ABSTRACT
Both the shift from an agrarian economy to an industrialized one characterized by mechanized production and efficiency and the pull of the city have transformed our institutions, including the polity. Globalization is to the twenty-first century what urbanization and industrialization were to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like urbanization and industrialization, globalization also creates and necessitates more interconnectedness and interdependence between geographic areas and artificially created political units. Geographic disparity, where some locations are more influential than others, is one of the political outcomes of globalization (Martin 2007; Robinson 2007). This transformation has not gone unnoticed by sociologists, with a significant increase in research and writing on globalization issues (Hall 2002; Robertson and White 2007). Regardless of whether globalization will continue to dominate the sociological agenda, sociologists are credited with being the first to notice this phenomenon and its effects (Guillén 2001; Robertson and White 2007).
