Globalization Theories: Modernization, Systems, Society

• Globalization is the increasing interconnectedness of people, products, ideas, and places.
• Globalization increases interconnectedness through physical connections, spatial-temporal relations, and cognitive dissemination of ideas and culture.
• Globalization and global inequality are interrelated.
• A neoliberal argument that market growth achieves social development has been critiqued for resulting in income inequality.

3 Main Theories of Globalization/Global Inequality:

• Modernization Theory
• World Systems Theory
• World Society Theory

Modernization Theory:

• Focuses on how societies develop through a set of stages.
• Seeks to isolate the features that predict societal progression.
• Internal features like economic, social, and cultural systems either help or hinder development.
• Encourages countries to modernize in the ways Western societies have.

Rostow's Stages of Modernization:

• Traditional Societies: emphasize history, tradition, and spirituality, lacking material abundance.
• Increased demand for materials arises as non-material abundance exists, traditional societies struggle to keep up, leading to a push for productivity and a shift to cash crops.
• Economic Takeoff: Manufacturing increases and becomes more productive
• Societies produce goods for domestic use and export.
• Markets emerge as people trade goods; individualism rises, undermining family ties.
• Technological Maturity: All sectors of society become involved in market production, international trade rises.
• Economies become diversified as more goods/services are offered.
• Cities grow as people leave rural homes for urban jobs/opportunities.
• Mass Consumption: Stimulated by mass production.
• Consumers have more disposable income, leading to increased consumption.
• Industrialization is presented as the path out of poverty, with countries that do not industrialize expected to stagnate.
• Modernization is criticized because it is ethnocentric because countries are measured against Western standards.
• It fails to acknowledge industrialized nations colonized other countries.

What is Development:

• A multifaceted process involving individual and social well-being and economic and environmental capacities.
• Individual Level: Skills, freedom, creativity
• Individual development is tied to the state of society
• Social Level: capacity to regulate relationships and human needs
• Economically: Capacity for dealing with the environment
• Economic development does not necessarily mean social development
• There is a contradiction between concentration of wealth and underdevelopment of human needs

What is Underdevelopment:

• Expresses relationship of exploitation of one country by another
• Independently developing societies taken over by capitalist powers
• Exporting surplus of their production deprives them of their resources
• Underdeveloped countries are becoming more underdeveloped when compared to the world's great powers

World Systems Theory:

• Developed by Wallerstein as a critique of Modernization Theory.
• Highlights inherent inequality in globalization/global development.
• The development of the North is sustained by the underdevelopment in the South.
• The world is based on transnational division of labor between:
  • Core countries
  • Semi-Periphery countries
  • Periphery countries
• Core Countries: most powerful nations and skilled labor that concentrates of manufacturing.
• There is a power based on economic diversification/high industrialization
• Periphery Countries: least powerful countries. Concentrate on extracting raw materials for exports. Mainly in Africa and Latin America
• Semi-Periphery Countries: Combines the characteristics of both core and periphery countries moving towards industrialization and economic diversification. Canada was once a semi-periphery.
• Based on a Marxist principle: Core countries are capitalists that benefit from the labor of periphery countries.
• Companies in core take resources from periphery
• Core exploits labour power of periphery countries and pay low wages
• Core pollutes environments of periphery countries and deplete their resources
• Core sells finished products back to workers in the periphery countries and bring profits back to core

Unequal trade relations create problems for the periphery countries:

• Periphery is pressured to produce a smaller variety of cash crops for export
• Periphery urged to extract natural resources and export to core, destroying local environments
• Unequal trade relations create low wage/skill jobs in periphery while protecting high wage/skill jobs for the core
• Criticism of WST: Foreign trade has benefited some countries
• Core countries have the power to make decisions over which product will be produced and where within the world system.
• Products are assigned to periphery countries that are necessary for the development of capitalism.
• In this sense, these countries are located in capitalism where they are locked in a relation of dependence
• The production of export products produces an illusion of growth

World Society Theory:

• Focuses on comparative education research done in the 1970s.
• Explains global change as the consequence of emerging global institutions/world culture following WW2.
• Developed by John W. Meyers; argues countries are becoming increasingly similar
• Enlightenment/rationality influenced individuals/nations to adopt similar cultural frames.
• Lacks critical analysis on who gains from this similarity

Global Inequality:

• Income inequality that exists within countries and between countries.
• Gini Index: Measures global inequality from 1-10 (1 being maximum inequality).
• Inequality in society has serious implications like more crime, isolation, and anxiety.

