Globalisation
Globalisation refers to the increasing interconnectedness and interdependence of countries and people worldwide, driven by advancements in technology, communication, and trade. It involves the flow of goods, services, capital, and information across national borders, leading to a more integrated global economy and cultural exchange. This phenomenon has significant impacts on various aspects of human life, including economics, politics, and the environment.
8 Key excerpts on "Globalisation"
eBook - ePub- William P. Anderson(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Perhaps most importantly, cheaper transportation and better communication make it easier for firms to exploit spatial differentiation at a global scale. These issues will be addressed in detail later, but at the outset some basic definitions are needed. The term “globalization” seems to have as many definitions as there are books and articles written about it. For the moment, let’s settle for a very simple definition of globalization as the integration of economic activity at a global scale. Of course, this begs the question: what do we mean by integration? International trade and foreign direct investment are both forms of economic integration that can be measured in terms of flows of goods or funds between nations. In these cases, production is still conducted within national borders. At a deeper level of integration, the production process itself involves tasks performed by different actors at different locations around the globe who are closely coordinated via information and communications networks. As we will see, people from a dozen or more countries may have been involved in the design, production, distribution and marketing of the shirt you are wearing right now. It is this more complex type of integration that most people have in mind when they speak of globalization. To make this distinction clear, we will use the term internationalization to refer to integration across national borders that involves goods that are produced in a single country but sold in to an international market. Internationalization is not distinct from globalization; rather, it is a limited form of globalization. The knowledge economy is not quite so easily defined. A precise definition, including an explanation of the distinction between information and knowledge, is deferred until chapter 26...
eBook - ePubInternational Business Strategy
Theory and Practice
- Peter J Buckley, Pervez Ghauri, Peter J Buckley, Pervez Ghauri(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The progress of research in this area depends on inter-disciplinarity and connectivity. Economic geography has a long history (Clark et al., 2000 ; Krugman, 1991, 2000) and is currently enjoying a renaissance (Scott, 2000). The importance of the new geography is attested to by the concern for ‘the new geography of competition’ for mobile investment (Raines, 2003) and the increasingly complex interplay between states, economic regional blocs such as the EU and subnational regions such as states in the USA and semi-autonomous regions such as Catalonia or Scotland (Oxelheim and Ghauri, 2003 ; Phelps and Alden, 1999 ; Phelps and Rains, 2003). Economic geographers have made many significant contributions to the analysis of Globalisation that can, with profit, be noted by international business scholars. Regional integration and the division of world markets into trade and investment blocs have been extensively analysed by geographers (for summaries on Asia, North America and Europe, see Abo, 2000 ; Holmes, 2000 ; and Amin, 2000). However, the incorporation of real geographical features such as climate, coastline, river transport, soil quality and terrain has perhaps been underplayed and this represents a real opportunity for future development. This links physical geography and economic development. A research agenda of this kind is proposed by Mellinger et al. (2000) and Buckley and Casson (1991) included ‘geographical factors that influence entrepôt potential’ in their analysis of factors in the long-run economic success of a nation. The links between economic geography and development are also worthy of attention in the literature on ‘spillovers’ from MNEs to the local economy...
eBook - ePubGeofusion 2.0
The Power of Geography in the Economic and Geopolitical World Order
- Norbert Csizmadia, Bence Gáspár(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- PublishDrive(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 2 The Relationship Between Geography and Geopolitics The Interdisciplinary Relationship Between Geography and Geopolitics The place of geography in the system of sciences Geography once referred solely to the description of Earth; however, by the 20th century, it grew out of the descriptive role and integrated a spatial approach at its frontiers, creating its own subdomains. Nowadays a wide range of sciences, especially social sciences, increasingly turn to geography out of necessity nowadays. New ideas are produced with remarkable intensity in the interdisciplinary fields of economics and geography. The central role played by these geographical features in the development of countries and the global economy is increasingly seen as important in mainstream economic thinking. For example, the rise of geoeconomics, which develops at the intersection of geography, geopolitics, and economics, is due to the realization that development is best explained on a global scale by geographical and historical correlations. The main aim of the book Geography: A Global Synthesis by Peter Haggett, a professor emeritus at the University of Bristol, is to present the whole spectrum of geography in a modern approach. According to him, geography has become a synthetizing science that deals with the spatial context, correlation, distribution, and interrelationships of the social, economic, and environmental processes and phenomena that occur on Earth. Geographical synthesis concerns all branches of geography as well as the neighboring disciplines. Among geographical disciplines, a new fault line was opened with the appearance of regional science in the 20th century. Haggett breaks down the study of geography into five topics...
