GLOBAL ISSUES
Theoretical Perspectives: The Market
© Dr. Francis Adu-Febiri &
Dr. Francis Yee, 2014
Contents of Presentation
CONSEQUENCES
1. Human Suffering
2. Environmental
Destruction
CONCEPTS
1. Issues of Global
Inequality & Poverty
2. Issues of Global Development
3. Issues of Global
Sustainability
Theory:
MARKETIZATION
CURES
1. Market Approach
2. State Approach
3. Civil Society Approach
4. Human Factor
Competency Approach
CAUSES
1. Industrialization &
Population Explosion
2. Human Factor
Deficiency/Decay
3. Ideologies of Liberalism &
Neoliberalism
GLOBAL ISSUES: Main Theory
 The Concepts, Causes,
Consequences, and
Cures of/for Global
Issues are structurally
connected to
Marketization.
MARKETIZATION:
 It is the commodification of
labor, money, religion, culture,
education, politics, and nature
driven by liberal and neoliberal
ideologies of globality.
Marketization
 A wave of marketization is sweeping the world. Entities
that used to be embedded in human bodies, communities,
and nature are being ripped out of their habitats,
appropriated by new classes of merchants, and sold in
chains of markets that stretch across the globe (Michael
Burawoy 2014, p. 292).
Marketization




Waves of Marketization (Burawoy
2014, p. 292):
First Wave: The Industrial Revolution
of the late 18th and the 19th centuries
worked through a global expansion in
the marketization of labor and its
products.
Second Wave: The Financial
Revolution of the 20th century turned
money into a full-blown global
commodity as well as commodified
religion, culture, education, and politic.
Third Wave: The Ecological
Transformation that now besets us digs
even deeper, making land, water, air,
and genes the subject of global market
exchange, thereby threatening human
existence.
THE PARADOX OF GLOBAL ISSUES
 Marketization has created Global
Issues that are producing global
human suffering and unsustainable
environment, yet these global issues
could provide opportunities and
resources to transform marketization
to support sustainable global
development that would minimize, if
not eliminate, human suffering and
environmental destruction.
 The fate of this paradox rests on the
quality of people--“we the peoples”
(Kofi Annan, 2001), the Human
Factor (Adjibolosoo 1995); Human
Factor Competency (Adu-Febiri
2000).
THE PARADOX OF GLOBAL ISSUES
 Why is it necessary to know the causes,
consequences, and cures of/for global
issues?
 In order to resolve the global issues
paradox, it is necessary to explore the
causes, consequences, and cures of/for
global issues because this exploration may
provide global opportunities and resources
to make a sustainable global difference in
the global development processes.
GLOBAL ISSUES:
 CAUSES
 Population Explosion
 Industrial Revolution
 Human Factor Decay
 Liberal & Neoliberal
Ideologies
CAUSES
 The combination of population explosion, the
industrial revolution, and human factor
deficiency/decay in Europe generated
marketization driven by the ideology of
liberalism. This initiated violent global slave
trade, colonialism, and exploitation of labor,
culture and nature that laid the foundation for
unsustainable globalization reflected in global
issues.
 The ideology of Neoliberalism globalized
marketization which reinforces and sustains
this unsustainable globalization and its related
global issues.

Video: The Future of Neoliberalism:
http://videoarchive.asanet.org/presentations/2004_d7.html
Causes: Neoliberalism
 The Nature of Neolibralism:
 According to Michal Rozworski (2014),
"Privatizing gains and socializing losses" could
be the motto for the neoliberal era. Alongside
this and "there is no alternative," few slogans
better capture the ideology that has been so
successfully diffused throughout the world over
the past several decades
(http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/931.php#contin
ue).
Causes: Neoliberalism

Corporatization
It is a set of ideas governing economic policies that
seeks to create worldwide market for capital and trade
flows free of government interference through waves of
marketization (Robinson 2014, p. 281):
Labor
 First-wave Marketization: The market’s
uncontrolled assault on proletarianized
populations and community in the 19th century
 Second-wave Marketization: Challenged the
few rights labor has won before WW1 through
trade unions and political parties. State
protection of Money/capital at the expense of
labor
 Third-wave Marketization: State regulates for,
rather than against, the market at the expense
of labor, culture and nature