3 Main Strategies for Addressing Global Inequality:

• Development Assistance

• Debt Relief

• Micro-Financing

• Development Assistance: Financial aid given by governments/charitable organizations.

• Primary strategy is to reduce global poverty with some success.

• Debt Relief: Many developing nations are burdened with debts.

• When money goes to debt repayment, there's less money to spend on social programs.

• Micro-Financing: Provision of small loans to individuals/small businesses who lack access.

• Helps lift individuals/families/communities out of poverty by providing small amounts of start up capital for entrepreneur projects.

• Fair Trade: Refers to commodities produced with social/environmental investments to meet standards demanded by certifications.

Engineering Crisis:

• IMF's policies are designed to ensure and manage a permanent debt crisis, not erase debt.
• "the IMF began to respond to requests for short-term bridge financing by demanding that countries radically change their domestic economic policies as a condition for approval".
• "privatise the economy, including the state sector; commodify areas of human life that had up to that point been in the public domain; terminate any government deficit financing; and dissolve any barriers on foreign capital investment and trade (such as subsidies and tariffs)."
• Countries go into debt because they rely on borrowing to conduct capital improvements
• IMF arrives and informs the finance ministries that government spending for education, healthcare, and other social development projects must be cut in order to prioritise payments to bondholders and governments
• To pay the debt servicing on these loans, the poorer nations cut their government spending, thereby impoverishing their people further, and export more of their cheapened raw materials
• the poorer nations must continue to cut their social spending, ramp up their sales of raw materials and public assets, and borrow more money from external private and governmental sources.

Race, Ethnicity, and Indigenous People

• 1968 Sanitation Worker Strike: Martin Luther King was standing with the strike when he was assassinated.
• It was a fight for social justice and economic inequality
• Black workers were not able to unionize, but the city didn't recognize their union as legitimate
• Two sanitation workers were crushed to death by a garbage compactor, city didn't replace defective equipment
• Strike ended but future strikes were necessary for City of Memphis to honor the agreement

Notable Accomplishments of Civil Rights Movement:

• NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)
• 1954: Brown vs Board of Education (US Court ruled segregation in school was unconstitutional)
• 1955: Rosa Parks bus boycott
• 1960: Greensboro 4 and Sit in Movement: African american students sat in 'white only' counter
• 1961: Freedom Rides:
• 1963: Birmingham Demonstrations: Campaign launched by MLK to undermine the city's system of racial segregation.
• 1963: March on Washington: Demonstrations of 1963 culmination. Protest civil right abuses and employment discrimination
• 1964: Civil Rights Act: authorized federal government to prevent racial discrimination in employment
• 1967: Loving v. Virginia: Law prohibiting interracial marriage deemed unconstitutional

Trump's Assault on Civil Rights Movement:

• DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) are frameworks in the US to promote fair treatment of all groups, specifically those who have been historically marginalized
• Based on racist assumptions regarding merit against inclusive requirements
• Trump also scrapped 'Clintons Rule' which requires agencies to incorporate environmental justice policies into their mission
• RACE: Social distinction made on perceived physical/biological differences
• ETHNICITY: Refers to differences between people rooted in culture/language/religion/etc

Essentialism

• Tendency to see the ideas of race/ethnicity as permanent/natural category
• Some inherent characteristic makes a person part of a specific race/ethnic group
• Essentialism reduces identity to group membership

Social Construction:

• race/ethnicity are not natural; created within human society
• Within group differences are greater than between group differences
• All of humanity is 99.9% genetically similar
• However social construction of race has real consequences for individuals and groups

The Thomas Principle:

