ABSTRACT
Globalisation is not a new phenomenon. The international exchange of markets, skills, knowledge and cultures has been occurring for millennia (Little and Green 2009). However, the contemporary unprecedented information and communications technology revolution has transformed the ways that knowledge and skills are produced, assessed and disseminated (Coolahan 2002). The sheer rapidity of change and its accumulated effects have also altered the character of work and many features of contemporary living in a fundamental way (Held et al. 1999; Coolahan 2002; Little and Green 2009). The latest phase of globalisation is thus ‘qualitatively distinct’ (Little and Green 2009: 166). Friedman (2005) pronounces that the world is now flat in the third wave of globalisation and that the ‘flat-world platform’ is ‘enabling, empowering, and enjoining individuals and small groups to go global so easily and so seamlessly’:
Globalization 3.0 [phase3] makes it possible for so many more people to plug in and play, and you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part.
(Friedman 2005: 11)