ATTITUDES TOWARD

GLOBALIZATION

- Sagar Agrawal
WHAT IS GLOBALIZATION?
 "Globalization refers to a multidimensional set of social
processes that create, multiply, stretch, and intensify
worldwide social interdependencies and exchanges while
at the same time fostering in people a growing awareness
of deepening connections between the local and the
distant.”
DIFFERENT LEVELS OF
GLOBALIZATION
 Economical level
 Cultural level

 Political level

 Ecological level

 Technical level

 Educational level

 ...
Which
way you
choose to
reach the
top ?
GLOBALISATION
TOO MUCH
OR
TOO LITTLE !!!!
EDUCATION
QUALITY OF LIFE
WHY THERE IS DIFFERENCE IN
LIFESTYLE OF RURAL AND
URBAN??

Basic necessities
Nutrition problem
Transportation
Medicine
No local contacts
Housing
CULTURE :

Why
are we
going
Crazy Globally ??
 Drug Abuse

 Increase in number of unmarried pregnant women

 Burn Out Ratio of Employees

FOOD RETAILERS

 Wal-Mart-US, Carrefour-France, Tesco-UK, Ahold-Holland

 Reasons for globalization
 Cross-border barriers removed
 Saturation in domestic markets
 One company started overseas expansion, others followed
 Benefit from economies of scale
 Strong position in domestic markets and efficient operations

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GLOBALIZATION

 Difficulties
 Differences in tastes and preferences
 Local preferences
 Labour costs
 Supply Chain Management
 Lack of computer-based infrastructure
 High holding costs

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ANTI GLOBALIZATION - RADICALS

Globalization is all the evil in today’s

world and cares only about money

It divides the world into rich and poor (North and

South of the world)

It is the cause of all the global problems

STICKY WICKET 1:
Inequality and Chaos:
Increasing Global Inequalities
Vulnerability of Complex Systems
Global Justice and Productivity of Labor
 STICKY WICKET 2:
 Environmental Disaster
The Biotech Century
Global Warming
 Global Impasse: the limits of the biosphere and the
American model of development
ATTITUDES TOWARD GLOBALIZATION

2 major schools of thought:

 HYPERGLOBALIZERS
 SCEPTICS

3 major attitudes:
 PRO-GLOBALISTS
 ANTI-GLOBALISTS
 ALTER-GLOBALISTS
HYPERGLOBALIZERS
In this 'runaway world'
nation states
can no longer
effectively manage or regulate
their own national economies
SCEPTICS
Globalization:

 Based on the regionalization

into 3 major blocks: Europe,
Asia – Pacific, North
America

Paul Hirst
( Paul Hirst (1947-2003) was a British sociologist. He became Professor of Social Theory at
Birkbeck, University of London.)
SCEPTICS
 There is an intensification of international interdependence
BUT
the intensity of global interdependence is exaggerated

 Globalization is a phenomenon connected to the richest countries.

SCEPTICS
 There is no unified global economy
 The world is breaking up into several major economic
and political blocs
 Too much emphasis on footloose capital and a new
global capitalist order
3 SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT – SUMMARY
1. Hyperglobalizers  one single global economy;
end of state

2. Sceptics  3 major economical regional blocs;

states less important
AN EXAMPLE :--
GLOBALIZATION
 American drives a car
made in Germany,
steel from Korea,

Tyres from Malaysia,

fills gasoline from UK BP,

oil pumped from a well in Africa by a

French company,
transported to US in a ship owned by a

Greek shipping company.

(contd)
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GLOBALIZATION
While driving, talks to a stock broker on
Nokia cell designed in Finland, assembled
in Texas using chips produced in Taiwan
by an Indian engineer working in
California
(she finally purchased shares of a German
Telecom comp)
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GLOBALIZATION

 Sheturns on radio made in Malaysia by a Japanese

firm, hears a song composed and sung by by a
group of English, which is recorded by a French
music company.

 Pulls
out a coffee from a stall owned by Korean
immigrant, beans coming from Brazil, chocolate
from Peru and biscuits from Italy.

