ABSTRACT
The term ‘globalisation’ entered into the English language in the past 25 years, although for certain social policy commentators (e.g. Hirst and Thompson, 1999) globalisation is scarcely a new phenomenon, as distinct from the international economy, which operated at the birth of the twentieth century. Globalisation may be defi ned more for the intensifi cation of supranational connections, and for its penetration into all wakes of life than for its historical novelty. Giddens (2007) views globalisation as a two-way set of procedures, which might most appropriately be characterised by the Internet. George and Wilding (2002, p. 19) defi ne globalisation as: ‘the increasing inter-connectedness of the world through the compression of time and space brought about by advances in knowledge and technology as well as by political events and decisions’.
