ABSTRACT
Two themes of this book are, first, to explore the ways in which globalization is grounded in social action and communication and, second, to argue for the continuing relevance of engagement with the central ideas in classical sociological theory. This chapter develops these with reference to global inequalities and their consequences. Between the 1960s and the 1980s debate about the relationship between rich developed and poor ‘developing’ nations was couched in terms of modernization versus dependency and then world systems approaches (see pp.21-4). However, events that took shape during the 1980s and 1990s radically shifted the terms of debate and significantly enhanced the process of economic globalization (Babb 2005). In the wake of the Third World debt crisis and the collapse of the post-war Bretton Woods regulatory order, World Bank and IMF policy was informed by neo-liberal ideology that insisted that it was only through liberating market forces that poor countries could ‘catch up’ with the developed world. The so-called ‘Washington consensus’ shared by the US Administration, the World Bank and the IMF held that developing countries should be
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given financial support only in return for conditions that generally involved reducing inflation, slashing public spending and deregulating economic activity. One major manifestation of this belief was structural adjustment lending programmes that insisted on privatization, marketization and (trade) liberalization as conditions of new or restructured loans. This global strategy (that was imposed on postcommunist countries too) opened locales to the impact of global capital to an unprecedented extent and changed the terms of debate about global poverty.
