A Globalizing World
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Globalization has become one of those "buzzwords" that means many different things to many
different people. And it has become something of a banal cliché to point out what is increasingly
obvious to most people: that there is a growing degree of interaction between different regions
and localities throughout the world. We hear a lot about globalization these days. We hear that
it's a bad thing, that it's a good thing, that it's inevitable, that it's overstated. But what
does globalization really mean to you personally? How is your life related to globalization?
The units in "A Globalizing World" seek to move beyond what is most obvious about globalization
in a general sense to introduce some of the ways that you might understand how globalization
relates directly to you.
The units also explore the geographer's perspective on globalization. In World Regional
Geography, globalization is about the ways different regions and localities interact with
each other, and how these interactions create change. At least six different types of
interaction between regions and localities can be identified: 1) Production systems in which
different regions specialize in different parts of the production process; this type of
interaction has also been called the International Division of Labor. 2) Financial systems
in which money increasingly moves across international borders, sometimes through the electronic
buying and selling of currencies, or through the private investment of capital from one country
to another. 3) New technology systems that enable communication and travel between regions and
localities, such as telecommunications infrastructure, satellites, and increasingly cheap and
accessible air travel. 4) Market systems in which the same goods and services are sold in an
ever-growing number of regional and local markets. 5) Transnational corporations which have
the power to coordinate and control operations in more than one country. And 6) Political
and economic institutions that reach beyond any one country though international agreements
and systems of governance, such as the European Union or the Association of South East Asian
Nations.
The units in "A Globalizing World" not only introduce specific examples of most of these types
of interactions, but emphasize the social and cultural implications of these interactions -
that is, the changes that are experienced by people in the localities themselves. Our exploration
of these local and regional implications of globalization is organized around several key themes:
the geography of breakfast, the debate over free trade and "sweatshop" labor, the relationship
between disease and globalization, and the debate over cultural change and "McDonaldization."
The Geography of Breakfast
Whatever you eat or drink for breakfast, the inescapable fact is
that your day begins with globalization. Your breakfast is the outcome of a dizzying array of
spatial relationship and interactions, and the systems that bring coffee and bananas to your
breakfast table are much more complicated than most of us realize. In these units we examine
the powerful role played by large corporate coffee buyers like Starbucks in the livelihoods
of Central American coffee producers (Chapter 3), and we take a detailed look at the "banana
trade war" that occurred between the EU and the United States (Chapter 4). While thinking
about Starbucks and coffee, you may also wish to look at the case of Starbucks in Beijing's
Forbidden City (Chapter 9), a unit which raises further questions about the cultural implications
of global marketing systems.
The Sweatshop Debate
One particularly contentious aspect of international production systems
is the fact that while the internationalization of production has allowed prices for many
consumer products to remain very low, much of the production occurs in conditions that most
of us would find intolerable. Companies in the United States and other major consumer markets
increasingly subcontract production to factories where labor costs are low and where standards
for the safety and livelihoods of workers, and the environment, are often much lower than in
the United States. This has brought about a multifaceted debate over the rights of workers in
places like Mexico and China, about whether U.S. companies should do more to safeguard the
safety and livelihoods of those who produce the goods ultimately sold by these companies,
and about whether or not there can be different standards based on the realities of life
in places like Mexico and China. Are "sweatshops" exploitative and harmful to the countries
where they're found or do they offer the best opportunity for alleviating poverty employing
people who would have no job otherwise? We look at the cases of the maquiladora industrial
zone along the U.S.-Mexico border, and Chinese sweatshops, where the difficulties of
independent monitoring is also explored.
Globalization and Disease
The increasing frequency and volume of international travel means
that the global impact of epidemics and contagions has also increased. The extent to which
regions and localities are plugged into global networks of interaction is also the extent to
which they open themselves to the vulnerabilities of new diseases carried along the networks
of travel that link localities together. There is nothing new about the new vulnerabilities
to disease brought by globalization, of course. European colonization in North and South
American brought with it devastating diseases that depleted and weakened indigenous populations,
and the devastating Spanish Influenza epidemic of the early twentieth century was also the result
of new interactions between once-isolated regions of the world. The SARS epidemic that spread
through East Asia and parts of Europe and North America offers an interesting contemporary case
in the globalization of disease. Most importantly, it offers a study of the mutual vulnerabilities
that globalization creates between regions.
Is Globalization McDonaldization?
One significant theme within the topic of "A Globalizing
World" is the debate over whether the increasing interactions between regions and localities
is producing a world of sameness, a homogenized world where one place is indistinguishable from
the next. From a geographer's perspective there is both evidence of homogenization as well
as evidence of new kinds of difference brought about by changing spatial relationships.
Overall, the units here suggest that the McDonaldization thesis is too simplistic to
capture the complexities of cultural and social change brought about by globalization.
Nor can the process be reduced to one of "Westernization." The units look at the cultural
politics of globalization in Islamic countries, among Hindu nationalists in India, in the
case of a Starbucks coffee shop in a Chinese heritage site, and in the debate over "Asian
Values" in the globalized societies of Singapore and Malaysia.
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