A Globalizing World?

Culture, Economics, Politics

David Held

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134329946
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Today's news media is full of references to 'globalization' - a buzz word that is quickly becoming ubiquitous. But what exactly is globalization? What are its main driving forces? Does it truly embrace all aspects of our lives, from economics to cultural developments?

A Globalizing World? examines these and other key questions in a highly accessible fashion, offering a clear and intelligent guide to the big ideas and debates of our time. In doing so, it does not take one particular stance for or against globalizaton; rather, it examines the arguments and evidence about its nature, form and impact.

After introducing the main theoretical positions of those who have studied the subject, key chapters look at the changing form of modern communication and cultural industries, trade patterns and financial flows of the world economy, and whether or not the 'new political world order' is qualitatively different from the old state system. This is essential reading for all students of politics, economics and international relations.

A globalizing society?

chapter 1

Allan Cochrane and Kathy Pain

1 INTRODUCTION

There is a widely shared—almost taken for granted—view that the world is changing more rapidly and dramatically at the start of the twenty-first century than ever before. Although it may not be a term we all use, many of the changes seem to be associated with something that has been called ‘globalization’.

The alleged story of globalization is probably familiar enough and can be told relatively simply. Drugs, crime, sex, war, protest movements, terrorism, disease, people, ideas, images, news, information, entertainment, pollution, goods and money, it is said, now all travel the globe. They are crossing national boundaries and connecting the world on an unprecedented scale and with previously unimaginable speed. The lives of ordinary people everywhere in the world seem increasingly to be shaped by events, decisions and actions that take place far away from where they live and work. Cultures, economies and politics appear to merge across the globe through the rapid exchange of information, ideas and knowledge, and the investment strategies of global corporations.

Some writers suggest that the advent of the mobile phone, satellite television and the Internet means that communication from one side of the globe to the other is virtually instantaneous. Distant events are presented to us on television screens even as they are taking place. Newspaper and TV headlines relay to our homes news of crises, fears and panics, which suggests that across the world change is alarmingly out of control. Many of us fear for our own economic security in the wake of global economic change, while our cultural and political certainties are challenged by the rise of new movements and the emergence of new institutions. The authority of individual nation-states and traditional social institutions seems to be increasingly redundant in the face of powerful and apparently dominant global forces. Even the value of the money in our pockets is dependent on fluctuations in global financial markets.

Again, according to some writers we seem to be living in a world of increasing change and uncertainty, in what Giddens (1999) has characterized as a ‘runaway world’. ‘For better or worse’, he says, ‘we are being propelled into a global order that no one fully understands, but which is making its effects felt upon all of us’ (Giddens, 1999, Lecture 1).

It is further suggested that the authority of individual nation-states, whose existence and sovereignty has been taken for granted over the past three centuries, is now facing dramatic challenges.

Nation-state

A state which possesses external, fixed, known, demarcated borders, and possesses an internal uniformity of rule.

The key defining characteristics of nation-states make them particularly vulnerable in the context of global change, because they are fundamentally defined through their ‘supreme jurisdiction over a demarcated territorial area’ (Held, 1995, p. 49). A key aspect of the nation-state is the precise definition of borders within which it has authority. States can be understood as the cluster of institutions which claim ultimate law-making authority over a territory, and claim the monopoly on the legitimate use of coercion and violence. It is the significance of borders that is challenged by the rise of transactions and relationships that cut across borders and either do not accept or simply bypass the old arrangements and the controls associated with them. Nation-states, some argue, are too small to be able to influence global change, and too large to respond effectively to the pressures for increased flexibility and competitiveness, or as Giddens (1999, Lecture 1) put it ‘too small to solve the big problems, but also too large to solve the small ones’.

Along with the acceptance of some writers of the notion of globalization—and the belief that it captures something about the ways the world in which we live is currently changing—its existence and meaning remain subjects of intense debate among social scientists. Also debated are questions of ‘winners’ and losers’ from globalization, with states, some social classes, gender groups, particular continents and the environment all being identified as possible losers’. Some even question whether it represents as significant a break with the past as its more enthusiastic proponents imagine. In this chapter we introduce the main debates about globalization and lay the foundations for the analytical approaches that will be developed in later chapters. We set out to identify the concepts that define globalization and establish criteria to help us decide whether it is a useful way of understanding the nature of contemporary social change. Just because ‘globalization’ has entered the language, this does not make its meaning any easier to pin down.

2 WHAT IS GLOBALIZATION?

2.1 Some claims

As a starting point in examining some of the social changes that have been associated with the notion of globalization, we will reflect on some of the ways in which the notion has been used to inform contemporary political debates. The extract that follows focuses on some developments in the information technology field that took place in the late 1990s, but it is helpful in highlighting some of the more significant claims that have been made about globalization. In the event the Psion challenge to Microsoft eventually failed as a result of technological advances and the company moved on to other areas of production, but the points raised in the extract remain significant.

ACTIVITY 1.1

First of all, read through the extract overleaf. As you do this, make a note of three or four main points that you feel say something about the nature of global change.

Knocking at Gates’s heaven
Psion’s telecoms-computer alliance has rocked the Microsoft monolith

Bill Gates is at the centre of a public relations offensrve….

But even Gates will have his work cut out For a small British company is at the centre of a fast-growing consortium that could seriously damage Microsoft’s control of tomorrow’s technology.

