Globalization, Apuntes de Administración de Empresas

¡Descarga Globalization y más Apuntes en PDF de Administración de Empresas solo en Docsity!

Globalization

• (^) Defining and periodising globalization
• (^) Main features of contemporary globalization
• (^) Theories of globalization: Harvey, Giddens,

Castells

Defining globalization

• “... the widening, deepening and speeding up

of worldwide interconnectedness in all

aspects of contemporary social life.” (Held et

al , 1999: 2)

• “Globalization ... refers both to the

compression of the world and the

intensification of consciousness of the world

as a whole.”(Robertson 1992: 8)

Main features of contemporary globalization

• (^) New extreme mobility of capital. Consolidation of a global

economy ( ↔ world economy exists since 16th century): “an

economy with the capacity to work as a unit in real time, or

chosen time, on a planetary scale” (Castells 2000: 101).

• (^) The fall in the cost and time needed to move commodities and

people, and the overcoming of space as a crucial factor.

• (^) Sharp acceleration in the means of global communications and

the consolidation of a global media system.

• (^) Growth of global organizations since the 1960s.
• (^) Emergence of English as the global lingua franca among elites.

What is new in contemporary globalization? (Scholte)

• (^) Globalization as the spread of transplanetary connections between people: “A global (in the sense of transplanetary) social relation is one that (like an Internet chat room and certain communicable diseases) can link persons situated at any inhabitable points on the earth... With globalization people become more able – physically, legally, linguistically, culturally and psychologically – to engage with each other wherever on planet Earth they might be.” (2005: 59)
• (^) Supraterritoriality is a new quality of contemporary globalisation. ‘Supraterritorial relations’ are social connections that substantially transcend territorial geography. Transworld simultaneity (connections that extend across the planet at the same time) and transworld instantaneity (connections that move anywhere on the planet in no time).

Harvey: Globalisation as time-space compression

• (^) Time-space compression designates a speeding up of the pace of life while also overcoming spatial barriers, as a central feature of modernity.
• (^) Marx on globalization: Communist Manifesto pp. 83-84.
• (^) Renaissance: a slow revolution in the conception of space and time from which scientific, objective (uniform, measurable). Clock time and empty space are the structural conditions that make possible the representation of the world as homogeneous and uniform.
• (^) Second half of the 19th^ century: the process of time-space compression was strongly accelerated with key technical innovations such as the telegraph, steam shipping and the railway.
• (^) Long trend towards the overcoming of space through time: spatial barriers lose significance in modernity.

Giddens: the spread of modernity on a global scale

• (^) Time-space distantiation. With uniformity in measuring time (clock), time becomes separated from space and place. Empty time and empty space.
• (^) Disembedding as “the “lifting out” of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.” (1991: 21). Two types of disembedding mechanisms: - (^) Symbolic tokens: impersonal media of interchange (eg.

money – a means of bracketing time).

• (^) Expert systems: we trust the guarantees that absent

experts offer us.

Castells: the network society and the space of flows

• (^) Globalisation linked to the revolution in information

technologies of the 1970s: informationalism as the base of

the socio-economic restructuring of the 1980s that gave rise

to the network society ( ↔ information society): ‘In

contrast, the term “informational” indicates the attribute of

a specific form of social organization in which information

generation, processing, and transmission become the

fundamental sources of productivity and power because of

new technological conditions emerging in this historical

period.’ (2000: 21).

• (^) Informational capitalism: information technologies become

the new base, or material foundation of the network society.

Main characteristics of informational capitalism

1. The informational economy is global.
2. The basic unit of the global economy is the network.
3. Asymmetry and inequality: an informational core and local or regional production disconnected from it. Selective globalization (eg. science and technology).
4. A new spatial organization: the space of flows. Fluid mobility but also spatial fragmentation and discontinuity.
5. Globalization of speciality labour.
6. Great increase in the circulation sphere.

• (^) Communication explosion through which we have come to interact “endlessly and automatically” with the media: “In the second half of the 1990s a new electronic communication system started to be formed out of the merger of globalized, customized mass media and computer-mediated communication… the new system is characterized by the integration of different media and by its interactive potential. Multimedia, as the new system was hastily labeled, extend the realm of electronic communication into the whole domain of life, from home to work, from schools to hospitals, from entertainment to travel.” (2000: 394)

The space of flows. Examples:

• (^) Global cities: ‘The global city is not a place, but a process. A process by which centers of production and consumption of advanced services, and their ancillary local societies, are connected in a global network, while simultaneously downplaying the linkages with their hinterlands, on the basis of information flows.’ (2000: 417)
• (^) The new industrial space ‘is characterized by the technological and organizational ability to separate the production process in different locations while reintegrating its unity through telecommunications linkages, and micro-electronics-based precision and flexibility in the fabrication of components.’ (2000: 417)