 (contd)
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THE WORLD WE LIVE IN
 Globalization causing
Suffering of domestic industry
Job losses, income inequalities
Economic crisis in some countries
Economic slowdown in the US
Japanese stock market fall
Reversal of reforms at times
 (contd)

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GLOBALIZATION
 Fundamental shift in the National economies

 (self-containedentities, isolated,barriers of trade,

distance, time zone differences, Govt regulation,
culture, transportation, telecom, technology)

 Theprocess by which visible shift in the above is

occurring is referred to as Globalization
(contd)
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GLOBAL COMMODITY
 It is a world in which products are made from inputs that
come from all over the world
 Increased opportunities and threats

 Global markets
2 lakh small US business firms employing less than 100 had
foreign sales
 Boeing 777 has 1,32,500 major components made by 545
suppliers

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DIFFICULTY
GLOBAL MANAGER
 Ms Radha Basu
 Graduate engineer in computer science, joined in Hewlett
Packard in Germany followed by India and back in US
 Manages teams of software engineers spread across 15 time
zones
 All teams do collaborative work
 logs on to over 1,00,000 mails a year, video conferencing, voice
mail messages to 1,000 people in her division every day.
 (contd)

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GLOBAL MANAGER
 Language and communication gaps
 Eg: Once she told German engineers that they should do
something and discovered that they they did not.
 (should means in Germany that he has the option of not
doing)
 Use of right words (MUST) to convey

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SOCIAL CHANGE
“Globalization in its current phase has
been described as an unprecedented
compression of time and space
reflected in the tremendous
intensification of social, political,
economic, and cultural
interconnections and
interdependencies on a global scale.”
-Stegler, p. ix
 One way to approach
this: think about the
world before
globalization

• Distance mattered—space often measured in time

• Territorial boundaries more or less kept things in and out
• Society and culture had spatial referents
• Everything had its “place” (literally)
 In a world of deterritorialization and
supraterritoriality:
•Distance becomes almost irrelevant (the end of distance)
•Boundaries are increasingly permeable.
•Groups and cultures increasingly don’t have a territorial basis
•A new kind of non-physical “place” is emerging
 A survey of some key processes of
globalization

• Technological advances
• Expansion of international commerce (exports and imports)
• Rising importance of private capital flows (stock markets and multinational corporations)
• Increasing travel and migration (international tourism and domestic diversity)
• Increased communication and interaction between peoples (through all sorts of media)
some of the key public controversies over globalization:
What are they?

“Can globalization be harnessed so that all citizens and

countries benefit and not just the lucky few?”
 How to Judge Globalization (Normatively)

1. 1. Is globalization Westernization? Is it a threat to non-

western societies?
2. What is the right question to ask about globalization and the
poor?
3. What are the “legitimate” questions that “anti-
globalization” protestors ask?
“Over the past decade globalization has
been driven by technological
advances…..But globalization has also been
driven by policies and ideas…”
INTERPRETATIONS (1)
 Dominance of World Capitalistic Economic system
 Erosion of local cultures through global culture
 Westernization of the world
 Ascendancy of capitalism
 Increasing homogeneity

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INTERPRETATIONS (2)
 Producing diversity & heterogeneity through increased
hybridization
 Strategy for increasing corporate profits & power
 Lever to produce positive social goods like environment
action, democratization, humanization
 It is modernity

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INTERPRETATIONS (3)
 Replacement of the term “imperialism” (-ve, critical) with
“modernization” (+ve, legitimizing)
 Neocolonialism: continuing exploitation of much of the world
by the few super powers
 Entirely positive process of socioeconomic progress,
technological innovation, more diverse products and services,
cornucopia of information and growing cultural freedom, higher
standard of living

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ONE SINGLE MEANING?
 Thus globalization is a theoretical construct
 Open to various meanings and inflections

 It can be described positively, negatively or multivalent to

describe complex and multidimensional process in the
economy, polity, culture, and everyday life

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CULTURE, STATE & CULTURE
 Triumph of market forces and hegemony of capital
 Expansion of the capitalist world into areas
previously closed off to it (erstwhile Communist
countries, many LDCs)
 Decline of nation state and its power to regulate and
control the flow of goods, people, information, and
various cultural forms.

