George Ritzer - Globalization

The perspective adopted in this book on the current global age is most in accord with this focus on broader changes in the last half of the twentieth century. While all of the other perspectives deal with global processes, they were far more limited in geographic scope and far less extensive and intensive than the global processes that took off in the late twentieth century. Thus the perspective adopted here is that globalization is a relatively recent development with its major points of origin occurring after the close of WW II.

While we can discuss globalization in general terms, such a discussion obscures the important fact that there are, as pointed out earlier, various types of globalization – various globalization s – that need to be identified and the relationships among and between them teased out (Hoffman 2002). The following are some of the major types of globalization that will be dealt with in this book.

As we’ve seen, to many observers, economic globalization is globalization. While economic globalization is certainly of great importance, perhaps of greatest importance, there are other important types of globalization (see below).

While heavily influenced by economic globalization, political globalization cannot be reduced to economics alone. For example, US wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 certainly had an economic motivation (for example, protecting the supply of Middle East oil, perhaps even gaining more control over Iraq’s oil), but there were many other factors (misguided fears of “weapons of mass destruction” and of al-Qaeda in Iraq, demonization of Islam, and so on).

Those who study political globalizationtend to think in terms of international relations. However, the key contribution of globalization studies in this domain is to encompass, but look beyond, international relations to other kinds of political relations that exist at a global level (So 2012). Examples include those involving global organizations, especially the United Nations (UN), relations between regions and cities that bypass the nation-states in which they exist, and more specific phenomena such as terrorist organizations (e.g. al-Qaeda and ISIS) that are not based in, or associated with, any particular nation-state; they are “state-less.” Indeed, statelessness and the increasing problems associated with it (e.g. in the tribal territories of Pakistan, Syria, in several countries in Africa [e.g. Somalia, Congo] which seem to have a government in name only) are of increasing global interest and concern.

There is a wide variety of cultural flows that exist, at least in part, independently of the other major forms of globalization (Nederveen Pieterse 2015). Examples include food (Italian, Chinese, Indian, etc.), television offerings (BBC and al-Hurra), movies (from Hollywood and Bollywood), museum shows, touring rock and classical music performances, and so on. Of course, these forms of cultural globalizationcannot be divorced totally from the other major forms of globalization. They often have roots in particular nation-states (e.g. India’s Bollywood) and their global movement may lead to political outcries in various countries (the hostility to American-style fast food among at least some in France, Italy, and elsewhere). More importantly, all of these forms of cultural globalization are affected by economic considerations (e.g. whether or not they can at least earn back their expenses, if not show a profit, in other geographic locales) and have economic consequences (the continued production of new cultural offerings depends upon previous ones showing a profit, or at least not losing money).

Most of the world’s religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc.) are global in scope and often seek to extend their global influence (Abrutyn 2012). For example, Catholicism, with about 1.3 billion adherents, is a global operation run from the Vatican. There are Catholics, Catholic churches, and Catholic priests in most parts of the world and all sorts of information flows to and from them and the Vatican. Many other religions, both large and small, are, or seek to be, global in scope and work toward that through proselytizing throughout the world, sending missionaries, and opening religious centers (churches, mosques, synagogues, and so on). Great attention these days is devoted to the global spread of Islam, especially Islamic fundamentalism, although it has been a globalizing religion since its creation in the seventh century (it spread through the Middle East, northern Africa, and as far as Spain) (Vertigans and Sutton 2002).

Science today is inherently a global enterprise as its knowledge base is formed by inputs from many parts of the world and that knowledge is disseminated virtually everywhere (Drori 2012). This has been true for quite some time (e.g. work on atomic and sub-atomic theory in the first half of the twentieth century), but has been made much easier by various technological advances. The advent of the Internet was of particular importance in enhancing the global character and reach of science. Many scientific journals are now online and can be accessed by scientists in most parts of the world. Furthermore, many scientists no longer wait for journals to accept and publish their articles; they now publish their work online through a variety of outlets. Such work, often in its early stages, can be read by scientists everywhere. It can affect their own work almost instantaneously, or they can offer rapid feedback or corrections to the original author(s) who can quickly revise a work and publish the revised paper online. To take one other example, large if not massive collaborations among scientists around the world are now much more likely because of the Internet and video conferencing. Science curriculum has become increasingly global as well (Stacey et al. 2018).

Health and medicine have been increasingly globalized in many different ways (Adams et al. 2019; Noack 2019). Diseases, most notably COVID-19, can and do proliferate globally. There is also the global spread of medical knowledge and expertise as well as technologies useful in diagnosing and treating various diseases. Although cultural differences to health and medicine persist and geopolitics between North and South shape such flows, medical knowledge is increasingly disseminated rapidly around the world. Global organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) seek to address these issues, just as they did with fighting the coronavirus. The WHO was important in tracking its global spread, disseminating medical knowledge about the disease, and coordinating the global response.

Sport, too, has been globalized in various ways (Andrews and Mower 2012; Giulianotti and Numerato 2018). We have already touched on a few of the major organizations involved in the globalization of sport; other sports that are quite global in reach are professional tennis and golf. The global media, especially television, have played a key role in the globalization of sport and creating global interest in, and an audience for, sport.

Higher education has spread through increasing areas of the world, with enrollments increasing from 100 million to 150 million students in only a decade (Altbach et al. 2019). This global spread is even truer of schools of business administration, especially those that offer MBA programs (Clegg and Carter 2007). Recently, American universities have, in effect, been opening “franchises” in various countries, especially the oil-rich Persian Gulf area. Universities are now even graded on various world rankings systems (Luque-Martínez and Faraoni 2019).