This unbridled global marketization of labor,
money, culture, education, politics and nature is


intensifying global human suffering and environmental
destruction
Contributing to Integration and globalization of the three
waves of marketization
Politics
Culture
Causes: Neoliberalism
 Because the ideology of neoliberalism has
forged the integration and globalization of
the three waves of marketization from the
1980s onward that drive global issues, the
social sciences, particularly sociology, can
no longer limit their engagement to local
or national publics, but must be concerned
with knitting together a global civil
society to counter the ravages of the
combined forces of the neoliberal global
state and free market (Burawoy 2014, p.
299).
 This reality must inform the design and
implementation of students’ service
learning projects.
GLOBAL ISSUES:
 CONSEQUENCES
 Human Suffering
 Environmental Destruction
A Disastrous Combination
 The intersection of population explosion,
human factor deficiency/decay, and the
industrial revolution in Europe in the 19th
century generated the ideology of
liberalism that initiated the first-wave
marketization that unleashed a terrible
human suffering through:
 Violent global slave trade
 Violent global colonization
 Violent exploitation of labor, culture and nature
Global Issues: Consequences



The second-wave marketization entrenched human
suffering and environmental destruction started in the firstwave marketization and laid the foundations for the thirdwave marketization driven by neoliberal ideology:
1. Global Human Suffering: The 99%?






Poverty
Hunger
Diseases
Violence
Unemployment/underemployment
Destruction of community



Global Pollution
Global Warming
Extinction of flora and fauna
2. Global Environmental Destruction
Global Human Suffering (Robinson
2014)
 In Developed Regions:
 Third-wave marketization creates
deteriorating standard of living for many
people in the developed regions because it
is driven by neoliberal ideology that thrives
on:




Deindustrialization of these regions
Cutting/limiting state benefits or the safety net
Keeping wages in check
Turning full-time jobs into part-time and
seasonal jobs
Global Human Suffering (Robinson
2014)
 In Less Developed Regions:
 The third-wave marketization creates deteriorating
standard of living for the greater majority of people in
the less developed or underdeveloped regions of the
world because it is driven by neoliberal ideology that
thrives on:
 Decline in per capita income
 Growing inequality
 Elimination of subsidies for water, health care,
transportation, education, food, and other necessities
 Eroding the land ownership and utilization base of
rural dwellers
Global Environmental Destruction
(Robinson 2014)

The third-wave marketization intensifies the commodification of land/nature
because it is driven by neoliberal ideology that thrives on:
 Exploitation of nature without limit
 Increasing use of fossil fuels (coal, oil, gasoline, etc)
 “Greenhouse effect” on global warming with potentially catastrophic
climatic change
 What are the possible strategies to
eliminate the negative consequences
of the neoliberal marketization?
GLOBAL ISSUES:
 CURES:




Market
State
Civil Society
Human Factor Competency
Global Issues: Cures
 Applied and proposed global cures for global issues
are responses to marketization: either conforming to
marketization or countering marketization.
 EXISTING APPROACHES:
 There are three major approaches, according
to (John Seitz & Kristen Hite 2012)
 1. Market Approach (Neoclassical or Private
Capitalist Approach)
 2. The State Approach (Command Economy
or State Capitalist Approach)
 3. Civil Society Approach (Decentralized or
Redistributive Development Approach)
Existing Applied Cures for Global
Issues: The Market Approach
 Economics (The Standpoint of
the Market –Adam Smith):




Private Ownership/Control
Labor Specialization
Free trade
Central Role of Entrepreneurs and
Multinational Corporation
Emphasis on these strategies
 produces more wealth and
facilitates sharing of the new
wealth by more and more
people. United States, Western
Europe, Japan, China, South
Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and
Hong Kong are the poster
children of this approach
(Seitz & Hite 2012, pp. 55- 57)
 Increases the production of
global public goods
(Bhargava 2006).
Existing Applied Cures for Global
Issues: The Market Approach
 Main Weakness:
Profit before People
 High rates of unemployment
 A large income gap between the rich and
the poor
 Damage to people’s health
Existing Applied Cures for Global
Issues: The State Approach
 Political Science: (The
Standpoint of the State –Karl
Marx & V.I Lenin)
 Public/State
Ownership/Control
 Central Planning
 Equal distribution of income
 Basic needs of all are
provided for
 Capital invested in areas that
benefit society

Global state actors such as the
European Union, African Union,
United Nations don’t share this
perspective? (Payne 2013, pp. 47).
Power/Politics
Existing Applied Cures for Global
Issues: The State Approach
 Main Weakness:
Politics/Power before
Profit and People




Inefficient production of wealth
Suppression of individual liberties
Human Rights abuses
Genocides
Existing Applied Cures for Global
Issues: The State Approach
 The State Approach if not symbiotically integrated with the
market and civil society to form an organic whole, usuallys lead to
human right abuses and even genocide.
Tiananmen Square
Cambodia Killing Fields
THE MISSING LINK
 A Focus on People:
 Civil Society, its philosophy and the
quality of people.
THE MISSING LINK