eBook - ePubGlobalization
The Return of Borders to a Borderless World?
- Yale H. Ferguson, Richard W. Mansbach(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...globalization, there is no single, agreed-upon definition of the phenomenon itself. As Thomas Risse suggests, “explanations for its origins as well as its consequences are equally varied.” 18 Again, normative preferences intervene and preclude consensus. “For some,” as Risse declares, “globalization means the internationalization of financial markets and of production networks. Others understand globalization as the erosion of borders and the end of the nation-state as we know it.” 19 Defining globalization might seem to some a nominal task suitable only for introductory texts, yet research agendas are repeatedly confounded by the confusion that flows from defining the concept in different ways. Hence both the range of useful notions and our own definition of globalization must be clear for the analysis that follows to be meaningful. An attractive definition is provided by David Held and his colleagues who declare globalization to be “the widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life, from the cultural to the criminal, the financial to the spiritual.” 20 It consists of the “multiplicity of linkages and interconnections that transcend the nation-state (and by implication the societies) which make up the modern world system.” It “defines a process through which events, decisions, and activities in one part of the world can come to have significant consequences for individuals in quite distant parts of the globe.” 21 The combining of the local and global in this way leads James Rosenau to view the phenomenon as a matter of “distant proximities.” 22 The way in which globalization is conceptualized is surely critical to any assessment of whether the current era is unique in human history, and the comprehensive history of globalization that we provide later bears witness to our own conviction that historical perspective is crucial...
eBook - ePubEconomic Geography
Places, Networks and Flows
- Andrew Wood, Susan Roberts(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Perhaps the most important is that a division of labor indicates a relationship to local and regional economies elsewhere through a set of substantial connections. Some of these connections involve the material flow of goods, money and people while others, such as information flows, are less tangible. As we have already suggested, for many years economic geographers followed a gazetteer or encyclopedia-like approach to studying the economy, categorizing places on the basis of what they produced and tending to view them in relative isolation from one another. While there was a clear recognition that localities and regions served what were often quite distant markets the notion that the fortunes of local economies are intimately connected to one another is a relatively recent one. The interdependence between different local and regional economies provides one of the foundations for what has come to be known as the ‘relational’ approach in economic geography (Bathelt and Glückler 2003). For now we need to do no more than point out that the position of local and regional economies within these broader spatial divisions of labor provides a very useful way of thinking about and accounting for their changing fortunes. Much of the rhetoric surrounding globalization indicates that the conditions of and prospects for local and regional economies are almost entirely determined by ‘external’ influences, meaning forces that operate beyond the local economy. These external influences include a whole range of variables or ‘factors’ including changes in markets and the pattern of demand for goods and services, changes in technology, regulatory changes at scales beyond the local economy and, more generally, the changing relative position of other places, regions and countries. Technological change provides a very common explanation for the rise and fall of local and regional economies and this is largely seen as a general force that operates beyond any single local economy...
