and economic doctrine of neoliberalism was in the ascendant, a doctrine described as ‘(1) an ideology; (2) a mode of governance; (3) a policy package’ (Steger and Roy, 2010: 11). These three elements are central to the continual spread of the policies of ‘market globalism’ around the world and the rhetorical ways in which they are justified. Put simply, neoliberalism implies the expansion of global markets, free trade and commercial business activity and the occlusion of government, welfare and regulation. More competition equals less regulation. Freer markets means weakened states (Beck, 2000: 7).

Rapid technological advances in the fields of telecommunication, transportation and computing technologies throughout the 1980s onwards made international contact cheaper, easier, quicker, more interactive, more prevalent and more necessary. A bull market in the 1990s fuelled investor interest in technology and internet stocks, reinforcing notions of a radically new, digitized, ‘weightless’ economy of worldwide services, including so-called cultural and knowledge industries. Having ‘won’ the Cold War, political leaders in the West championed free markets and the spread of democracy but also worried about the new waves of global change that threatened government power and were difficult to regulate.

These separate yet interrelated areas of change reinforced one another. Dramatic political reform opened up new areas of the world to global markets and sent a rollercoaster ride of free-market capitalism to weave through the world economy including the hitherto sealed-off countries of the former Soviet Union. Triumphant right-wing commentators proclaimed the collapse of communism as ‘the end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1992) and a ‘New World Order’ (the latter notion a soundbite from US President George H.W. Bush’s 1991 State of the Union address). Other communist nations (primarily China) accelerated their economic reforms towards encouraging ever-greater degrees of market forces, competition and international economic relations. New international markets, workforces and opportunities opened up in places such as India which also abandoned much of its socialist-leaning government planning and regulation of the economy (McCann, 2014a: 255–7). Physically and technically, economic globalization was enabled by improvements in computing architecture, processing speed and software design. The internet rapidly took on a central role in daily life, dramatically broadening, deepening and accelerating international communication and information spread. Stock exchanges became digitized and the rise of ‘high-frequency trading’ enabled and created the need for an acceleration of the pace of financial trading. Time is money after all.

Globalization created and reproduced itself in giant feedback loops that fed into further developments. Technological change, political change, economic change and cultural change all went hand-in-hand. Academic, media and political commentary fed this endless recursive loop. Writings on globalization, digitalization, financialization and a new world order were everywhere you looked. Universities scrambled to develop courses, degrees and departments dedicated to ‘Global Studies’. New academic journals were founded, such as Global Networks (launched 2001), Globalizations (first volume 2004), and Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies (inaugurated 2009). Indeed, this book – like the notion of globalization itself (Giddens, 1999: 7) – is in some sense a product of the processes it describes.

The terms ‘globalization’, ‘world economy’ and ‘global market forces’ became catch-all buzzwords used by business leaders, politicians, media commentators and academics. Many of these opinion-leaders were members of a cosmopolitan global elite or ‘transnational capitalist class’ (Sklair, 2000) and tended to speak of globalization as something to praise, encourage and normalize. Certainly the first major ‘wave’ of globalization literature by authors such as Kenichi Ohmae and Thomas Freidman (see Held et al., 1999: 2–10; Martell, 2007) promulgated such a worldview as follows: growing international trade is generating more global and local wealth; standards of living are rising; autocratic governments have collapsed; the failed logics of communism, trade barriers and economic planning have been utterly discredited by the successes and dynamism of free markets; and the policies and doctrines of privatization and deregulation are rapidly – and rightly – spreading throughout the globe. These ‘first wave’ globalization texts, such as The Borderless World (Ohmae, 1991), The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Friedman, 1999) and Going Global (Taylor and Webber, 1996) were simplistic in many ways and often the product of business journalists or current and former executives who unashamedly promoted neoliberal economic globalization with little in the way of historic, political or theoretical nuance. Going Global carries a gushing, highly corporate front cover endorsement by business consultant Tom Peters: ‘Captures the spirit of the brave new times … Nice job!’.

But that was the nineties – only the beginning of the globalization craze. In today’s world of corporate ‘superbrands’, global value chains, nearly fifty thousand airports, cloud computing, the Indian Premier League, World of Warcraft, 2 billion Android users and Justin Bieber’s 103 million Twitter followers, isn’t globalization self-evident and now kind of boring? Hasn’t the concept become old and hackneyed? What more can anyone possibly say on the subject?

