George Ritzer - Globalization

Specific examples of barriers created by the nation-state involve blocking economic transactions that it regards as not in the national interest. For example, in 2006 the US government blocked a deal in which a Dubai company was to purchase an American company involved in the business of running America’s ports ( Economist 2006: March 10). The government felt that such ownership would be a threat to national security since foreign nationals, perhaps enemies, could acquire information that would allow terrorists easy entrée to the ports. In other examples, the US government blocked a Singapore-based firm from acquiring Qualcomm, a manufacturer of computer chips (Kang and Rappeport 2018), and pressured the Chinese company owning TikTok to sell its US assets (Associated Press 2020). Former President Trump, through separate presidential orders, argued that the deals “threaten to impair the national security of the United States.” In the case of Qualcomm, the move prevented what would have been the largest technology deal in history, and continued an “America first” policy.

However, many of the barriers created by nation-states that we assume are, or can be, successful do not in fact deal with the flows they are supposed to stem. It remains to be seen whether the new wall between Mexico and the US can reduce the flow of undocumented immigrants to the US. Similarly, it is not clear that the wall between Israel and the West Bank will stop the flow of terrorists into Israel during more intense periods of conflict in the Middle East.

More generally, in a study of the confluence of legal and illegal global imports, Nordstrom found that the global flow of illegal goods is almost impossible to stop. For one thing, the illegal is often shipped with, or is even part of, the legal so that stopping one means stopping the other. For another, the global economy would grind to a halt if there really were serious efforts to, for example, search all cargo entering every country in the world. Even holding “up one line of trucks, one train, one ship” ripples through the global supply chain (Nordstrom 2007: 196). Nordstrom estimates the “most sophisticated ports in the world can inspect a maximum of only 5% of the cargo passing through customs,” but even inspecting that much cargo would tax any port and its authorities beyond the limit of its capacities. Global economic gridlock would occur if 5% of cargo was really inspected; a total global economic meltdown would occur if all cargo was inspected.

Nordstrom found that not only do illegal products flow freely across borders, but so do people. She traveled by freighter to and from the US and found that “security does not exist, in fact it cannot exist, in the world today” (Nordstrom 2007: 181). She boarded the freighter and left the US without anyone checking her or stamping her passport and her arrival in Europe was no different: “When I went ashore, I couldn’t even find a person to tell me how to get out of port and into town. No customs, no immigration, no one to even ignore me” (Nordstrom 2007: 187). On both sides of the Atlantic she moved freely among the containers, some of them open, stored onshore.

Corporate organizations, say a multinational corporation like Volkswagen, are devoted to optimizing the flow of their automobiles to all possible markets throughout the world. They also seek to compete with and out-perform other multinational corporations in the automobile business. If they are successful, and Volkswagen has been extremely successful (it has supplanted Toyota as the world’s largest automobile manufacturer), the flow of automobiles from those corporations is greatly reduced, further advantaging the company.

While organizations of many types, including nation-states and corporations serve as structures that can operate against global flows, the fact is that there are signs that many organizations are changing and are themselves becoming more fluid and increasingly open.

One of the roots of this change is open-sourcing and the Internet. The best-known example of open-sourcing is Linux, a free computer-operating system. Anyone in the world with the needed skills can make changes in, and contributions to, it. (The best-known operating systems are produced by Microsoft [now Windows 10]. They cost a great deal and are closed in that only those who work for the company can, at least legally, work on and modify them.) In recent years a traditionally closed organization – IBM – has embraced not only the Linux system, but opened up more and more of its own operations to outside inputs. The Internet has a number of open systems, such as the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia (or wikis more generally). With Wikipedia, (virtually) anyone, anywhere in the world, can contribute to the definition of terms on it. The contrast here is the traditional (and costly) dictionaries (e.g. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary ) and encyclopedias written by selected experts ( Encyclopedia Britannica ) are closed to contributions from anyone else.

However, in spite of this new openness, most organizations and systems remain closed to various flows. This usually benefits (often economically) those in the system and disadvantages those outside the organization. Even with the new open systems, there are structural realities that help some and hinder others. For example, to contribute to Linux or Wikipedia one must have a computer, computer expertise, and access to the Internet (especially high speed access). These inequalities are explored in the next section.

It is important to note that while global flows are increasing, they are not ubiquitous. Rather, global structures direct flows towards some groups and away from others, thereby creating winners and losers within globalization. These various structures serve to differentiate and to subordinate on the basis of social class, race, ethnicity, gender (see Chapter 13and 14), and region of the world (North–South). In fact, these phenomena tend to be interrelated and often reinforce one another. Thus in the disadvantaged South, one is more likely to find large numbers of poor people in the lower social classes, disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities, and women who are discriminated against on the basis of gender (Bose 2015). As a result, various efforts by the North to subordinate the South serve to further disadvantage people there in all of those categories. Furthermore, these categories overlap – a black female who is a member of the Ibo peoples in Africa is likely to be in a lower social class. (And there is a similar overlap among those who are advantaged – for example, white, upper-class, male Anglo-Saxons in Europe and North America.)

To better understand how advantaged and disadvantaged positions work within globalization, we draw upon another important concept. Intersectionalityis the idea that members of any given group are affected by their positions within multiple systems of inequality (Chow et al. 2011; Collins and Bilge 2016). This concept was developed, at least initially, to deal with the situation confronting women as an oppressed group with women of color arguing that women’s experiences are not all the same; they vary by race, class, etc. (McKinzie and Richards 2019). The concept, therefore, is extended to all social groups. Group members are seen as being enmeshed in a “matrix of oppression” that involves their gender, race, ethnic group, sexual orientation, age, social class, and the part of the globe (North or South) in which they live. All of these variables can be seen as “vectors of oppression” with people simultaneously occupying dominant and oppressed positions.

The experience of a member of any oppressed group is not simply additive, but the disadvantages change, as do their effects, based on the context and other positions that they occupy (McKinzie and Richards 2019). For example, being a black woman in the UK is different from being a black man in the UK, and the experiences of a black working-class woman differ from those of a black upper-middle class woman. The experiences of those individuals would also differ if they were in Brazil, rather than the UK. With each different combination of identities and experiences, the vectors of oppression change. But virtually all people (including you!) occupy both dominant and oppressed positions, and such knowledge can be used to understand the advantages and disadvantages of majority/minority groups other than your own.