Theorizing Globalization

Abstract

I sketch aspects of a critical theory of globalization that will discuss the fundamental transformations in the world economy, politics, and culture in a dialectical framework that distinguishes between progressive and emancipatory features and oppressive and negative attributes. This requires articulations of the contradictions and ambiguities of globalization and the ways that globalization both is imposed from above and yet can be contested and reconfigured from below. I argue that the key to understanding globalization is theorizing it as at once a product of technological revolution and the global restructuring of capitalism in which economic, technological, political, and cultural features are intertwined. From this perspective, one should avoid both technological and economic determinism and all one-sided optics of globalization in favor of a view that theorizes globalization as a highly complex, contradictory, and thus ambiguous set of institutions and social relations, as well as one involving flows of goods, services, ideas, technologies, cultural forms, and people.Globalization appears to be the buzzword of the 1990s, the primary attractor of books, articles, and heated debate, just as postmodernism was the most fashionable and debated topic of the 1980s. A wide and diverse range of social theorists are arguing that today's world is organized by accelerating globalization, which is strengthening the dominance of a world capitalist economic system, supplanting the primacy of the nation-state with transnational corporations and organizations, and eroding local cultures and traditions through a global culture. 1 Marxists, world-systems theorists, functionalists, Weberians, and other contemporary theorists are converging on the position that globalization is a distinguishing trend of the present moment.Moreover, advocates of a postmodern break in history argue that developments in transnational capitalism are producing a new global historical configuration of post-Fordism, or postmodernism, as an emergent cultural logic of capitalism~Harvey 1989; Soja 1989; Jameson 1991; Gottdiener 1995!. Others define the emergent global economy and culture as a "network society" grounded in new communications and information technologỹ Castells 1996Castells , 1997Castells , 1998!. For others, globalization marks the triumph of capitalism and its market economy. 2 Some theorists see the emergence of a new transnational ruling elite and the universalization of consumerism~Sklair 2001!, while others stress global fragmentation of "the clash of civilizations"~Huntington 1996!. Driving "post" discourses into

Welcome to the Sitcom School: A Globalized Outlook for the Study of Television History

“…Hall, as well as others has noted that this epoch of Americanized globalization is connected at its core to the rise of an American-centred global media culture (Schiller 1992;Sreberny-Mohammad et al 1997;Kellner 2002). While scholarship looking at these media trends in the 1980s was dominated by the media imperialism approach, this oversimplified scenario fails to grasp the complexities involved in the second wave of globalization as theorized by Hall and others (for example : Hall 1997;Sreberny-Mohammad et al 1997;Kellner 2002;Parks and Kumar 2003).…”

“…While scholarship looking at these media trends in the 1980s was dominated by the media imperialism approach, this oversimplified scenario fails to grasp the complexities involved in the second wave of globalization as theorized by Hall and others (for example : Hall 1997;Sreberny-Mohammad et al 1997;Kellner 2002;Parks and Kumar 2003).…”

“…Focusing as it did on the global expansion of U.S run multi-national media corporations and foregrounding the worldwide circulation of finalized or 'canned' U.S shows like Dallas, the one-sided media imperialism scenario fails to account for the complexities typifying the cultural and economical processes of globalization -mainly the tension between simultaneous global 'McDonaldization' or homogenization and the seemingly contradictory process of global heterogenization, or the 'persistence' of 'difference', and of local forms of identification globally (Hall 1997;Kellner 2002 ).…”

El papel de la educación superior en el desarrollo de la ciudadanía global en Eritrea

“…On one hand, HEIs that follow banking education produce a loyal citizen so as to adapt and cope with any hegemonic structure (FREIRE, 2010;BURBULES & TORRES, 2000;GADOTTI, 1996). On the other hand, HEIs through critical pedagogy are responsible for teaching individuals the skills that will enable them to critically examine things, participate in the struggles of the present and future within and beyond their cultural communities and work for their transformation (KELLNER, 2002;FREIRE, 2010). It can be noted that pedagogical practices determine the way individuals think and act even for their own benefit and freedom.…”

On the origins of the globalization process

“…Pocos términos han conocido una difusión mayor en todos los ámbitos del conocimiento y de la vida que el de globalización. Si en los años 80 del siglo pasado el concepto de moda fue el de posmodernidad, a partir de los 90 tomó el relevo el de globalización (Kellner, 2002). Aunque suele considerarse que el profesor de la Escuela de Negocios de Harvard Theodore Levitt, en su artículo "La globalización de los mercados" (1983), acuñó el término, este puede rastrearse más atrás (Hamilton, 2009).…”