ABSTRACT
Although the concept of globalization has become widely diffused only since the 1980s, particularly following Levitt’s (1983) paper on the globalization of markets, the underlying concept can be traced back to at least 1960 when McLuhan (1960) coined the term ‘global village’ to capture the impact of new communications technologies on social and cultural life. Subsequently, the idea suffused broad reaches of popular communication as well as of academe. Yet while Chesnais’ claim that ‘globalization is largely a term coined by journalists and politicians … [which] has been thrust on the academic community’ (1993: 12) is difficult to sustain in the face of the voluminous academic literature on the subject, much of this material is stereotypical and exaggerated. Quite often, globalization is represented not so much as a historical tendency or a complex process, but as an outcome: a ‘new order’. How often do we read that, in the face of the unstoppable juggernaut of globalization, nation-states will inexorably disappear (if they have not done so already), that homogenization of markets, consumer tastes and cultures is inevitable (if it has not happened already), that a small number of gigantic global firms will, or do, control the global economy through an internalized global production system? Part of the problem is that too much of the current debate proceeds on the basis of very loose, often contradictory and self-serving, definitions. Most writers either dp not bother to define globalization at all, or carelessly use the term interchangeably with ‘internationalization’. But they are not the same thing (Dicken, 1992). Definitions are not mere semantic peccadilloes; they remain crucial not least because they caution against the kind of caricaturing of globalization which has become all too common.