The significance of the need to reconstruct
the global market and global governance
and to replace HFD with HFC in the
framework of the ubuntu philosophy is
well expressed in Robinson’s (2014, p.
283), observation that:
 To the degree that people continue to
think of themselves as members of a
particular nation, class, or race, and
not as part of humanity as a whole,
the efforts to combat global issues will
have little success.
 Much now depends on whether we will
be able to think and act as members
of a single human group whose
members share a common interest in
survival. If we fail to take such a
global view, if we insist, instead on
fighting to protect our narrow group
[individual] privileges rather than
humanity’s general interest, we may
go the way of the dinosaurs.
HOPE
HOPE
 Hope lies in the CIVIL SOCIETY APPROACH, according to
some sociologists, the International Institute for Human
Factor Development (www.iihfd.net) and many other
NGOs:
 People before Profit and/or
Politics/Power.
The Civil Society Approach
 Sociology: (The Standpoint of Civil
Society –Auguste Comte & C. Wright
Mills)
 People before Profit and/or
Politics:
 Self-help community actions that
 raise people’s low standard of living
 Help people to control their lives
rather than let the market or the
state be the main determinants of
their lives
 make social and human
development a reality
 Protect the environment
The Civil Society Approach
 Redistributive Development Model (Robinson
2014)
 Global grassroots governance system fueled by
the global justice movement (using the strategy
of global revolt from below) that redistributes
wealth globally by creating and sustaining:
 Democratization of Social Life
 Reorientation of productive resources toward
poor majorities
The Civil Society Approach
 The last holdout against marketization is society itself, or
more precisely civil society, composed of associations with
a measure of collective self-regulation, movements forged
out of a collective will, and publics of mutual recognition
and communication (Michael Burawoy 2014, pp. 292293).
 Development is not something that the rich bestow on the
poor but rather something the poor achieve for
themselves (Nancy Birdsall and Francis Fukuyama 2011)
 The poor that survive are intelligent, hard working, and
resourceful (Richard Stearn 2010).
The Civil Society Approach
 Weaknesses?
 Criticized as too small-scale to make a
big difference in the global society
 Efforts at the grassroots level directed
towards community managed economic
development often fail because of
unsupportive global political and economic
forces (Seitz & Hite 2012, p. 63-64)
 Even people helped by successful NGO
projects still remain poor (UNDP Human
Development Report 1998, p. 94; New
York Times 1998, p. A8)
 Market, power/political, and human factor
constraints contribute to this situation
The Civil Society Approach
 In order for the civil society approach
to achieve its goal of making the
market and power/politics work for
“we the people”, it is necessary for it
to facilitate the development of
Human Factor Competency (HFC) in
the global community.
ELIMINATING THE WEAKNESSES OF THE CIVIL
SOCIETY APPROACH:
The Role of Human Factor Competency (HFC)
 The role of HFC in
implementing the “we” factor or
Ubuntu philosophy is crucial to
the effectiveness of the civil
society approach as a cure for
global issues.
ELIMINATING THE WEAKNESSES OF THE CIVIL SOCIETY
APPROACH:
The Role of Human Factor Competency (HFC)

Distilling from earlier definitions of the HFC (Adjibolosoo, 1995;
Adu-Febiri, 2000, 2001, 2003/2004 and 2011), HFC constitutes
peoples’ thinking and humanitarian abilities that inspire and
facilitate their acquisition and application of appropriate
resources to connect with our common humanity and the
environment emotionally, morally and spiritually to make a
sustainable difference in society. In essence, HFC is an
essential dimension of what Adjibolosoo (1995, p. 33)
conceptualizes as “the appropriate human qualities and/or
characteristics (i.e., the HF). Human Factor Decay (HFD) is the
decline or loss or lack of those human qualities and/or
characteristics (Adjibolosoo 1995). Senyo Adjibolosoo (1995,
pp. 33 and 36), defines the HF as
 a spectrum of personality characteristics that enable social,
economic, and political institutions to function and remain
functional over time. These [personality characteristics]
include human capital, spiritual capital, moral capital,
aesthetic capital, human abilities, and human potential.
ELIMINATING THE WEAKNESSES OF
THE CIVIL SOCIETY APPROACH: The
Role of Human Factor Competency


