ABSTRACT
The term ‘globalization’, so evocative of our present age, acquired greater circulation with the 1990s, a decade marked by such epochal events as the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the rise of China to superpower status. The most readily accessible image of globalization has come from the economic arena, with the unprecedented speed and agility of technological changes led by the telecommunications revolution producing a common vocabulary of capital exchanges in the world market. It is now possible for financial trading to continue round the clock; and although the worldwide internet is a relatively recent development,1 it has become synonymous with globalization with a far-reaching impact on the transformation of China and India following the integration of these countries into the economic structures of global capital. There has been outsourcing of production and manufacturing to Asia on a massive scale unimaginable even thirty years ago. Unlike the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the first industrial revolution, smoke stacks and factories have disappeared from sight in the metropolitan centres of North America and Western Europe. There is a recognizable convergence of consumption patterns of elites all over the world, and language usage increasingly converges through the use of the internet and social
media. All these developments can be subsumed as the outcomes of globalization in which, along with the multiplication of futuristic models of ‘a post-industrial world’ (which has also meant a postlabour union world), has championed the motto has become ‘free market values’.
