EDM 6022
Education and Development
Globalization: Conceptual and
Historical Accounts
Wing-kwong Tsang
Ho Tim Bldg. Room 416; Ext. 6922;
wktsang@cuhk.edu.hk; www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/~wktsang
Globalization: A Conceptual Account:
What is globalization?
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David Harvey (1989): Time-space compression as
The Condition of Postmodernity
“The concept of ‘time-space compression’ refers
to “processes that so revolutionize the objective
qualities and time that we are forced to alter,
sometimes in quite radical ways, how we
represent the world to ourselves.” (1989, P. 240)
Anthony Giddens (1994): The Consequences of
Modernity “Globalization is really about the
transformation of space and time. I would define it
as action at distance, and relate its growth over
recent years to the development of means of
instantaneous global communication and mass
transportation.” (1994, p. 22)
Globalization: A Conceptual Account:
What is globalization?
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Manuel Castells (1996): The Network Society
Globalization as a separation of simultaneous
social practice from physical contiguity and the
transformation the traditional notion of space of
places to space of flows.
Zygmunt Bauman (1998): Globalization as
“annulment of temporal/spatial distances” (1998,
p.18).
Globalization: A Historical Account
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Origins of globalization
 A.G. Frank & Grill (1993) World History
Perspective: Originated 5000 year ago
 Braudel (1979) & Wallerstein (1974) Worldsystem Approach: Originated from the 16th
century and the rise of mercantile capitalism
 J. W. Meyer (1979) World Polity Perspective:
Originated from the late 18th & early 19th
century and the constitution of inter-state
competition world polity
 M. Castell (1996) & M. Carnoy (2000) Global IT
Economy Perspective: Originated from 1970s
Globalization and IT Revolution: A
Historical Account
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Norbert Wiener’s formulation of Cybernetics
since the end of the Second World War
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Cybernetics: Control and communication in the
Animal and the Machine, 1948
The Human use of Human Being: Cybernetics and
Society, 1950
Cybernetics is defined as the study of messages,
which is “to develop a language and technique that
will enable us indeed to attack the problem of
control and communication in general.” (1950/67, p.
25)
Globalization and IT Revolution: A
Historical Account
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Practices of IT during the Second World War
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The invention of radar and the victory of the Battle
of Britain
The war of intelligence and the code-breakers,
Colossus developed in Britain in 1943, as the
pioneer of computers
The practices of war games and the development
of Operations Research
The psychology of war
Globalization and IT Revolution: A
Historical Account
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Practices of IT during the Second World War
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The invention of radar and the victory of the Battle
of Britain
The war of intelligence and the code-breakers,
Colossus developed in Britain in 1943, as the
pioneer of computers
The practices of war games and the development
of Operations Research
The psychology of war
Globalization and IT Revolution: A
Historical Account

The developments of the hardware for the
Information Technology Revolution
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The development pf microelectronics
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1947, Bardeen, Brattan, and Shockley invented the
transistor in 1947 at Bell Laboratories
1954, Texas Instruments in Dallas accomplished the shift
to silicon in manufacturing chips
1957, Jack Kilby and Bob Noyce co-invented the Intgrated
Circuit (IC)
1971, Ted Hoff, an Intel engineer, invented the
microprocessor
Globalization and IT Revolution: A
Historical Account

The developments of the hardware for the
Information Technology Revolution
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The development of computers
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1943, Colossus was built in Britain as a machine to
decipher enemy codes
1964, Mauchly and Eckert in the University of
Pennsylvania, under the sponsorship of the US Army,
produced the first general purpose computer ENIAC
(Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator)
1951, Mauchly and Eckert produced the first commercial
version computer, UNIVAC-1
1975, Ed Robert built the first small-scale computer
around the microprocessor
Globalization and IT Revolution: A
Historical Account

The developments of the hardware for the
Information Technology Revolution
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The development of computers
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1976, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs built the first
commercially successful microcomputer Apple I in the
garage of their parents’ home in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley
As member of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of
hackers who started meeting regularly in the Bay Area in
the mid-seventies, Steve Wozniak used the information
shared freely within club to built his Apple I. Hence, he
accordingly distributed openly the blueprints of Apple I to
others and published bits of his program.
1981, IBM introduced its version of microcomputer, which
name the Personal Computer (PC)
Globalization and IT Revolution: A
Historical Account

