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Globalization is everywhere. States, economies, and societies are
increasingly integrated. Flows of goods, capital, humans, and cultural
objects now link all of us in a global integrated web (Mittelman 1997,
Hirst and Thompson, 1996). The development of international trade has had
the most immediate (or most visible) consequence, but money, in and of
itself, has come to play an arguably even larger role than does the
transfer of material goods. Labor, while still subject to much greater
control than capital, moves transnationally while tourism now involves an
estimated 600 million international travelers a year. Finally, the
ubiquity of CNN is already a cliché, and entertainment industry budgets
now make calculations on the basis of a global market.
There is little doubt that we are undergoing a process of
compression of international time and space; no country, economy, or
society can expect to remain an island. The separation of production and
consumption that is the heart of the market economy appears to have
reached its zenith. Political structures are not immune to apparently
overwhelming forces of globalization; even the most powerful states
tremble before the vagaries of the international market. Globalization is
not just another "buzz-word" (globaloney?), but very much a real
and
significant phenomenon.
Excerpt from Who Calls Whom? Global Hierarchies and
Telephone Networks
by Hugh Louch, Eszter Hargittai, and Miguel Angel Centeno
Princeton University
Forthcoming 1999. The Washington Quarterly.
Mittelman, James H. 1996. "How Does Globalization
Really
Work".
In James H. Mittelman, ed., Globalization: Critical
Reflections.
Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers
Hirst, Paul and Grahame Thompson. 1996. Globalization in Question.
London: Polity Press.
Mapping
The Global
Web is a project
initiated by Professor Miguel
Angel Centeno of Princeton
University's
Sociology
Department and is being pursued in collaboration with Eszter
Hargittai of the same department and numerous participants.
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