The answer, I hope, is rather a lot. In a world of flux, change and disputed knowledge claims, where the next big idea often declines as rapidly as it appears, the globalization publishing and studying boom seems to defy gravity. Globalization remains an attractive area for studying, writing and publishing. A recent bestseller on globalization is Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat (2007) in which many familiar globalization arguments are repackaged in more up-to-date form, including the latest developments in internet technology and the rapid growth of outsourcing and offshoring. He uses the metaphor of ‘Globalization 2.0’, suggesting that times have moved on apace since the first wave of writings on globalization in the early to mid-1990s. Others continue to reassert the accuracy of ‘first wave’ globalization writings. In a 2017 newspaper discussion of Yuval Noah Harari’s books Sapiens and Homo Deus, the physicist Helen Czerski suggests that, ‘[w]e are living through a fantastically rapid globalisation’, and asks the author whether there will ‘be one global culture in the future or will we maintain some sort of deliberate artificial tribal grouping?’ Harari’s answer:

We’ll probably have just one civilization. In a way this is already the case. All over the world the political system of the state is roughly identical. All over the world capitalism is the dominant economic system. […] There are no longer any fundamental civilizational differences. (Anthony, 2017)

Francis Fukuyama, he concludes, ‘was largely correct.’

Globalization as a concept has not become obvious and boring or died away; instead it has multiplied and mutated like a virus. Today there is no such thing as the ‘globalization literature’ that can be cross-sectioned, filleted and placed into a comparative table (like Held et al. do in Global Transformations, 1999: 10). Contemporary writings on global society discuss globalizations in the plural, rather than globalization in the singular. Notions of globality have spiralled out into all kinds of disciplines and substantive areas. Long-established disciplines such as sociology, geography, politics, anthropology and history now also have to contend with globalization as a major part of their curriculum and methods of study.

Why is globalization such a pervasive phenomenon that continues to attract interest around 30 years after its rise to popularity? There are probably several reasons for this. Firstly, a significant part of the explanation surely resides in the ways in which globalization is still so strongly promoted as correct and inevitable, much like the assertive first wave literature that talks of the triumph of free markets and democracy – a kind of market fundamentalism (Frank, 2001). It is far from surprising that multinational corporations, politicians and think tanks all promote the ideology of globalization and global integration as it is clearly in their interests to do so. A global transnational class stands to gain from promoting, justifying and normalizing global markets, global communities, global cultural consumption and global imaginaries (Sklair, 2000; Steger, 2013; Steger and Roy, 2010).

But this can’t explain all of the enduring popularity of globalization. The vast majority of the global population is not, of course, part of the elite, and is often far from convinced that their own interests are going to coincide so happily with those of the global free marketeers. As we shall see in much more depth in the next two chapters there are also plenty of sceptical and critical writers on globalization. But, interestingly, these writings also seem to somehow promote and sustain the notion of globalization rather than debunking it entirely. Anti-globalists, or those promoting ‘justice globalism’ or even ‘jihad globalism’ tend also to construct their worldview in terms of big-picture ‘global’ issues and, in so doing, add to the breadth and range of writings that make up the ever-expanding canon of literature framed at the level of the global imaginary (see Steger, 2013). I will turn to these ideas in more depth in the following two chapters and I will discuss the controversy surrounding the use of the term ‘jihad’ in globalization studies in Chapter 4. But for now, it is safe to say that over time globalization literatures (or globalizations in the plural) have expanded and developed in a universe of different directions. Much of the straightforward optimism and boastfulness of the 1980s–1990s’ globalization literature now looks misplaced, naïve and vulgar. Globalization doesn’t just mean the increasing spread of markets and democracy. It also implies transnational terrorist networks, rising international economic inequality, environmental catastrophe, economic crises, political scandals and the collapse of public trust in the ‘progress’ and ‘democracy’ promoted by our global political and business leaders. Contemporary globalizations imply increasing heterodoxy and chaos; the rapidly accelerating unmanageability of global affairs (Guillén, 2015; Virilio, 2012a, 2012b).