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GLOBAL CULTURE

 Promoting life-styles, consumption, products, and

identities
 TNCs deploy advertising to penetrate local markets to
sell global products to overcome local resistance
 Private cable and satellite systems aggressively
promoting a commercial culture throughout the world
 Global homogenization and new local hybrid forms
and identities

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WHAT HAS GLOBALIZATION CREATED?
 Dissemination of new technologies
 Time-space compression produced by new media and
communication technologies are helping to overcome
previous barriers
 New labour markets, production centres are getting created
 Deindustrialization or “rustbelts” created elsewhere

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GLOBAL INSTITUTIONS
 Creation of the World Bank and the IMF
 GATT and NAFTA
 WTO
 As we look back 50 years, economic growth has
expanded five-fold, international trade roughly twelve
times and FDI 2/3rds of the international trade
 However, there has been unevenness in the above
developments
 Economic elites benefited and LDCs could not, and
the poorer regions of LDCs became relatively poorer
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TRADITIONAL FEATURES OF A
NATION
(PARTIAL LIST)

 A single integrated economic system

 “Frictionless” transactions for the most part within the
system
 Relatively fluid pool of labor limited to the system
 Common laws governing systems of exchanges

 A decision-making system
 An enforcement mechanism

 Protection of citizens and citizens’ rights

GLOBALIZATION--ACTUAL
 Integrated economic system for (much of) the world
 International transactions becoming common and more
frictionless
 Labor pool: immigration and exporting of jobs
 Development of laws governing supra-national exchanges
GLOBALIZATION--QUESTIONABLE
 Decision-making system?
 Int’lorganizations—e.g. UN
 U.S. [compare size of economy with size of population]

 An enforcement mechanism?
 Protection of people and rights?
ANTI-GLOBALIZATION: IT’S NOT
JUST FOR POOR PEOPLE
ANYMORE
 Anti-Globalization as Ideological Movement
 Against realizing the promise of a Flat-World that
requires developing countries to slash public spending,
revoke labor laws, rescind environmental protection
(anti-trade) and let a thousand sweatshops flourish
 People before profit, or simply put, “why aren’t bailouts
for airlines going to the workers losing their jobs?
 We believe in exposing the local realities of
globalization
 Have it our way: deep democracy and social justice
ANTI-GLOBALIZATION: IT’S NOT
JUST FOR POOR PEOPLE
ANYMORE
 Anti-Globalization as the Manifestation of Fear, Distrust and
National Security
 The Dubai Port controversy: Should DP World, owned by the UA
Emirates, be allowed to own several American port terminals? Or
simply put, “how can an Arab firm be trusted to operate cargo terminals
at American ports?”

 Last fall, a Chinese firm was denied the opportunity to acquire

UNOCAL, a second tier American oil company after Congress objected

 Before these two incidents, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the

US (CFIUS) had denied only one proposed foreign acquisition of a US
company---the Chinese National Aero Technology Import and Export’s
attempt to acquire a Seattle aircraft parts maker in 1990.
ANTI-GLOBALIZATION: IT’S NOT
JUST FOR POOR PEOPLE
ANYMORE
 Anti-Globalization as the Manifestation of Fear,
Distrust and National Security
 Europe is also experiencing similar incidents as governments in France,
Spain and Poland are blocking foreign investment even in seeming
unimportant consumer industries

 At the same time, the US is so dependent on foreign investment that we

require $3 billion in foreign capital every working day to finance the huge
gap between imports and exports

 In terms of the jump in oil prices, the Arab members of the OPEC cartel
have earned $1.3 trillion petrodollars that we need back in the US to
support corporate bonds, equities and direct foreign investment in our
economy or simply put” foreigners have a whole pile of US dollars----what
do we expect them to do with them?”
IN DEFENSE OF GLOBALIZATION
 Anti-Globalization
 Globalization’s Human Face:
 Poverty
 Child Labor
 Women
 Wages and Labor Standards
 Environment

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FIGHTING THE SYSTEM
Anti-globalization Protests
“The
Second
Super-
Power”

