“…The ideological dimensions of culture are further apparent in the ways the discipline represents the global contexts in which intercultural communication takes place: the discipline tends to deemphasize the economic and political imbalances in the globalizing world, in effect sidelining these issues in intercultural communication. In several sources (e.g., DeVoss, Jasken, and Hayden 2002;Sokuvitz and George 2003), globalization emerges as a level playing field, Thomas Friedman's "flat world," a "global village," a "global marketplace," a "borderless world," or similar images that depict an economically homogenous world system full of equal actors. Moreover, studies have tended to focus on small population segments who can readily access the global economy (Munshi and McKee 2001), skewing the image of globalization in favor of regions and peoples with economic clout.…”