Enthusiasts for globalization face their mirror image in a broad range of critics and sceptics. Far from representing a new world order of economic, political and cultural integration, globalization also became an umbrella term for a range of serious risks, evils and grievances. The early globalist literature was soon confronted by critics such as George Ritzer’s McDonaldization thesis (Ritzer, 2014; first edition 1993), in which the logic of economic and cultural globalization is symbolized by the unhealthy, restrictive and culturally dumbed-down management systems of McDonald’s fast-food outlets. Concurrently, globalization sceptics such as Hirst and Thompson (2001), Rosenberg (2000) and Veseth (2010) were arguing that globalization is an exaggerated and mythological concept, with much of the world isolated from supposedly ‘global’ flows or networks. These debates have refused to settle since the nineties, as shown by the frequent re-issuing of classic globalization texts such as McDonaldization (Ritzer, 2014), Jihad vs. McWorld (Barber, 2011) and Globalization in Question (Hirst et al., 2009).

These controversies have only been deepened by the calamitous events of the 2000s, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the so-called ‘War on Terror’; the second Iraq War and prolonged counterinsurgency campaigns that have bogged down Western militaries; revelations about state-sponsored electronic snooping; the subprime mortgage fiasco that triggered a massive financial downturn in 2007–10; increasingly disquieting evidence about global warming and climate change; and other developments that possibly signal a reversal or at the very least a problematizing of globalization (such as the UK voting in a referendum in June 2016 to leave the European Union). The Independent newspaper in 2011 editorialized about the 2000s as ‘a lost decade’ in which the unifying forces of globalization hit the buffers or reversed course (Cornwell, 2011).

But such is the perverse logic of globalization as a discourse or field that these localizing, anti-globalist or de-globalizing tendencies are somehow brought into the globalization stable and become part of its seedbed. You believe in it even as you deny it. You are for it even when against it. Globalization cannot be a singular theory or even a distinct literature. It is like some kind of conceptual vacuum cleaner, hoovering up ideas, criticisms and scepticism, claiming all as parts of itself under the broader global brand or narrative. Globalization as a concept or set of writings actually reflects what it claims – globalization is inescapable and unavoidable. It knows what’s good for you. It’s a bit like the war cry of those horrid galactic imperialists ‘The Borg’ in the science-fiction franchise Star Trek: ‘resistance is futile’ (Klikauer, 2013: 73; Veseth, 2010: 8).

In some sense, therefore, the breadth of the term ‘globalization’ and its dramatic manifestation as utopia or dystopia (or both) is precisely what makes the term and field of study attractive. It is both compelling and repulsive, like The Borg. This horror/intensity trope is often what international news media play to when portraying globalization. It is epitomized perhaps by the dreadful imagery of the 9/11 attacks: planes and explosions ripping through the twin towers of the World Trade Center, panicking citizens running down New York streets pursued by cascading walls of dust. It is also precisely the images that global terrorist organizations want to see broadcast around the world. Terror, risk and states of emergency have become routine. Globalization’s unruliness, breadth, unpredictability, adaptability and ability to reinvent and mutate are clearly important reasons why it refuses to die as a concept or genre of writing.

Globalization is therefore a popular academic field of study simply because it gives us something big and brash to play with. It can be used as shorthand to describe almost any process or outcome, any cause or effect, depending on one’s political taste. It signifies everything and nothing (Bauman, 1998; Ritzer, 2007). Globalization’s very grandiosity, especially in a time of general scepticism about grand theories (James and Steger, 2014), gives us a welcome free-for-all, a wild and wacky playground inside the academic precincts which tend instead towards granular detail, conservatism and precision. The globalization literature is certainly dumbed-down in places. On the other hand, global studies is a place for ‘big picture’ analysis, where connections can be made between an array of disciplines and where boundaries and problems can be rethought and redrawn.

Some have attacked the likes of George Ritzer for the simplicity and commerciality of their globalization writings, claiming that kind of work precisely reflects the intellectual poverty, ‘nothingness’ and crass commercialism of McDonaldization and globalization itself. Roberts (2005) describes this process as the ‘Ritzerization’ of knowledge. Globalization – I’m Lovin’ It. Some otherwise highly cerebral writers have tended towards dumbing-down in producing another blockbuster globalization text. Anthony Giddens, one of the most prominent sociologists of the 1990s and early 2000s, devoted a considerable portion of his latter career to exploring ...