eBook - ePub- Barrie Axford(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...First is the very impulse to think globally. In a more recent review of state-of-the-art political geography, Kevin Cox and his co-authors (2008) refer to the ways in which the work of Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein has influenced the writing of political geographers such as Peter Taylor (1994; Flint and Taylor, 2007; Dicken et al., 2001). For Taylor, relations between cities and localities, the state system and the global economy, reveal how the modern world works. The theme of complex relationality between actors and institutions situated at different spatial scales is central to the geography of globalization and constitutes the second emergent theme in current research. Perhaps the main problematic in such work is the ‘decoupling of power and the state’ (Helmig and Kessler, 2007, 240). When ‘political spaces no longer match geographical spaces’, the ‘banal statism’ of conventional IR theory and international law is more difficult to sustain (Kuus and Agnew, 2008, 98). The ramifications of this insight resonate through the work of many international or transnational economic and political geographers (Sassen, 2006; Agnew, 1994; 2005; O’Tuathail, 2003), and research in political geography converges markedly with findings from work in other disciplines. Third, and as a case in point, Low draws attention to the impact of a different kind of critical geo-politics heavily influenced by political theory, continental philosophy and especially critical theory, not least in the variants used by some IR theorists like R. J. B. Walker (1992), Hardt and Negri (2000; 2004; 2009), James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro (1989)...
eBook - ePubRegional Geography (RLE Social & Cultural Geography)
Current Developments and Future Prospects
- Ron Johnston, Joost Hauer, G. Hoekveld(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In short, it focuses attention upon the significance of social interaction which must be geographical and which takes place continuously up and down the continuum of geographical space. Not only does regional enquiry address an inherent ontological feature of the social world, it also enables an appreciation of the significance of uneven development. The ‘territorial production complexes’ (Scott and Storper 1986:310), which are produced by this geographically-informed process of development, frame the processes of both urban and regional development and provide the material underpinning of the dynamics of international relations. Under these circumstances regional geography is not merely of analytical significance but of paramount emancipatory importance. This leads to a final point. We live at a time when the capitalist world is passing through a crucial divide: from modernism to post-modernism; from the fourth to the fifth Kondratiev; from Fordism to neo-Fordism; through The Second Industrial Divide (Piore and Sabel 1984) when The End of Organized Capitalism (Lash and Urry 1987) is nigh; and from Fordist to flexible accumulation. Whatever the true form of the transition, it implies a much greater sensitivity and responsiveness to geography on the part of capital. Indeed it could be argued that the restructuring of the social relations of production and the spatial implications of the new technology place (regional) geography at the heart of the current transition in a way far less contingent than is suggested by Neil Smith. Certainly, not only is the geography of the current transformation remarkably varied and dynamic, but geographical restructuring is a centrally important feature of it...
eBook - ePubEveryday Europe
Social Transnationalism in an Unsettled Continent
- Recchi, Ettore, Favell, Adrian(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Policy Press(Publisher)
...one Cartographies of social transnationalism Mike Savage, Niall Cunningham, David Reimer and Adrian Favell Introduction Early Globalisation theorists (Harvey 1989; Giddens 1991; Beck 2000) emphasised the significance of ‘time–space compression’ – the extent to which greater and easier mobility reduced the significance of local face-to-face ties. Others articulated a new social and spatial division between global elites and local masses (Castells 2000; Bauman 1998), a theme which rehearsed and gave new bite to the familiar distinction between sedentary ‘locals’ and mobile ‘cosmopolitans’, which had long been observed in the sociology and anthropology of community (Merton 1957; Watson 1964). These trends were also seen by sociologists embracing the mobilities turn (Urry 2000), as articulating the declining significance of borders, and fuelled the critique of ‘methodological nationalism’ which has gathered pace over the past two decades (Beck and Sznaider 2006). This chapter recognises the power of these trends, and the extent and significance of mundane, or what we call ‘everyday’ mobilities, of people, objects and information in the contemporary world. At the same time, it seeks to direct these observations onto a more balanced terrain in which we can see how such forms of mobility allow the consolidation of distinctive territorial and social identities. This recognition also has a long history, dating back to arguments according to which Globalisation led not to the eradication of the local, but to ‘glocalisation’, as global processes acted to construct new kinds of local entities (Robertson 1995)...