HFC approach to global issues emphasizes that the
emergence and entrenchment of global issues result from
and they reproduce human factor deficiency/decay (HFD),
which is the link between neoliberalism and marketization
(Adu-Febiri 2003/2004, 2008).
HFD makes people focus on their individual interests at
the expense of community, humanity, and the
environment. This is a violation of the UBUNTU
philosophy. The Civil Society Approach is an antidote to
this global issues. However, the civil society approach
needs people with high HFC index to implement its “good
intentions” successfully. With high HFC index, the civil
society approach could transform existing global political
forces and economic forces to support civil society’s
efforts to create sustainable global development. Without
high HFC index, “the good intentions” of development
NGOs will metamorphose into “imperialism” (Barry-Shaw
and Oja Jay 2012)
Human Factor Deficiency/Decay
(HFD)
 Deterioration in the human capital, cultural
capital, social capital, aesthetic capital,
emotional capital, moral capital, and
spiritual capital of people, organizations,
institutions, communities and societies
(Adjibolosoo 1995).
 This deterioration causes mental, cultural,
emotional, moral, spiritual, and aesthetic
disconnection of people from each other,
family, community, nation, society,
common humanity, the environment, and
the cosmos (Adu-Febiri 2003/2004, 2011).
The Significance of HFC
 When civil society is equipped with
high HFC index, it is likely to
transform the market and the state to
support the development of Ubuntu
(the “we” factor) and the processes of
applying it to make policies,
programs, and projects that cater to
the well-being of individuals,
communities, societies, and the
environment.
The Ubuntu Philosophy
 UBUNTU = The “We” factor of human
life
 “We the Peoples” (Kofi Annan 2001).
UBUNTU Symbol
https://www.google.ca/search?q=images+of+ubuntu&hl
UBUNTU

…It is the essence of being human. It speaks of the fact that
my humanity is caught up and is inextricably bound up in
yours. I am human because I belong. It speaks about
wholeness, it speaks about compassion. A person with ubuntu
is welcoming, hospitable, warm and generous, willing to
share. Such people are open and available to others, willing to
be vulnerable, affirming of others, do not feel threatened that
others are able and good, for they have a proper selfassurance that comes from knowing that they belong in a
greater whole. They know that they are diminished when
others are humiliated, diminished when others are oppressed,
diminished when others are treated as if they were less than
who they are. The quality of ubuntu gives people resilience,
enabling them to survive and emerge still human despite all
efforts to dehumanise them (Tutu 2004. God Has A Dream:
Published by Doubleday).
UBUNTU
 There are three maxims that shape the
Ubuntu philosophy: The first maxim asserts
that 'To be human is to affirm one's
humanity by recognizing the humanity of
others and, on that basis, establish
respectful human relations with them.' And
'the second maxim means that if and when
one is faced with a decisive choice between
wealth and the preservation of the life of
another human being, then one should opt
for the preservation of life'. The third
'maxim' as a 'principle deeply embedded in
traditional African political philosophy' says
'that the king owed his status, including all
the powers associated with it, to the will of
the people under him‘ (Samkange 1980).
NELSON MANDELA’S COMMENTS
ON UBUNTU
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Expe
rience_ubuntu.ogg
Implementing the Ubuntu
Philosophy: The Role of HFC
 The Ubuntu philosophy is only a
vision or philosophy, and as such
people, communities and societies
need to develop emotional, moral and
spiritual connections to our common
humanity in addition to appropriate
knowledge, skills, strategies and
principles to implement the vision in
real life and in real time. The HFC
education model seeks to provide
these.
Implementing the Ubuntu
Philosophy: The Role of HFC
HFC Education Model: Processes
Implementing the Ubuntu
Philosophy: The Role of HFC

HFC Education Model: Curriculum Content & Pedagogy
 1. Thinking: Synthetic Thinking, Critical Thinking,
Creative Thinking, and Design Thinking.
 2. Service Learning: Students contributing to
community needs and using community needs to
make curriculum and instruction more relevant
 3. Applied Programs: Integration of Theory and
Practice; transforming knowledge into wisdom
 4. Indigenous Knowledges: Finding local solutions
to local problems
 5. Multidisciplinary & Interdisciplinary Programs:
Holistic connections to all available disciplines.
Implementing the Ubuntu
Philosophy: The Role of HFC

HFC Education Model: Pedagogy
Critical Thinking
Creative Thinking
ACTION:
- Service-Learning
Design Thinking
© Francis Adu-Febiri 2013
Synthetic Thinking
Implementing the Ubuntu
Philosophy: The Role of HFC
HFC Education Model: Practice
HFC
EDUCATION
PRACTICE
CONCLUSION: HOPE FOR HUMANITY




Global issues could be transformed into global
opportunities and resources to contribute to
building inclusive globalization through local actions
based on our common humanity in all its diversity
(Kofi Annan 2001).
Students who internalize the Ubuntu philosophy and
develop high human factor competency (HFC) could
use service-learning strategies to participate
effectively in this process. That is, the community
or societal process the civil society approach has
initiated to transform the existing global market and
global governance to serve the interests of civil
society globally.
The hope/solution is not in the civil society
approach per se; rather, the hope/solution is in the
quality of human beings designing and
implementing the approach.
You may be part of this hope
References






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
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 Payne, Richard. 2013. Global Issues: Politics,
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 Robinson, William I. 2014. “The Chimera of
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