• The idea that social constructions have real consequences
• Racism is a real consequence of our socially constructed ideas about race
• Racism extends beyond excluding or rejecting the other, to dehumanising the other
• Social classes are divided politically/culturally/ideologically/economically in society
• Marxists scholars argue capitalism involves creation of an international division of labor that's made up of class/ethnic hierarchies
• Basically race becomes an important category when the question of power is involved
• Negative attitude towards someone based solely on their membership in a group
• Situations of cooperation between groups would reduce prejudice

Social Inequality and Indigenous People

• Structural logic of the use of wealth to maintain processes of enrichment
• Unequal right to life
• Unequal differentiation based on perceived physical appearance
• There are 663 First Nations in Canada, including various languages/cultures/traditions
• Royal Proclamation of 1763: Recognized First nations as sovereign over their own people
• Led to treaty making across the country
• Indian Act of 1876: Gave Canadian government power to define regulation of their way of life
• RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS: 150,000 children forced to leave. Designed to re-socialize Indigenous children

Indigenous Peoples in Canada

• FN only legally allowed to vote in federal elections in 1960; 1970 in Quebec
• First Nation/Metis/Inuit only make 73% of the national average -Poverty rates higher for First Nations; with child poverty rates 2-3 times higher

Gender at the Intersections

• Sex: Biological identity divided into main categories of male or female
• Gender: Social concept referring to an array of social patterns/behaviors categorizing men and women
• Intersex: People born with body characteristics of both genders
• Gender Roles: One set of roles we perform in society
• Performativity: Term developed by Judith Butler
• Captures idea that gender is created and sustained through interactions with others

Cost of Masculinity:

• Concept developed by Michael Messner
• Refers to how ideas about normal masculinity are harmful to men
• The social institution is highly gendered
• WORK IS GENDERED IN 2 MAIN WAYS:
  • Gender concentration in specific kinds of work
  • Gendered-imbued meaning in the definition of work
• The Double Shift: Women who work outside the home for money and inside on unpaid tasks
• This imbalance is due to our traditional understandings of gender roles

Sexuality:

• Refers to feelings of sexual attraction and behaviors related to them
• Ideas about sexuality have changed considerably over time
• Change reflects an increase in openness to diversity of sexual behaviors
• ALFRED KINSEY: First systematic study of sexuality (1948;1953)
• Homophobia: Set of negative attitudes/beliefs about individuals who are LGBT
• Feminism: Concerned with equality between men and women
• Intersectionalitiy: The study of how various dimensions of inequality can combine

The Media

• MEDIA: refers to the technological processes that facilitate communication between a sender and a receiver
• Mass Media: Sending a message from one source to multiple people
• Modern society has many kinds of mass media forms
• MEDIA: ‘The medium is the message' -Marshall McLuhan
• Increasing density referred to as 'corporate concentration' of media ownership
• Media are increasingly owned/controlled by fewer huge corporations/conglomerates

Violence and the Media

• Prevalence of violence in contemporary medias a significant concern for social function
• SOCIAL MEDIA: Used mainly for interaction and fulfilling important social functions
• More and more people seeking companionship through social media

The Family and Intimate Relationships

• Families: Groups of people related by birth, affinity, or cohabitation
• Marriage: Legal union between two people, allowing them to live together
• Nuclear Family: Two adults living with one or more children
• FIVE MAIN WAYS MARRIAGE IS BECOMING DEINSTITUTIONALIZED
• Fewer people are getting married, choosing to remain single or cohabitate
• The role individuals in couples play in modern society are increasingly questioned
• Norms surrounding children are changing
• Divorce rates in society are rising
• Diversity in forms of marriage are rising

Types of Marriage

• Institutional Marriages: Way to bind larger families and communities
• Companionate Marriages: Based on bonds of sentiment, friendship, sexual ties
• Individualized Marriages: Each spouses satisfaction is the focus; individualistic

Theorizing the Family

• STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONALISM: Focuses on how family functions to create stability/order in society
  • Families perform wide variety of roles; FOUR MAIN CATEGORIES
• CONFLICT THEORY: Approach concerned with the unequal distribution of resources
• Sees the family as a source of a wide variety of conflicts -FEMINIST/CONFLICT THEORY: See the family as an arena for gender based conflict