Lesson Title: The Contemporary World
Lectures and Annotations:
Even after more than two decades of intense scholarly scrutiny, ‘globalization’ has remained a
contested and slippery concept. In spite of the remarkable proliferation of research programmes for the
study of globalization, there are many different approaches to the study of globalization. Since the
beginning of self-conscious academic inquiries into multiple process of globalization in the early
1990s, academics have remained divided on the utility of various methodological approaches, the value
of available empirical evidence for gauging the extent, impact, and direction of globalization, and, of
course, its normative implications. The failure to arrive at a broad scholarly consensus on the subject
attests not only to the contentious nature of academic inquiry in general, but also reflects the retreat
from generalizing initiated in the 1980s by the influential ‘poststructuralist turn’ away from ‘grand
narratives’.
As Fredric Jameson (1998) astutely points out, there seems to be little utility in forcing such a
complex set of social forces as globalization into a single analytic framework. It seems to make more
sense to survey various approaches to globalization by linking them to the debates on the subject that
have been taking place over the last two decades in two separate but related arenas. One battle has
been mostly fought within the narrow walls of academia, while the other has been unfolding in the
popular arena of public discourse. Although there are some common themes and overlapping
observations, the academic debate differs from the more general discussion in that its participants tend
to focus on the analytical rather than the normative or ideological dimension of globalization.
Certainly, there has been an explosion in the number of books and articles on the subject published by
both academic and trade outlets. Consulting the electronic database Factiva, which holds some 8,000
newspapers, magazines, and reports worldwide, the global studies scholar Nayan Chanda (2007)
showed that the number of items mentioning globalization grew from a mere two in 1981 to a high of
57,235 in 2001. Since then, it has stabilized at an annual average of about 45,000.
Many of the principal participants in the academic debate reside and teach in the wealthy countries of
the northern hemisphere, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom. Their
disproportionate intellectual influence reflects not only existing power relations in the world, but also
the global dominance of Anglo-American ideas. Although they share a common intellectual
framework, these scholars hold radically different views regarding the definition of globalization, its
scale, chronology, impact, and policy outcomes. Part of the reason why there is so much disagreement
has to do with the fact that globalization itself is a fragmented, incomplete, uneven, and contradictory
set of social processes. Rosenau (2003), for example, has defined globalization in terms of what he
calls ‘fragmegrative dynamics’ to ‘underscore the contradictions, ambiguities, complexities, and
uncertainties that have replaced the regularities of prior epochs’. Academics often respond to the
analytical challenge by trying to take conceptual possession of globalization – as though it were
something ‘out there’ to be captured by the ‘correct’ analytical framework. Indeed, as Rosow (2000)
has pointed out, many researchers approach globalization as if they were dealing with a process or an
object without a meaning of its own prior to its constitution as a conceptual ‘territory’. Moreover, since
it falls outside the boundaries of established academic disciplines, the study of globalization has invited
armies of social scientists, scholars in the humanities, and even natural scientists to leave their mark
on an intellectual terra incognita.
As a result, various scholars have approached the concept of globalization by analysing and describing
a variety of changing economic, political, and cultural processes that are alleged to have accelerated
since the 1970s. No generally accepted definition of globalization has emerged, except for such broad
descriptions as ‘increasing global ‘inter-connectedness’, ‘the expansions and intensification of social
relations across world-time and world- space’, ‘the compression of time and space’, ‘distant
proximities’, ‘a complex range of processes, driven by a mixture of political and economic influences’,
and ‘the swift and relatively unimpeded flow of capital, people, and ideas across national borders’
(Giddens, 1990; Harvey, 1989; Held and McGrew, 2007; Lechner and Boli, 2011; Robertson, 1992;
Steger, 2013; Waters, 2001). A number of researchers object to those characterizations, some going so
far as to deny the existence of globalization altogether. And yet, the last few years have also seen some
emerging areas of consensus as well as the rise of the new transdisciplinary field of ‘global studies’.