The developments of the hardware for the
Information Technology Revolution
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The development of telecommunication
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1970s, telecommunication turned from analog to digital
transmissions
1970s, the development of optoelectronics (fiber optics
and laser transmission
These two technological breakthroughs constituted the
two building blocks of the so-called Information
Superhighway in the 1990s
Globalization and IT Revolution: A
Historical Account
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The development of the software for the Information
Technology Revolution
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The development of the Internet
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1958, Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was formed by
the Defense Department of the US Government
1969, ARPA NET, a computer network was set up within ARPA.
The objective of the ARPANET was to build a military
communications system able to survive a nuclear attack.
1970s, Vint Cerf and members of the Network Working Group
designed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internetwork Protocol (IP). Taken together, they formed the TCP/IP,
which laid down the standard on which the Internet still operates
today.
1983, the defense Department created a separate MILNET, as a
result ARPANET became ARPA-INTERNET.
Feb. 1990, ARPANET technological obsolete. The US Government
charged the National Science Foundation with the management of
the Internet.
Globalization and IT Revolution: A
Historical Account
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The development of the software for the Information
Technology Revolution
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The development of the grassroots computer networks
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1977 Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, two Chicago students
wrote a program they call MODEM, enabling the transfer of files
between PCs.
1978, Christensen and Suess wrote another program Computer
Bulletin Broad System, enabling PCs to store and transmit
message
1983, Tom Jennings created the FIDONET in California1981 Ira
Fuch and Greydon Freeman created the BITNET
From the 1970s, a computer network emerged from the
community of UNIX users. It eventually developed into the Usenet.
In the summer 1980, graduate students in Berkeley developed a
program to bridge the ARPANET and the Usenet. These networks
eventually came together as the Internet. he development of the
Internet
Globalization and IT Revolution: A
Historical Account
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The development of the software for the Information
Technology Revolution
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The “Open Source Movement”
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1974, Bell Laboratories release UNIX to the universities, including
its source code and permission to alter the source. UNIX then
became the lingua franca of most computer science department.
1984, Richard Stallman, reacting against the decision by AT&T to
claim proprietary right to UNIX, launched the Free Software
Foundation, proposing to substitute “copyleft” for “copyright”.
He also created an operating system, GNU, as an alternative to
UNIX.
1991, Linus Torvald, a 22-year-old student at the University of
Helsinki, developed a new UNIX-based operating system, called
Linex, and distributed it freely on the Internet, asking users to
improve it and to pose their improvement back on the Net.
Lesson from the History of the
Information Technology Revolution
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The imperatives of the power-steering
system of the military-science regime
The imperatives of the money-steering
system of the capital-science mechanism
The imperatives of the free-democratic
and equal-meritocratic community of the
grassroots movements
Globalization and Postmodernity
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What is postmodernity?
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Jean-Fransois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition:
A Report on Knowledge (1984/1979)
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“I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.
This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress of the
sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the
obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of
legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of
metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution
which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is
losing its functions, its great hero, its great dangers, its
great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds
of narrative language elements -- narrative, but also
denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on." (1984/1979:
xxiii-xxiv)
Globalization and Postmodernity
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“It is fair to say that for the last forty years the ‘leading sciences
and technologies have had to do with language: phonology and
theories of linguistics, problems of communication and
cynbernetics, modern theories of algebra and informatics,
computers and their language, problems of translation and the
search for areas of compatibility among computer languages,
problems of information storage and data banks, telematics and
the perfection of intelligent terminals, paradoxology. …The
nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this
context of general transformation, It can fit into the new
channels, and become operational, only if leaning is translated
into quantities of information. We can predict that anything in
the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this
way will be abandoned and that the direction of new research
will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being
translatable into computer language.” (p. 4-5)
Globalization and Postmodernity
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David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity
(1990)
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“We have been experiencing, these last two decades, an
intense phase of time-space compression that has had a
disorientating and disruptive impa`ct upon politicaleconomic practices, the balance of class power, as well
as upon cultural and social life. …I think it no accident
that postmodern sensibility evidences strong sympathies
for certain of the confused political, cultural, and
philosophical movements that occurred at the beginning
of this century when the sense of time-space
compression was also peculiarly strong.” (p. 284)
Globalization and Postmodernity

David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity
(1990)
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"What appears to be the most startling fact about
postmodernism: its total acceptance of the ephemerality,
fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic.... But
postmodernism responds to the fact of that in a very
particular way. It does not try to transcend it, counteract
it, or even to define the 'eternal and immutable' elements
that might lie within it. Postmodernism swims, even
wallows, in the fragmentary and chaotic currents of
change as if that is all there is" (p.44).
Globalization and its Human
Consequences
Economic consequences
 Cultural consequences
 Social consequences
 Political and administrative consequence
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