Anti-
War
Protest

London,
2003
ICONS OF GLOBALIZATION
ANTIGLOBALIZATION MOVEMENTS
SPREAD THROUGHOUT THE WORLD
WTO MEMBERS
WTO PROTESTS IN SEATTLE, 1999
MADRID94
 The 50th anniversary of the IMF and the World Bank,
which was celebrated in Madrid in October 1994, was the
scene of a protest by an ad-hoc coalition of what would
later be called anti-globalization movements. They tried to
drown the bankers' parties in noise from outside and held
other public forms of protest under the motto "50 Years is
Enough". While Spanish King Juan Carlos was addressing
the participants in a huge exhibition hall, two Greenpeace
activists climbed to the top and showered the bankers with
fake dollar bills carrying the slogan "No $s for
Ozone Layer Destruction". A number of the
demonstrators were sent to the notorious
Carabanchel prison.
J18 PROTESTS, LONDON 1999
One of the first international anti-globalization protests was organized in dozens of cities
around the world on June 18, 1999, with those in London and Eugene, Oregon most often
noted. The drive was called the Carnival Against Capitalism, or J18 for short. The protest in
Eugene turned into a riot where local anarchists drove police out of a small park. One
anarchist, Robert Thaxton, was arrested and convicted of throwing a rock at a police officer.
WHO ARE THESE PROTESTERS?
 Members of the anti-globalization movement
generally advocate anarchist, nationalist,
socialist, social democratic or Eco-socialist
alternatives to liberal economics, and seek to
protect the world's population and ecosystem
from what they believe to be the damaging
effects of globalization.
 Support for human rights NGOs is another
cornerstone of the anti-globalization movement's
platform.
WHO ARE THESE PROTESTERS?
 They advocate for labor rights,
environmentalism, feminism, freedom of
migration, preservation of the cultures of
indigenous peoples, biodiversity, cultural
diversity, food safety, and ending or reforming
capitalism. Many of the protesters are veterans
of single-issue campaigns, including anti-
logging activism, living wage, labor union
organizing, and anti-sweatshop campaigns.
DOES BEING ANTI-GLOBALIZATION
MEAN YOU’RE ANTI-GLOBAL?
 Infact, they argue, the movement is actually
self-consciously internationalist, organising
globally and advocating for the cause of
oppressed people around the world. One element
that makes up the movement is the No Border
network, which argues for unrestricted migration
and the abolition of all national borders.
WHAT ARE THEY PROTESTING
AGAINST?
 Generally speaking, protesters believe that the
global financial institutions and agreements
undermine local decision-making methods.
Many governments and free trade institutions are
seen as acting for the good of transnational (or
multinational) corporations
 These corporations are seen as having privileges
that most human persons do not have: moving
freely across borders, extracting desired natural
resources, and utilizing a diversity of human
resources.
WHAT ARE THEY PROTESTING
AGAINST?
 They are perceived to be able to move on after doing
permanent damage to the natural capital and biodiversity
of a nation, in a manner impossible for that nation's
citizens. Activists also claim that corporations impose a
kind of "global monoculture".
 Some of the movements' common goals are, therefore,
an end to the legal status of so-called "corporate
personhood" and the dissolution or dramatic reform of
the World Bank, IMF, and WTO.The activists are
especially opposed to what they view as "globalization
abuse”, promoting globalisation without regard to ethical
standards.
WHAT ARE PEOPLE COMPLAINING
ABOUT?
 Disorganisation
 Addressing problems incorrectly: One argument often made by
the opponents of the anti-globalization movement (especially by The
Economist), is that one of the major causes of poverty amongst third-world
farmers are the trade barriers put up by rich nations and poor nations alike.
The WTO is an organisation set up to work towards removing those trade
barriers. Therefore, it is argued, people really concerned about the plight of
the third world should actually be encouraging free trade, rather than
attempting to fight it. People in the third world, they argue, will not take
any job unless it’s better than the next best option they have. Thus if you
deprive him of his best option, you have made his life worse. Further in this
vein, it is argued that the protesters' opposition to free trade is sometimes
aimed at protecting the interests of Western labor (whose wages and
conditions are protected by trade barriers) rather than the interests of the
developing world. This is sometime summed up as "keep the poor, poor".
WHAT ARE PEOPLE COMPLAINING
ABOUT?

 Addressing problems incorrectly: This contrasts with the stated

goals of those in the movement, which are to improve the conditions of ordinary
farmers and workers everywhere.Anti-globalization activists counter these claims by
arguing that free trade policies create an environment for workers similar to the
prisoner's dilemma, in which workers in different countries are tempted to "defect" or
"betray" other workers by undercutting standards on wages and work conditions. This
is because if you neighbor makes more money, this obviously makes you poorer.
Therefore, the anti-globalization movement supports a strategy of cooperation for
mutual benefit, where you cooperate by not improving your life while your neighbor
does not improve his. This strategy is in line with the notion of Internationalism
 Failure to propose solutions
 Motivations/Violence
 Lack of Evidence
MAKING GLOBALIZATION WORK
BETTER

 Appropriate Governance
 Coping with Downsides

 Accelerating the Achievements of Social Agendas

 Managing Transitions: Optimal Not Maximal Speed

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ALTERGLOBALISTS

Globalization is an inevitable process

Globalization needs a human, not

money face..