In the last week alone the Japanese mobile phone company NTT DoCoMo and the American computer group, Sun Microsystems, have joined Symbian, the consortium led by the palmtop computer manufacturer Psion.

Symbian is a front-runner in the ‘wireless’ revolution through which the mobile phone is fast beiag developed to access the Internet, send messages, pay bills and buy shares at speeds up to 40 times faster than today’s ‘wired’ modems. European firms led by the consortium of Psion, Nokia and Ericsson may soon dominate the world market….

Psion, run by David Potter, a South African educated at Cambridge, is a minnow by corporate standards. It began making PC games for Sinclair Research in the 1980s before moving into personal orgauisers and palm-sized computers, where it established a world lead. Recently it linked with Nokia of Finland, Ericsson of Sweden and America’s Motorola—who between them control three-quarters of the global market—to form Symbian. Psion’s operating system will drive the new ‘intelligent’ mobile phones.

Microsoft—the world’s biggest company in terms of stock market capitalisation—sees the European coasortium as a threat to its hold over around 95 per cent of the global software market. The next few years will see a David versns Goliath fight to see whether Windows or Symbian’s system dominates.

Most would back the American group, because the size of Microsoft’s market lead seems unimpeachable. Gates’s company, however, does not have the skills in mobile and telecoms technology Psion and its partners have. But it soon will, at the rate it has been making alliances with other telecoms companies….

If anyone had any doubts about where the next phase of the digital highway was leading they were dispelled by the pre-Christmas rush to buy mobile phones. Internet traffic now accounts for 15 per cent of BT’s local calls— double the level of a year ago. Experts expect new mobile subscribers to grow at 33 per cent in industrialised nations, compared with 4 per cent for conventional subscribers.

Within five years, sales of mobiles are expected to reach almost 750 million units, or three times the number of PCs, By then, mobile telephony will have overtaken fixedline connections. It took phones almost 40 years to reach 10 million customers in the US, as against 18 months for web-browsers, according to Professor Gary Hamel of London Business School….

Manufacturers know that as more mobile phones are bought they will get cheaper, and generate network effects arising from the fact that the more common they become the more nou-users feel the downdraught of exclusion….

It is possible to view the world as an invisible blizzard invisible blizzard of 1s and 0s speeding through the air at lightning speed, waiting to be repackaged into signals for an array of media including pictures, music, telecoms, print and electronic messages by the next ganeration of mobiles, In the next few years we will experience a plethora of new products from dozens of manufacturers offering all sorts of services. In the end, the consumer will decide.

But from what products? It could be a lightweight telephone with a compact technology, high-resolution screen, a wristwatch or a palm-held screen with a radio connection possibly to one of the global communication satellite systems already in the process of beiag established, Digitally encoded data tratismitted via satellite will enable anyone to phone or message anyone else instantly, and to access anything on the Interaet from the latest football scores to the archives of the Library of Congress….

Consumers will no longer have to go shopping, since the shops will simply follow them around, and if they want they could pay for the product or service they are buying from the comfort of a beach in Spain, shifting funds with a computer-phone.

Eventually handheld PCs could be integrated into clothes design, with a microphone woven into a collar, or even a hat. When practically everyone has a discreet phone, there will be no need for a conventional landline telephone in the home. That, of itself, is likely to change the culture of family life, for instance.

The personal market may be the biggest, but corporate demand will be the most profitable, In the US alone, according to Motorola, 40 million employees work nomadically, away from the office, for extended periods. The Columbia Institute for Tele-Information reckons that only 2 per cent of the 9.4 million square miles of America is ‘within four rings of the telephone’. Soon, instant communication will be available to all

Such commercial opportunities will trigger corporate wars. Last year, 96 per cent of devices surfing the Internet were attaehed to PCs, nearly all of them running Microsoft’s operating system, If Microsoft wants to continue ‘ruling’ the world the appropriate version of its Windows operating system will have to be installed in mobile devices, Three months ago Microsoft linked with Qual-comm,

Three months ago Microsoft linked with Qual-comm, a US leader in radio technology, and earlier this year it agreed a joint venture with BT. This is eerily similar to the way in which Gates realised, less than five years ago, that the Internet was going to be big and Micrasoft risked beiag left behind,

Employing huge resources, Gates soon caught up. Hell hath no fury like Microsoft in second place, as the Psion consortium knows too well. Microsoft is determined to ensure that its operating system is stitched into all the major products of the digital age as it moves from the desktop into the mobile world and into web and cable TV….

It is because the major mobile phone manufacturers do not want to be strangled by another Microsoft monopoly that they have teamed up with Psion. The aim is to try to establish Psioa’s Epoc operating system as the industry standard for the new mobile deviees before Microsoft carves out a beachhead, They have a 50:50 chance of doing so—and Europe has the chance to catapult itself into a winning position in the information highway race.

Source: The Guardian, 20 March 1999

COMMENT

Did you notice the language used to describe the events being reported? What did you think about the messages being conveyed? Phrases such as ‘a David versus Goliath fight’, ‘if Microsoft wants to continue “ruling” the world’ and ‘strangled by another Microsoft monopoly,’ have clear implications. This is the story of a struggle to dom...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• SERIES PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: A GLOBALIZING SOCIETY?
• CHAPTER 2: THE GLOBALIZATION OF CULTURE?
• CHAPTER 3: ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION?
• CHAPTER 4: POWER SHIFT: FROM NATIONAL GOVERNMENT TO GLOBAL GOVERNANCE?
• AFTERWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS