Instructional Material for The Contemporary World (GEED 10043) PDF

**Republic of the Philippines** **POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES** **Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs** **Santa Rosa Campus** **INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIAL FOR** **THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD** **(GEED 10043)** **COMPILED BY:** **Dr. DANIEL E. ORENSE** **Faculty** **PUP Santa Rosa Campus** **January 29, 2023** **TABLE OF CONTENTS** ----------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------- ------------------------------------------ ------------------- ---- -- **UNIT 1 -- SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION** Lesson 1 The Promise......... 1 **UNIT 2 -- INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF GLOBALIZATION: MARKET GLOBALISM** Lesson 2 The Five Core Claims of Market Globalism......... 6 **UNIT 3 -- A WORLD OF REGIONS: LOCATING THE GLOBAL SOUTH** Lesson 3 The Starbucks and the Shanty......... 13 Lesson 4 Conceptualizing without Defining......... 14 **UNIT 4 -- A WORLD OF IDEAS: GLOBALIZATION AND MEDIA CREATING THE GLOBAL VILLAGE** -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- -------------------------------------------- ------------------- ---- -- Lesson 5 Evolution of Media and Globalization......... 16 Lesson 6 Global Imaginary and Global Village......... 19 **UNIT 5 -- GLOBAL POPULATION AND MOBILITY: MOBILITY, DIVERSITY, AND COMMUNITY IN THE GLOBAL CITY** Lesson 7 What is "Global City"?......... 21 Lesson 8 Mobility, Migration and the Global City:......... 25 Attracting the "Creative Class" Lesson 9 Diversity and Community in the Global City......... 26 **UNIT 1 SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION** **OVERVIEW:** Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct. What ordinary people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel. **LEARNING OUTCOMES:** After successful completion of this unit, you should be able to: 1. Describe the concept of sociological imagination; and 2. Differentiate personal troubles from public issues of social structure. **COURSE MATERIALS:** **Lesson 1. THE PROMISE** Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct. What ordinary people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel. Underlying this sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure of continent-wide societies. The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a person is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a person takes new heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesperson becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar operator; a wife or husband lives alone; a child grows up without a parent. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both. Yet people do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of people they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of individuals and society, of biography and history, of self and world. They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them. Surely it is no wonder. In what period have so many people been so totally exposed at so fast a pace to such earthquakes of change? That Americans have not known such catastrophic changes as have the men and women of other societies is due to historical facts that are now quickly becoming \'merely history.\' The history that now affects every individual is world history. Within this scene and this period, in the course of a single generation, one sixth of humankind is transformed from all that is feudal and backward into all that is modern, advanced, and fearful. Political colonies are freed; new and less visible forms of imperialism installed. Revolutions occur; people feel the intimate grip of new kinds of authority. Totalitarian societies rise, and are smashed to bits - or succeed fabulously. After two centuries of ascendancy, capitalism is shown up as only one way to make society into an industrial apparatus. After two centuries of hope, even formal democracy is restricted to a quite small portion of mankind. Everywhere in the underdeveloped world, ancient ways of life are broken up and vague expectations become urgent demands. Everywhere in the overdeveloped world, the means of authority and of violence become total in scope and bureaucratic in form. Humanity itself now lies before us, the supernation at either pole concentrating its most coordinated and massive efforts upon the preparation of World War Three. The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of people to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values. And which values? Even when they do not panic, people often sense that older ways of feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of moral stasis. Is it any wonder that ordinary people feel they cannot cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted? That they cannot understand the meaning of their epoch for their own lives? That - in defense of selfhood - they become morally insensible, trying to remain altogether private individuals? Is it any wonder that they come to be possessed by a sense of the trap? It is not only information that they need - in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills of reason that they need - although their struggles to acquire these often exhaust their limited moral energy. What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It is this quality, I am going to contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to expect of what may be called the sociological imagination. The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions. Within that welter, the framework of modern society is sought, and within that framework the psychologies of a variety of men and women are formulated. By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues. The first fruit of this imagination - and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it - is the idea that the individual can understand her own experience and gauge her own fate only by locating herself within her period, that she can know her own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in her circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one. We do not know the limits of humans capacities for supreme effort or willing degradation, for agony or glee, for pleasurable brutality or the sweetness of reason. But in our time we have come to know that the limits of \'human nature\' are frighteningly broad. We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of this living, he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove. The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst. It is characteristic of Herbert Spencer - turgid, polysyllabic, comprehensive; of E. A. Ross - graceful, muckraking, upright; of Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim; of the intricate and subtle Karl Mannheim. It is the quality of all that is intellectually excellent in Karl Marx; it is the clue to Thorstein Veblen\'s brilliant and ironic insight, to Joseph Schumpeter\'s many-sided constructions of reality; it is the basis of the psychological sweep of W. E. H. Lecky no less than of the profundity and clarity of Max Weber. And it is the signal of what is best in contemporary studies of people and society. No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey. Whatever the specific problems of the classic social analysts, however limited or however broad the features of social reality they have examined, those who have been imaginatively aware of the promise of their work have consistently asked three sorts of questions: 1. What is the structure of this particular society as a whole? What are its essential components, and how are they related to one another? How does it differ from other varieties of social order? Within it, what is the meaning of any particular feature for its continuance and for its change? 2. Where does this society stand in human history? What are the mechanics by which it is changing? What is its place within and its meaning for the development of humanity as a whole? How does any particular feature we are examining affect, and how is it affected by, the historical period in which it moves? And this period - what are its essential features? How does it differ from other periods? What are its characteristic ways of history-making? 3. What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? And what varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of \`human nature\' are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in this society in this period? And what is the meaning for \'human nature\' of each and every feature of the society we are examining? Whether the point of interest is a great power state or a minor literary mood, a family, a prison, a creed - these are the kinds of questions the best social analysts have asked. They are the intellectual pivots of classic studies of individuals in society - and they are the questions inevitably raised by any mind possessing the sociological imagination. For that imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another - from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self - and to see the relations between the two. Back of its use there is always the urge to know the social and historical meaning of the individual in the society and in the period in which she has her quality and her being. That, in brief, is why it is by means of the sociological imagination that men and women now hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society. In large part, contemporary humanity\'s self-conscious view of itself as at least an outsider, if not a permanent stranger, rests upon an absorbed realization of social relativity and of the transformative power of history. The sociological imagination is the most fruitful form of this self-consciousness. By its use people whose mentalities have swept only a series of limited orbits often come to feel as if suddenly awakened in a house with which they had only supposed themselves to be familiar. Correctly or incorrectly, they often come to feel that they can now provide themselves with adequate summations, cohesive assessments, comprehensive orientations. Older decisions that once appeared sound now seem to them products of a mind unaccountably dense. Their capacity for astonishment is made lively again. They acquire a new way of thinking, they experience a transvaluation of values: in a word, by their reflection and by their sensibility, they realize the cultural meaning of the social sciences. Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between \'the personal troubles of milieu\' and \'the public issues of social structure.\' This distinction is an essential tool of the sociological imagination and a feature of all classic work in social science. *Troubles* occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his or her immediate relations with others; they have to do with one\'s self and with those limited areas of social life of which one is directly and personally aware. Accordingly, the statement and the resolution of troubles properly lie within the individual as a biographical entity and within the scope of one\'s immediate milieu - the social setting that is directly open to her personal experience and to some extent her willful activity. A trouble is a private matter: values cherished by an individual are felt by her to be threatened. *Issues* have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of her inner life. They have to do with the organization of many such milieu into the institutions of an historical society as a whole, with the ways in which various milieux overlap and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of social and historical life. An issue is a public matter: some value cherished by publics is felt to be threatened. Often there is a debate about what that value really is and about what it is that really threatens it. This debate is often without focus if only because it is the very nature of an issue, unlike even widespread trouble, that it cannot very well be defined in terms of the immediate and everyday environments of ordinary people. An issue, in fact, often involves a crisis in institutional arrangements, and often too it involves what Marxists call \'contradictions\' or \'antagonisms.\' In these terms, consider unemployment. When, in a city of 100,000, only one is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the individual, his skills and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million people are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals. Consider war. The personal problem of war, when it occurs, may be how to survive it or how to die in it with honor; how to make money out of it; how to climb into the higher safety of the military apparatus; or how to contribute to the war\'s termination. In short, according to one\'s values, to find a set of milieux and within it to survive the war or make one\'s death in it meaningful. But the structural issues of war have to do with its causes; with what types of people it throws up into command; with its effects upon economic and political, family and religious institutions, with the unorganized irresponsibility of a world of nation-states. Consider marriage. Inside a marriage a man and a woman may experience personal troubles, but when the divorce rate during the first four years of marriage is 250 out of every 1,000 attempts, this is an indication of a structural issue having to do with the institutions of marriage and the family and other institutions that bear upon them. Or consider the metropolis - the horrible, beautiful, ugly, magnificent sprawl of the great city. For many members of the upperclass the personal solution to \'the problem of the city\' is to have an apartment with private garage under it in the heart of the city and forty miles out, a house by Henry Hill, garden by Garrett Eckbo, on a hundred acres of private land. In these two controlled environments - with a small staff at each end and a private helicopter connection - most people could solve many of the problems of personal milieux caused by the facts of the city. But all this, however splendid, does not solve the public issues that the structural fact of the city poses. What should be done with this wonderful monstrosity? Break it all up into scattered units, combining residence and work? Refurbish it as it stands? Or, after evacuation, dynamite it and build new cities according to new plans in new places? What should those plans be? And who is to decide and to accomplish whatever choice is made? These are structural issues; to confront them and to solve them requires us to consider political and economic issues that affect innumerable milieux. In so far as an economy is so arranged that slumps occur, the problem of unemployment becomes incapable of personal solution. In so far as war is inherent in the nation-state system and in the uneven industrialization of the world, the ordinary individual in her restricted milieu will be powerless - with or without psychiatric aid - to solve the troubles this system or lack of system imposes upon him. In so far as the family as an institution turns women into darling little slaves and men into their chief providers and unweaned dependents, the problem of a satisfactory marriage remains incapable of purely private solution. In so far as the overdeveloped megalopolis and the overdeveloped automobile are built-in features of the overdeveloped society, the issues of urban living will not be solved by personal ingenuity and private wealth. What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to look beyond them. And the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutions within which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination. **READINGS** Steger, Manfred. (2014). *The SAGE Handbook of Globalization (Two vols.)*. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills (1959) **ASSESSMENT:** Each group must write a 100-word essay explaining this quotation: "*The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and failure of individual men and women.*" **UNIT 2 INTRODUCTION TO STUDY OF GLOBALIZATION: MARKET** **GLOBALISM** **OVERVIEW:** From its beginnings in the early 1990s, the fledgling field of global studies was dominated by accounts focusing primarily on the economic and technological aspects of globalization. To be sure, a proper recognition of the crucial role of integrating markets and new information technologies should be part of any comprehensive understanding of globalization, but it is equally important to avoid the trap of technological and economic reductionism. 'Market globalism' is a hegemonic system of ideas that makes normative claims about a set of social processes called 'globalization'. It seeks to limit public discussion on the meaning and character of globalization to an agenda of 'things to discuss' that supports particular political objectives. In other words, like all social processes, globalization contains an ideological dimension filled with a range of norms, claims, beliefs, and narratives about the phenomena itself. **LEARNING OUTCOMES:** After successful completion of this unit, you should be able to: 1. Differentiate the competing conceptions of globalization; 2. Identify the underlying philosophies of the varying definitions of globalization; and 3. Agree on a working definition of globalization for the course. **COURSE MATERIALS:** **Lesson 2. THE FIVE CORE CLAIMS OF MARKET GLOBALISM** The term 'globalization' gained in currency in the late 1980s. In part, its conceptual unwieldiness arose from the fact that global flows occur in different physical and mental dimensions, usefully divided by Arjun Appadurai (1996) into 'ethnoscapes', 'technoscapes', 'mediascapes', 'finanscapes', and 'ideoscapes'. The persistence of academic divisions on the subject notwithstanding, the term was associated with specific meanings in public discourse during the 1990s. With the collapse of Soviet-style communism in Eastern Europe, loosely affiliated power elites concentrated in the global north stepped up their ongoing efforts to sell their version of 'globalization' to the public in the ideological form of 'market globalism'. These power elites consisted chiefly of corporate managers, executives of large transnational corporations, corporate lobbyists, high-level military officers, prominent journalists and public relations specialists, intellectuals writing to a large public audience, state bureaucrats and influential politicians. By the mid-1990s, large segments of the population in both the global north and south had accepted globalism\'s core claims, thus internalizing large parts of its overarching neo-liberal framework that advocated the deregulation of markets, the liberalization of trade, the privatization of state-owned enterprises, and, after 9/11, the qualified support of the global 'War on Terror' under US leadership. Indeed, the comprehensive University of Maryland Poll (2004) conducted in 19 countries on four continents found that even after five years of massive, worldwide demonstrations against neoliberal globalization, 55 per cent of the respondents believed that globalization was positive for them and their families, while only 25 per cent said that it was negative. Seeking to make a persuasive case for a new global order based on their beliefs and values, these neo-liberal power elites constructed and disseminated narratives and images that associated the concept of globalization with inexorably expanding free markets. Their efforts at de-contesting the master concept 'globalization' went hand in hand with the rise of market globalism. Ideological 'de-contestation' is a crucial process in the formation of thought systems because it fixes the meanings of the core concepts by arranging them in a pattern or configuration that links them with other concepts in a meaningful way. As Michael Freeden (2003: 54--5) puts it: Effective ideological de-contestation structures -- I refer to them as 'central ideological claims' -- can thus be pictured as simple semantic chains whose conceptual links convey authoritative meanings that facilitate collective decision making. Their interconnected semantic and political roles suggest that control over political language translates directly into political power, that is, the power of deciding 'who gets what, when, and how' (Laswell, 1958). Subjecting to critical discourse analysis the utterances, speeches, and writings of influential advocates of market globalism in the 1990s and 2000s, my previous work on the subject suggests that 'globalization' and 'market' constitute two crucial core concepts of this dominant ideology of our global age (Steger, 2009). *Claim One: Globalization Is About the Liberalization and Global Integration of Markets* This first claim of market globalism is anchored in the neo-liberal ideal of the self-regulating market as the normative basis for a future global order. According to this perspective, the vital functions of the free market -- its rationality and efficiency, as well as its alleged ability to bring about greater social integration and material progress -- can only be realized in a democratic society that values and protects individual freedom. 'Market', of course, also plays an important role in two established ideologies: a libertarian variant of liberalism (often referred to as 'neo-liberalism') inspired by the ideas of Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman, and the late-twentieth century brand of Anglo-American conservatism ('neo-conservatism') associated with the views of Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan. While market globalism borrows heavily from both ideologies, it would be a mistake to reduce it to either. Moreover, neo-liberalism and neoconservatism should not be seen as ideological opposites, for their similarities sometimes outweigh their differences. In general, neo-conservatives agree with neo-liberals on the importance of 'free markets' and 'free trade', but they are much more inclined than the latter to combine their hands-off attitude toward big business with intrusive government action for the regulation of the ordinary citizenry in the name of public security and traditional values. In foreign affairs, neo-conservatives advocate a more assertive and expansive use of both economic and military power, although they often embrace the liberal ideal of promoting 'freedom' and 'democracy' around the world. Embracing the classical liberal idea of the self-regulating market, Claim One seeks to establish beyond dispute 'what globalization means', that is, to offer an authoritative definition of globalization designed for broad public consumption. It does so by interlocking its two core concepts and then linking them to the adjacent ideas of 'liberty' and 'integration'. A passage in a BusinessWeek editorial (13 December 1999) implicitly conveys this neo-liberal suspicion of political power in defining globalization in market terms: 'Globalization is about the triumph of markets over governments. Both proponents and opponents of globalization agree that the driving force today is markets, which are suborning the role of government. The truth is that the size of government has been shrinking relative to the economy almost everywhere.' The same claim is made over and over again by Thomas Friedman (1999) whose seminal book on globalization provided the dominant perspective on globalization in the United States. At one point in his narrative, the award-winning New York Times columnist insists that everybody ought to accept the following 'truth' about globalization: 'The driving idea behind globalization is free-market capitalism -- the more you let market forces rule and the more you open your economy to free trade and competition, the more efficient your economy will be. Globalization means the spread of free-market capitalism to virtually every country in the world.' By forging a close semantic link between 'globalization' and 'market', globalists like Friedman seek to create the impression that globalization represents primarily an economic phenomenon. Thus unburdened by the complexity of its additional non-economic dimensions, 'globalization' acquires the necessary simplicity and focus to convey its central normative message contained in further semantic connections to the adjacent concepts 'liberalization' and 'integration': the 'liberation' of markets from state control is a good thing. Conversely, the notion of 'integrating markets' is draped in the mantle of all-embracing liberty, hence the frequent formulation of Claim One as a global imperative anchored in universal reason. Thus de-contested as an economic project advancing human freedom in general, globalization must be applied to all countries, regardless of the political and cultural preferences expressed by local citizens. As President George W. Bush notes in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2002), 'Policies that further strengthen market incentives and market institutions are relevant for all economies -- industrialized countries, emerging markets, and the developing world.' In short, market globalist voices present globalization as a natural economic phenomenon whose essential qualities are the liberalization and integration of global markets and the reduction of governmental interference in the economy. Privatization, free trade, and unfettered capital movements are portrayed as the best and most natural way for realizing individual liberty and material progress in the world. The ideological claim that globalization is about the liberalization and global integration of markets serves to solidify as 'fact' what is actually a contingent political initiative. Market globalists have been successful because they have persuaded the public that their neo-liberal account of globalization represents an objective or at least neutral diagnosis rather than a direct contribution to the emergence of the very conditions it purports to analyze. To be sure, neo-liberals may indeed be able to offer some 'empirical evidence' for the 'liberalization' of markets. But does the spread of market principles really happen because there exists an intrinsic, metaphysical connection between globalization and the expansion of markets? Or does it occur because globalists have the political and discursive power to shape the world largely according to their ideological formulas? Their economistic-objectivist representation of globalization detracts from the multidimensional character of the phenomenon. Ecological, cultural, and political dimensions of globalization are discussed only as subordinate processes dependent on the movements of global markets. *Claim Two: Globalization Is Inevitable and Irreversible* The second mode of de-contesting 'globalization' turns on the adjacent concept of 'inevitability'. At first glance, the belief in the historical inevitability of globalization seems to be a poor fit for a globalist ideology based on neo-liberal principles. After all, throughout the twentieth century, liberals and conservatives have consistently criticized Marxism for its determinist claims that devalue human free agency and downplay the ability of noneconomic factors to shape social reality. In particular, neo-liberals have attacked the Marxist notion of history as a teleological process that unfolds according to 'inexorable laws' that hasten the demise of capitalism, ultimately leading to the emergence of a classless society on a global scale. By focusing on the 'logic' of technology and markets, market globalists minimize the role of human agency and individual choice -- the centerpiece of liberal thought from John Locke and John Stuart Mill to Milton Friedman. According to the market-globalist perspective, globalization reflects the spread of irreversible market forces driven by technological innovations that make the global integration of national economies inevitable. In fact, market globalism is almost always intertwined with the deep belief in the ability of markets to use new technologies to solve social problems far better than any alternative course. When, in the early 1980s, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously pronounced that 'there is no alternative', she meant that there no longer existed a theoretical and practical alternative to the expansionist logic of the market. In fact, she accused those nonconformists who still dared to pose alternatives as foolishly relying on anachronistic, socialist fantasies that betrayed their inability to cope with empirical reality. Governments, political parties, and social movements had no choice but to 'adjust' to the inevitability of globalization. Their sole remaining task was to facilitate the integration of national economies in the new global market. States and interstate systems should, therefore, serve to ensure the smooth working of market logic. A close study of the utterances of influential market globalists reveals their reliance on such a monocausal, economistic narrative of historical inevitability. While disagreeing with Marxists on the final goal of historical development, they nonetheless share with their ideological opponents a fondness for such terms as 'irresistible', 'inevitable', and 'irreversible' to describe the projected path of globalization. For example, in a major speech on US foreign policy, President Bill Clinton (1999) told his audience: 'Today we must embrace the inexorable logic of globalization... Globalization is irreversible. Protectionism will only make things worse.' Frederick Smith (1999), chairman and CEO of FedEx Corporation, proclaimed that 'Globalization is inevitable and inexorable and it is accelerating... Globalization is happening, it\'s going to happen. It does not matter whether you like it or not, it\'s happening, it\'s going to happen.' Neo-liberal power elites in the global south often faithfully echoed the determinist language of globalism. For example, Manuel Villar (1998), the Philippines Speaker of the House of Representatives, insisted that, 'We cannot simply wish away the process of globalization. It is a reality of a modern world. The process is irreversible.' The neo-liberal portrayal of globalization as some sort of natural force, like the weather or gravity, makes it easier for market globalists to convince people that they must adapt to the discipline of the market if they are to survive and prosper. Hence, the claim of inevitability serves a number of important political functions. For one, it neutralizes the challenges of alterglobalist opponents by depoliticizing the public discourse about globalization: neo-liberal policies are above politics, because they simply carry out what is ordained by nature. This view implies that, instead of acting according to a set of choices, people merely fulfill world market laws that demand the elimination of government controls. There is nothing that can be done about the natural movement of economic and technological forces; political groups ought to acquiesce and make the best of an unalterable situation. Since the emergence of a world based on the primacy of market values reflects the dictates of history, resistance would be unnatural, irrational, and dangerous. *Claim Three: Nobody Is in Charge of Globalization* The third mode of de-contesting globalization hinges on the classical liberal concept of the 'self-regulating market'. The semantic link between 'globalization-market' and the adjacent idea of 'leaderlessness' is simple: if the undisturbed workings of the market indeed preordain a certain course of history, then globalization does not reflect the arbitrary agenda of a particular social class or group. In other words, globalists are not 'in charge' in the sense of imposing their own political agenda on people. Rather, they merely carry out the unalterable imperatives of a transcendental force much larger than narrow partisan interests. For example, Robert Hormats (1998), vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International, emphasized that, 'The great beauty of globalization is that no one is in control. The great beauty of globalization is that it is not controlled by any individual, any government, any institution.' Likewise, Thomas Friedman (1999: 112--3) alleged that 'the most basic truth about globalization is this: No one is in charge.... But the global marketplace today is an Electronic Herd of often anonymous stock, bond and currency traders and multinational investors, connected by screens and networks.' Of course, Friedman is right in a formal sense. There is no conscious conspiracy orchestrated by a single evil force to disempower Asian nations. But does this mean that nobody is in charge of globalization? Is it really true that the liberalization and integration of global markets proceeds outside the realm of human choice? Does globalization, therefore, absolve businesses and corporations from social responsibility? A critical discourse analysis of Friedman\'s statement reveals how he utilizes a realist narrative to sell to his audience a neo-liberal version of globalization. He implies that anyone who thinks that globalization involves human choice is either hopelessly naïve or outright dangerous. The idea that nobody is in charge serves the neo-liberal political agenda of defending and expanding global capitalism. Like the market-globalist rhetoric of historical inevitability, the portrayal of globalization as a leaderless process seeks to both depoliticize the public debate on the subject and demobilize global justice movements. The deterministic language of a technological progress driven by uncontrollable market laws turns political issues into scientific problems of administration. Once large segments of the population have accepted the globalist image of a self-directed juggernaut that simply runs its course, it becomes extremely difficult to challenge what Antonio Gramsci calls the 'power of the hegemonic bloc'. As ordinary people cease to believe in the possibility of choosing alternative social arrangements, market globalism gains strength in its ability to construct passive consumer identities. This tendency is further enhanced by assurances that globalization will bring prosperity to all parts of the world. *Claim Four: Globalization Benefits Everyone (... in the Long Run)* This de-contestation chain lies at the heart of market globalism because it provides an affirmative answer to the crucial normative question of whether globalization represents a 'good' phenomenon. The adjacent idea of 'benefits for everyone' is usually unpacked in material terms such as 'economic growth' and 'prosperity'. However, when linked to globalism\'s peripheral concept, 'progress', the idea of 'benefits for everyone' taps not only into liberalism\'s progressive worldview, but also draws on the powerful socialist vision of establishing an economic paradise on earth -- albeit in the capitalist form of a worldwide consumerist utopia. Thus, Claim Four represents another bold example of combining elements from seemingly incompatible ideologies under the master concept 'globalization'. At the 1996 G-7 Summit in Lyons, France, the heads of state and government of the world\'s seven most powerful industrialized nations issued a joint Economic Communiqué (1996) that exemplifies the principal meanings of this claim: Even those market globalists who concede the strong possibility of unequal global distribution patterns nonetheless insist that the market itself will eventually correct these 'irregularities'. As John Meehan (1997), chairman of the US Public Securities Association, puts it, 'episodic dislocations' such as mass unemployment and reduced social services might be 'necessary in the short run', but, 'in the long run', they will give way to 'quantum leaps in productivity'. Thus, market globalists like Meehan justifiy the real human costs of globalization as the short-term price of economic liberalization. Such ideological statements are disseminated to large audiences by what Benjamin Barber (1996) calls the profit-oriented 'infotainment telesector'. Television, radio, and the Internet frequently place existing economic, political, and social realities within a neo-liberal framework, sustaining the claim that globalization benefits everyone through omnipresent affirmative images, websites, banner advertisements, and sound bites. *Claim Five: Globalization Furthers the Spread of Democracy in the World* The fifth de-contestation chain links 'globalization' and 'market' to the adjacent concept of 'democracy', which also plays a significant role in liberalism, conservatism, and socialism. Globalists typically de-contest 'democracy' through its proximity to 'market' and the making of economic choices -- a theme developed through the 1980s in the peculiar variant of conservatism Freeden (1996: 392) calls 'Thatcherism'. Indeed, a careful discourse analysis of relevant texts reveals that globalists tend to treat freedom, free markets, free trade and democracy as synonymous terms. Persistently affirmed as common sense, the compatibility of these concepts often goes unchallenged in the public discourse. The most obvious strategy by which neo-liberals generate popular support for the equation of democracy and the market is by discrediting traditionalism and socialism. After all, the contest with both precapitalist and anticapitalist forms of traditionalism, such as feudalism, has been won rather easily because the political principles of popular sovereignty and individual rights have been enshrined as the crucial catalyst for the technological and scientific achievements of modern market economies. The battle with socialism turned out to be a much tougher case. As late as the 1970s, socialism provided a powerful critique of the elitist, class-based character of liberal democracy, which, in its view, revealed that a substantive form of democracy had not been achieved in capitalist societies. Since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, however, the ideological edge has shifted decisively to the defenders of a neo-liberal perspective who emphasize the relationship between economic liberalization and the emergence of democratic political regimes. Francis Fukuyama (2000), for example, asserted that there exists a 'clear correlation' between a country\'s level of economic development and successful democracy. While globalization and capital development do not automatically produce democracies, 'the level of economic development resulting from globalization is conducive to the creation of complex civil societies with a powerful middle class. It is this class and societal structure that facilitates democracy'. Praising Eastern Europe\'s economic transition towards capitalism, then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton (1999) told her Polish audience that the emergence of new businesses and shopping centers in former communist countries should be seen as the 'backbone of democracy'. But Fukuyama\'s argument hinges on a limited definition of democracy that emphasizes formal procedures such as voting at the expense of the direct participation of broad majorities in political and economic decision making. This 'thin' definition of democracy is part of what William I. Robinson (1996: 56--62) has identified as the Anglo-American neo-liberal project of 'promoting polyarchy' in the developing world. For the critical political economist, the concept of polyarchy differs from the concept of 'popular democracy' in that the latter posits democracy as both a process and a means to an end -- a tool for devolving political and economic power from the hands of elite minorities to the masses. Polyarchy, on the other hand, represents an elitist and regimented model of 'low intensity' or 'formal' market democracy. Polyarchies not only limit democratic participation to voting in elections, but also require that those elected be insulated from popular pressures, so that they may 'effectively govern'. This focus on the act of voting -- in which equality prevails only in the formal sense -- helps to obscure the conditions of inequality reflected in existing asymmetrical power relations in society. Formal elections provide the important function of legitimating the rule of dominant elites, thus making it more difficult for popular movements to challenge the rule of elites. The claim that globalization furthers the spread of democracy in the world is largely based on a narrow, formal-procedural understanding of 'democracy'. Neo-liberal economic globalization and the strategic promotion of polyarchic regimes in the Third World are, therefore, two sides of the same ideological coin. They represent the systemic prerequisites for the legitimation of a full-blown world market. The promotion of polyarchy provides market globalists with the ideological opportunity to advance their neo-liberal projects of economic restructuring in a language that ostensibly supports the 'democratization' of the world. **READINGS** Steger, Manfred. (2014). *The SAGE Handbook of Globalization (Two vols.)*. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. **ASSESSMENT:** News Report Critique: Each group will find and read three newspaper op-eds (local or international) discussing globalization, then write 50-word summaries of each op-ed, identifying what the underlying definitions of globalization the op-ed writers use. **UNIT 3 A WORLD OF REGIONS: LOCATING THE GLOBAL SOUTH** **OVERVIEW:** One does not need to look far to see markers of global interconnectedness, even global modernity. There are Starbucks branches in both Melbourne and Manila, New York and New Delhi. All these branches look more or less the same, and they have similar menus of espresso-based drinks. This sameness represents the cultural homogenization that many critics have associated with globalization. Yet despite the common aesthetic of these cafes, the world outside them can be very different. In Manila and New Delhi, there is a good chance that, upon leaving the cafe, you will find a child beggar in tattered clothes and 'worn-down slippers. Walk a block or two and, with your latte still hot, you may find a shantytown, where houses are built from discarded plywood and galvanized iron sheets. These shanties have poor sanitation; many of its residents are employed in the informal economic sector; its children, some of whom are child laborers, cannot afford to go to school. **LEARNING OUTCOMES:** After successful completion of this unit, you should be able to: 1. Define the term "Global South"; 2. Differentiate the Global South from the Third World; and 3. Analyze how the conception of global south is of primary import to those engaged in social and political action against global inequality. **COURSE MATERIALS:** **Lesson 3. THE STARBUCKS AND THE SHANTY** One does not need to look far to see markers of global interconnectedness, even global modernity. There are Starbucks branches in both Melbourne and Manila, New York and New Delhi. All these branches look more or less the same, and they have similar menus of espresso-based drinks. This sameness represents the cultural homogenization that many critics have associated with globalization. Yet despite the common aesthetic of these cafes, the world outside them can be very different. In Manila and New Delhi, there is a good chance that, upon leaving the cafe, you will find a child beggar in tattered clothes and 'worn-down slippers. Walk a block or two and, with your latte still hot, you may find a shantytown, where houses are built from discarded plywood and galvanized iron sheets. These shanties have poor sanitation; many of its residents are employed in the informal economic sector; its children, some of whom are child laborers, cannot afford to go to school. There is also a good chance that these shanties\' residents are under threat of being evicted or having their homes demolished to make way for a large commercial development, which will service the city\'s middle class. Given their lack of political influence within the state, the residents of the shanty have very few avenues for redress. They live in so-called 'weak states', where governments are too poor, weak, corrupt, and unstable to supply its citizens with basic needs. You are unlikely to find New Delhi-type shanties in New York, despite that city also being a site of large-scale injustice. Harlem may be poor, but it does not have many child laborers. There is something more confronting about poverty in the global south, and the north/south divide is as visible as the processes of globalization that engender it. The divide thus reminds us that globalization creates undersides. At first glance, the coexistence of the Starbucks and the shanty point to the incompleteness of globalization in the global south. If one conceives of globalization as the spreading and consumption of cultural/commercial signifiers, the shanty represents the tenacity of the local, which is unable to participate in a cosmopolitan culture represented by the Starbucks. The underdevelopment of the global south, it would seem, prevents it from being globalized, revealing the inherent unevenness of the process. Poverty is backward. It is not modern. It is not cosmopolitan. It is not global. But this assumes one cannot locate the shanty within globality or, at the very least a globality. For while the shanties\' dwellers may not participate in consuming the symbols of global modernity, its very presence is already prefigured by mechanisms that are also global in scope. Leftwing critics of dominant economic paradigms call the forced liberalization and marketization of developing economies 'globalization' or neo-liberalism. This globalization, led by International Financial Institutions (IFIs) like the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) saddle developing economies with debt while making them more vulnerable to global economic shocks. This form of globalization is likewise uneven, as the economic norms the developed world applies to itself are never the same as those it imposes on the developing world. Consider the double standard in the prescription of 'cures' for ailing economies in the global south. In times of economic crisis, it is common for the WB and the IMF, dominated by economists from the global north, to demand that developing economies cut government spending and raise interest rates to reduce inflation. The shrinking of the public sector ultimately means a reduction in services like healthcare and the increase in interest rates reduces domestic consumption. The results are often catastrophic, and in many cases the cure is worse than the illness. **Lesson 4. CONCEPTUALIZING WITHOUT DEFINING** Conceiving of the global south is of primary import to those engaged in social and political action against global inequality. Drawing lines between the global south and the global north, the developed and the developing first, the first and the Third World, has a powerful political function: It allows critics and activists to make distinctions between the beneficiaries of uneven systems of global power. Contemporary critics of neo-liberal globalization use the global south as a banner to rally countries victimized by the violent economic 'cures' of institutions like the International Monetary Fund. Previously, critics of cold war-era power politics deployed the term 'Third World' or the logic of non-alignment in their rejection of 'colonialisms' from both the USA and the USSR. Changing geopolitical circumstances means these terms each have specific historical nuances we cannot disregard. It is true, for instance, that 'Third Worldism' or 'nonalignment' is no longer tenable in light of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc or the 'Second World' an issue I discuss below. Despite this, all these terms point to common phenomena: the underdevelopment of certain states/peoples and their lack of representation in global political processes. If only for this, the term 'global south' and similar categories are relevant to the study of globalization. And though the terminology may evolve, the effects of large-scale political projects from imperialism, to cold war-era containment, to neo-liberal globalization make it necessary for scholars and activists to use terms like 'global south', which serve as rhetorical anchors in a grammar that represents global difference. As Levander and Mignolo (2011: 3) explain, the important question may not be 'what the global south is' but 'for whom and under what conditions the global south becomes relevant'. Similarly, for Sparke (2007: 117), 'The Global South is everywhere, but it is also somewhere, and that somewhere, located at the intersection of entangled political geographies of dispossession and repossession...' The global south is thus both a reality and a provisional work-in-progress. It is crucial, therefore, to examine how actors on the ground, particularly those from the global south itself, mobilize the concept. It should not be defined a priori, but rather articulated in the context of provisional and mutable processes of political praxis. This allows us to historicize it and remain mindful of its evolution. Concomitantly, the global south can be located in between the objective realities of global inequality and the various subjective responses to these. There is no uniform global south, and academic analysis is in a better position to document its articulation rather than set its ontological limits. But, despite its heterogeneity, what binds the global south and what common experiences unite the countries in it? Grovogui (2011: 176) contends that: What is necessary to add to Grovogui is that the 'former colonial entities' are almost all categorizable as states in an international system of governance. The terms 'Third World', 'developing world', and 'global south' are all ways to represent interstate inequalities. The term 'interstate' is crucial, because we are discussing imbalances of aggregate economic and political power between states. This conception of the global south is, of course, a simplification that allows for analytic consistency. Admittedly, the focus on the state and interstate dynamics creates a methodological narrowing, which ignores the richness of nonstate politics. **READINGS** Steger, Manfred. (2014). *The SAGE Handbook of Globalization (Two vols.)*. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. **ASSESSMENT:** Global North vs. Global South: Each group will find 3 pairs of pictures depicting global north and global south on each, then write a 50-word explanation on each pair answering the question -- what is the relevance of your illustration to the contemporary world we live in? **UNIT 4 A WORLD OF IDEAS: GLOBALIZATION AND MEDIA** **CREATING THE GLOBAL VILLAGE** **OVERVIEW:** Globalization is a vague, opaque, and difficult word. Indeed, many people have trouble defining globalization. The word seems to mean many things -- a global economy, international trade, growing prosperity in China and India, international travel and communication, immigration, migration, more foreign films and foods, McDonald\'s in Paris, Starbucks in Africa, mosques in New York, an increase in 'global' problems such as climate change and terrorism. The word can mean everything and nothing. Many scholars study globalization by pairing it with another concept, such as globalization and identity, globalization and human rights, globalization and culture, or globalization and terrorism. Such studies are extremely important. However, the pairing of globalization and media offers especial insights. In fact, this chapter will suggest that globalization could not occur without media, that globalization and media act in concert and cohort, and that the two have partnered throughout the whole of human history. From cave paintings to papyrus to printing presses to television to Facebook, media have made globalization possible. **LEARNING OUTCOMES:** After successful completion of this unit, you should be able to: 1. Describe the evolution of media and globalization; 2. Analyze how various media drive various forms of global integration; and 3. Explain the dynamic between local and global cultural production. **COURSE MATERIALS:** **Lesson 5. EVOLUTION OF MEDIA AND GLOBALIZATION** Scholars have found it logical and helpful to organize the historical study of media by time periods or stages. Each period is characterized by its dominant medium. For example, the Canadian theorist Harold Innis (1950), Marshall McLuhan\'s teacher, writing in the 1940s and 1950s, divided media into three periods: oral, print, and electronic. James Lull (2000), writing at the close of the twentieth century, added digital to those three. Terhi Rantanen (2005) places script before the printing press and breaks down the electronic period into wired and wireless, for six periods. For our purposes, five time periods usefully capture the study of globalization and media: oral, script, print, electronic, and digital. We will look at the different time periods and point out how the media of each time period contributed to the globalization of our world. This accounting isolates and highlights the essential role of media in globalization over time and firmly establishes the centrality of media for studies of globalization. However, it is important to stress that globalization and media do not proceed along an inevitable, inexorable path of progress. Media -- and globalization as well -- have developed sporadically, erratically, in fits and starts, driven by human needs, desires, and actions, resulting in great benefits and sometimes greater harm. Charting history is not necessarily charting progress. The history of media and globalization is the history of humanity itself. *Oral Communication* Speech is often the most overlooked medium in histories of globalization. Yet the oral medium -- human speech -- is the oldest and most enduring of all media. Over hundreds of thousands of years, despite numerous changes undergone by humans and their societies, the very first and last humans will share at least one thing -- the ability to speak. Speech has been with us for at least 200,000 years, script for less than 7,000 years, print for less than 600 years, and digital technology for less than 50 years. *Script* Some histories of media technology skip this stage or give it brief mention as a transition between oral cultures and cultures of the printing press. But the era was crucial for globalization and media. Language was essential but imperfect. Distance causes trouble for oral communication. It takes elaborate systems to communicate with language over great expanses. Time also causes difficulties. Language relies on human memory, which is limited in capacity and not always perfect. Script -- the very first writing -- allowed humans to communicate and share knowledge and ideas over much larger spaces and across much longer times. Writing has its own evolution and developed from cave paintings, petroglyphs, and hieroglyphs. Early writing systems began to appear after 3000 BCE, with symbols carved into clay tablets to keep account of trade. These 'cuneiform' marks later developed into symbols that represented the syllables of languages and eventually led to the creation of alphabets, the scripted letters that represent the smallest sounds of a language. These alphabets, learned now in pre-schools around the world, were central to the evolution of humankind and its civilizations. But script needed to be written on something. Writing surfaces even have their own evolution. Writing was done at first as carvings into wood, clay, bronze, bones, stone, and even tortoise shells. Ancient Egypt created one of the most popular writing surfaces from a plant found along the Nile River -- papyrus (from which the English word paper eventually derived). With script on sheets of papyrus and parchment, humans had a medium that catapulted globalization. Script allowed for the written and permanent codification of economic, cultural, religious, and political practice. These codes could then be spread out over large distances and handed down through time. The great civilizations, from Egypt and Greece to Rome and China, were made possible through script (Powell, 2009). If globalization is considered the economic, cultural, and political integration of the world, then surely script -- the written word -- must be considered an essential medium. *The Printing Press* It started the 'information revolution' and transformed markets, businesses, nations, schools, churches, governments, armies, and more. All histories of media and globalization acknowledge the consequential role of the printing press. Many begin with the printing press. It\'s easy to see why. *Electronic Media* Beginning in the nineteenth century, a host of new media would revolutionize the ongoing processes of globalization. Scholars have come to call these 'electronic media' because they require electromagnetic energy -- electricity -- to use. The telegraph, telephone, radio, film, and television are the usual media collected under electronic media. The vast reach of these electronic media continues to open up new vistas in the economic, political, and cultural processes of globalization. In our modern world, the telegraph is not thought of as a revolutionary medium. But in its time, the telegraph was a sensation with significant consequences. Samuel F. B. Morse began work on a machine in the 1830s that eventually could send coded messages -- dots and dashes -- over electrical lines. The effects were enormous. Almost immediately, rail travel was more efficient and safe since information about arrivals or delays could be passed down the line ahead of the trains. Corporations and businesses were able to exchange information about markets and prices. Newspapers could report information instantaneously. By 1866, a transatlantic cable was laid between the United States and Europe, and the telegraph became a truly global medium (Carey, 1992: 157). The ability to transmit speech over distance was the next communication breakthrough. Though not always considered a mass medium, the telephone surely contributed to connecting the world. Alexander Graham Bell is credited with inventing the telephone in 1876. It quickly became a globally adopted medium. By 1927, the first transatlantic call was made via radio. The creation of the cell phone in 1973 was especially crucial in the context of globalization and media. Relatively cheap to produce and buy, and easy to learn and transport, cell phones have quickly become the world\'s dominant communication device and penetrated even the world\'s most remote regions and villages. Radio developed alongside the telegraph and telephone in the late 1890s. The technology was first conceived as a 'wireless telegraph'. By the early 1900s, speech indeed was being transmitted without wires. By the 1920s, broadcast stations were 'on the air', transmitting music and news. Radio quickly became a global medium, reaching distant regions without the construction of wires or roads. For much of the twentieth century, radio was the only mass medium available in many remote villages. Radio was crucially involved with the upheavals of globalization during this time, from radio broadcasts that riveted audiences during World War II, to the propaganda services that did battle worldwide during the Cold War, to the so-called 'death radio' that helped drive the genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda (Frere, 2009). The ability of radio to broadcast over the Internet has only expanded its global reach. Along with the telegraph, telephone, and radio, film arose as another potent medium. Silent motion pictures were shown as early as the 1870s. But as a mass medium, film developed in the 1890s. The Great Train Robbery, made in 1903, is often credited as the first narrative film, ten minutes long with 14 scenes. Film soon developed into an artistic medium of great cultural expression. By the 1920s, directors such as D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang were using film to capture powerful narratives that resonated within and across cultures. The worldwide success of films such as Avatar and Titanic offers resounding examples of the confluence of globalization and media. Though Hollywood and Bollywood get much attention, the cultivation of film industries in nations around the globe continues to this day. For many people, television is considered the most powerful and pervasive mass medium yet created. Though television programming existed back in the 1920s, the years after World War II saw the explosion in the production and penetration of television into homes around the world. According to the US Census Bureau\'s Statistical Abstract, for example, before 1950, fewer than 10 per cent of US homes had televisions. In five years, the number grew to 64.5 per cent. By 1960, 87.1 per cent of US homes had television. Worldwide growth was rapid too. By the end of the 1960s, half the countries in the world had television stations. Television brought together the visual and aural power of film with the accessibility of radio: people sat in their living rooms and kitchens and viewed pictures and stories from across the globe. The world was brought into the home. The amount, range, and intensity of communication with other lands and cultures occurred in ways simply not possible before. For some scholars, the introduction of television was a defining moment in globalization. Marshall McLuhan proclaimed the world a 'global village', largely because of television. *Digital Media* Digital media are most often electronic media that rely on digital codes -- the long arcane combinations of 0s and 1s that represent information. Many of our earlier media, such as phones and televisions, can now be considered digital. Indeed, digital may even be blurring the lines among media. If you can watch television, take photographs, show movies, and send e-mail on your smart phone or tablet, what does that mean for our neat categorization of media into television, film, or phone? The computer, though, is the usual representation of digital media. The computer comes as the latest and, some would argue, most significant medium to influence globalization. In the realm of economics, computers allow instantaneous, global trading 24 hours a day. Anyone with a computer has access to economic information that just a few years ago was in the hands of a wealthy few. Too, computers have revolutionized work in every industry and trade. They streamline tasks, open up new areas and methods of research, and allow any company or industry access to a global marketplace. Some of the largest companies in the world, such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, and more, arose in the digital era and have been instrumental to globalization. In the realm of politics, computers allow citizens access to information from around the world, even information that governments would like to conceal. Blogs, social media, Twitter, text messaging, and more allow citizens to communicate among themselves. And computers have transformed cultural life. Access to information around the globe allows people to adopt and adapt new practices in music, sports, education, religion, fashion, cuisine, the arts, and other areas of culture. People talk with friends, relations, and even strangers around the world through Skype, Google Chat, and other programs. Digital media have revolutionized daily life. **Lesson 6. GLOBAL IMAGINARY AND GLOBAL VILLAGE** As we have seen, one of the most important consequences of communication media for globalization has been: through media, the people of the world came to know of the world. That is, people have needed to be able to truly imagine the world -- and imagine themselves acting in the world -- for globalization to proceed. In this perspective, the media have not only physically linked the globe with cables, broadband, and wireless networks, but have also linked the globe with stories, images, myths, and metaphors. The media are helping to bring about a fundamentally new imaginary, what scholar Manfred Steger (2008) has called a rising global imaginary -- the globe itself as imagined community. In the past, only a few, privileged people thought of themselves as 'cosmopolitan' -- citizens of the world. Cosmopolitanism is now a feature of modern life. People imagine themselves as part of the world. Political scientist Benedict Anderson (1991) added much to understanding of the global imaginary. Anderson\'s primary focus was the origin of nations and nationalism. He wondered how a group of people, though spread across vast expanses of land, came to conceive of themselves as a 'nation'. Anderson\'s answer: the imagination. He said that nations are the result of 'imagined communities', a concept now used regularly throughout the humanities and social sciences. People will never meet face to face with all or even most of the other members of their nation, Anderson said, but they can imagine themselves as one; 'in the minds of each lives the image of their communion' (1991: 6). The global imaginary surely seems like a modern notion. But in the 1960s, media scholar Marshall McLuhan anticipated this phenomenon with his argument that media have connected the world in ways that create a 'global village'. The global village, McLuhan felt, would bring about a utopia. Drawn closely together by media, people would be like neighbors, living in 'a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity' (1964: 80). From its introduction, though, the metaphor of the global village has been a source of controversy. Perhaps McLuhan\'s fiercest critic was the historian of technology and science Lewis Mumford (1970). Years before McLuhan, with strikingly similar language, Mumford too found utopian hope in media technology. He too hoped for a villagelike world of community and grace. However, Mumford watched with dismay as media technology was used instead for capitalism, militarism, profit, and power. His dreams became nightmares. Mumford\'s later work savaged the possibility of the global village and railed against its implications. Mumford became one of McLuhan\'s most ferocious critics. Ultimately, however, globalization and media are producing a macabre marriage of the visions of Mumford and McLuhan. As McLuhan predicted, media and globalization have connected the world and its people from end to end so that we can indeed imagine the world as a village. **READINGS** Steger, Manfred. (2014). *The SAGE Handbook of Globalization (Two vols.)*. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. **ASSESSMENT:** Review on Social Media Globalization: Each group will choose 1 social media application that is known internationally, then answer the following questions: 1. Where did the social media application originate? 2. In which countries did the social media application become known? 3. Why do you think the said social media application became a hit? 4. What are the social media application's effect on globalization? Enumerate and explain. **UNIT 5 GLOBAL POPULATION AND MOBILITY: MOBILITY,** **DIVERSITY, AND COMMUNITY IN THE GLOBAL CITY** **OVERVIEW:** The notion of "global city" has a central place in understanding contemporary spatial patterns of globalization: the ways it impacts on local life is nowhere more visible than in the global city. The global city is therefore the main physical and geographic playground of the globalizing forces: in this space of population concentration and mixing, the global flows of people, capital and ideas are woven into the daily lived experiences of its residents. Cultural diversity, a key marker of the global city and a consequence of human mobility and migration, is usually detected on the surface as a "cosmopolitan feel": the global city\'s "natives" encountering and engaging daily with a variety of immigrants and visitors. The result is "cosmopolitan" consumption, "cosmopolitan" work culture, global networking and "glocal" transnational community relations. Global city represents and in many ways contains the world in a bounded space. This means that many global problems, contradictions, hostilities and inequalities also find expression amidst the teeming verve of the global city. **LEARNING OUTCOMES:** After successful completion of this unit, you should be able to: 1. Describe the global city; 2. Identify the attributes of a global city; and 3. Analyze how cities serve as engines of globalization. **COURSE MATERIALS:** **Lesson 7. WHAT IS "GLOBAL CITY"?** It is barely surprising that the idea of "global city" emerged in the social science literature in the 1980s, shortly after the concept of globalization captured the social scientific imagination, becoming one of its most powerful notional gravitational pulls (Gilpin, 2000). However, the idea of global city was hardly new at the time, and as a phenomenon, global cities, either as centres of imperial power or "free cities" at the crossroads of international merchant routes, existed since ancient times. More recently, the concept was preceded by the idea of "world city". Roderick McKenzie, a Chicago academic, conceptualized a global network of cities as early as 1927 (Acuto, 2011: 2956). In order to be able to imagine, observe and define global city, one first needs to be able to imagine the world, the globe, as one entity. This is not difficult today, with all its graphic, visual and conceptual representations, and with a constant debate on "global issues" in the realm of economics, security and the environment. Yet, arguing why and how the human globe, the global society, is one, or should be one, remains difficult. Since the 1980s, when the globalization paradigm started to dominate social sciences, it has produced ongoing conceptual and ideological disputes. Conceptually, the meaning and timing of globalization have been debated; ideologically, the apologists and critics of globalization keep arguing about who benefits from the intensification of the interconnectedness of economic, political, cultural and environmental processes and transformations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Bauman, 1998; Beck, 2000; Hobsbawm et al., 1999; Wallerstein, 1989). During this time, there have been attempts to shun the traditional approach of social sciences as an obsolete "methodological nationalism" dictating a (nation-state) "container model" of society, unfit for the "global age" where trans-nationalism, porous borders and global interdependency were said to condition all social processes and prompt social change (Faist, 2000; Wimmer and Glick-Schiller, 2003). While the nation-state no doubt remains a powerful institution shaping not only global macro-processes but also everyday lives of its citizens, its power is increasingly relative and steered by global forces, primarily economic in nature, but also geo-political, cultural and environmental. Like many other phenomena of the "global era", the global city also escapes the full control of the nation state -- although each global city is also a national city, its significance as a trans-national and "cosmopolitan" hub goes beyond its "host nation". In fact, through global cities the nation-states project their significance onto the global stage. What, therefore, is the "global city"? This question may be easier to approach from an empirical angle: we can ask which cities are "global", and why? In her seminal work on the topic, Saskia Sassen (1991) identified only three global cities: New York, London and Tokyo. This choice indicated that the criteria for the status of the global city were, unsurprisingly, primarily economic: global cities, according to Sassen, are the "command centres", the main nodes of triumphant global capitalism (even more triumphant and global after the fall of its only real-life competitor -- communism -- at that time). Sassen (1991: 5) argued that "the more globalised the economy becomes, the higher the agglomeration of central functions in a relatively few sites" -- that is, the global cities. Twenty years later the three cities are still the main financial centres, and their respective stock exchanges and indices -- New York\'s Wall Street, London\'s "Footsie" (the informal name for FTSE 100 Index of the largest listed companies) and Tokyo\'s Nikkei, are concepts familiar even to those with no interest in global finance. Sharon Zukin (1998: 826), taking a "cultural view" of the issue, put New York, London and Paris at the top of the "urban cultural hierarchy" in terms of cultural innovation and ability to attract visitors. Two decades after Sassen\'s (1991) book launched the concept, other cities, primarily in upand-coming Asia, started to enjoy the status of global cities where primarily financial, but also other "productive services" such as information technology, law and accountancy, are concentrated (Sassen, 1991: 5). Therefore, the "things" that are produced in a global city are not primarily material: large manufacturing agglomerations are now invariably placed outside global cities, normally in the slum-ridden "megacities" of the "Third World". In fact, it seems that one of the conditions of the status of global city is to stop making things and switch to handling and shifting money and ideas. Global cities are decidedly post-industrial: Shanghai, for example, previously a statecontrolled socialist industrial powerhouse, claimed its global city status when chimneys started to be replaced by steel-and glass skyscrapers, home to finance, commerce and research and development, facilitated by massive foreign capital inflows (Wu, 2000). Singapore is another recent addition to the global city club, with its efficient global transport infrastructure and growing professional service sector. The development of the city-state of Singapore into a global city neatly reflects the growing global importance of the Asia-Pacific region (Baum, 1999: 1097). Zukin describes the process of switching to a "service economy" as a "cultural turn" in the advanced societies where a "symbolic economy", based on abstract products such as financial instruments, information and "culture" (arts, fashion, music, etc.), has increasing importance. Such "symbolic production" by knowledge workers does not produce smoke, smell, noise or visible motion and is therefore largely invisible. As a consequence, global cities are no longer experienced as "landscapes of production" but as "landscapes of consumption" (Zukin, 1998: 825). Indeed, they are places where consumer culture reaches its late-Western paroxysm. Even if the cities are not Western, the consumer culture definitely remains an invention of the affluent West (Humphery, 2010). Perhaps the most famous, and of late also notorious, symbolic products created in the command posts of global capitalism are "financial products", the inflation and then implosion of which triggered the "global financial crisis" in 2008. Apart from being financial centres, global cities are also concentrations of geopolitical power, and cultural and trendsetting powerhouses, higher education hubs and playgrounds of creative industries, such as arts, fashion and design. They therefore create a specific labour demand -- its key workforce is the professional class which, according to Sassen (1991: 280), constituted only five per cent of New York residents at the beginning of the twentieth century but grew to 30 per cent by the late 1980s. These "knowledge workers" are not necessarily part of the core wealth and power elite of global capitalism, but are a highly (globally) mobile, career-minded middle class (Colic-Peisker, 2010). Their burgeoning presence in global cities, alongside withdrawal of manufacturing and its working class, lead to gentrification of previously industrial inner-city neighbourhoods over the past half-century. Gentrification is at the same time a process of social class polarization and residential segregation of the affluent from the poor. According to Zukin (1998: 835) gentrification and consumption of the gentrifiers drives a "wedge between urban social classes". The lifestyle and needs of the well-off professional classes bring into the global city an army of low-paid workers who deliver personal and labour-intensive services: cleaning, child-care, delivery, restaurants and eateries, catering, maintenance, transport, hotels, domestic help and retail (Sassen, 1991; Zukin, 1998: 831, 835). According to Sassen (1991), global cities are characterized by occupational and income polarization, with the highly paid professional class on the one end and providers of low-paid services on the other. Instead of being egg-shaped, with those in the middle being a majority, the labour market of global cities is increasingly "hourglass-shaped", with a hollow middle (Autor et al., 2006; Baum, 1999). The polarization of the service-dominated post-industrial labour market is reflected in the polarization of housing markets. Gentrified inner city and other attractive, well-connected and services-rich areas have expensive real estate because in a highly developed and sensitive housing market (a "thick", dynamic housing market with much supply and demand) the attractive features and advantages of an urban area end up being readily capitalized into higher property prices. The opposite happens with less attractive and less liveable outer areas with fewer job opportunities and services (Wood, 2004). Given that most people (at least in home-ownership English-speaking societies) have most of their wealth stored in their homes, the polarized housing markets exacerbate general socioeconomic inequality (Wood, 2004). The global cities that attract large population intakes have high real-estate prices and as a consequence of population growth suffer falling housing affordability. This is especially noticeable in Australia over the past decade of very high immigration intakes (Wood, 2004). Zhong, Clark and Sassen (2007) used census data for all US metro areas to support their argument that income polarization is mostly present in large gateway cities, where large immigration intakes tend to depress wages at the bottom of the labour market. This section of the large urban labour markets now comprises the most flexible labour -- those who hold casual and insecure jobs, often in the grey economy. Of course, the polarization argument should be applied with caution, as every city, however "global", has its local, national and regional contexts that colour and condition economic and social processes driven primarily, but not solely, by economic globalization (Baum, 1999). In Singapore and Shanghai for example, the processes of globalization are far less laissez-faire than in the "Western" cities and are in fact tightly managed by the state (Baum, 1999; Wu, 2000). Singapore\'s dual industrial strategy, where "up-market" manufacturing is kept alongside burgeoning professional services, lessened the workforce polarization effect (Baum, 1999). In the twenty-first century, the list of global cities expanded to encompass cities across Asia, and few cities in other parts of the world. According to Japanese Mori Foundation\'s Global Power City Index, the global power of cities is measured by a combination of six criteria: economy, research and development, cultural interaction, liveability, environment and accessibility (Mori Memorial Foundation, 2011: 1). The top five cities according to these criteria are New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and Singapore. Of course, there are different rankings and criteria and this one cannot be considered definitive. Ultimately, according to the Mori Foundation, cities deserve their global status through their '"magnetism": a comprehensive power to attract creative people and excellent companies from around the world amidst accelerated interurban competition' (2011: 1). The main thesis of a recent book by ItalianAmerican economist Enrico Moretti (2012) is in agreement with such a view: he argues that the most important twenty-first century cities are those which represent "brain hubs", that is, concentrations of innovative people and firms, and are also good "human ecosystems" for cutting-edge businesses, providing all the support functions or "secondary services" for the innovators (Moretti, 2012: 133, 247; Solimano, 2006). Moretti (2012) argues, alongside many other economists, that the continuation of the success of Western economies nowadays hinges on the "knowledge economy": the creation of new ideas, technologies and products (2012: 5, 40--1). A more novel aspect of his argument is that even more than traditional industries, the "knowledge economy" has an inherent tendency towards geographical agglomeration. This goes against the widely accepted view that Internet communication makes the place of work irrelevant. According to economist Moretti (2012: 5, 144) as well as sociologist Florida (2005: 29) the geographic "economies of scale" remain relevant, because larger "brain concentrations" have a "thicker labour market" -- a high supply of professionals and a high demand for them, with a possibility to fast recruit, which is critical in the "time-driven and horizontal" knowledge economy -- and a more specialized supply of business services, as well as more opportunities for what they call "knowledge spillovers". The latter means, in a nutshell, that creative people thrive in the company of other creative people and tend to stagnate in isolation, even if Internet-connected. The role of cities as critical concentrations of people and hubs of exchange of products and ideas is not new: they have been the engine of civilization since the beginning of history. Focusing on the United States, Moretti adds a new dimension to the global cities debate, identifying the most important American cities not primarily as financial hubs but rather as thriving hubs of digital innovation, and opposes them to "struggling cities" with low human capital base, that is, a low proportion of university graduates in the population. The main brain hubs with more than half of their population with college degrees are Silicon Valley (San Francisco-- San Jose area) the home ground of the digital era giants such as Google and Apple, followed by Washington DC, Boston and Seattle. Moretti (2012) further develops the thesis about growing polarization of the labour market, not just between cities and regions but also within large cities (2012: 164): he calls it the "Great Divergence" and marks the 1980s as its beginning (2012: 4). While American cities may be less racially segregated that a few decades ago, he argues, they are becoming increasingly segregated by education and earnings. Moretti argues that workers in the dynamic brain hubs have two to three times higher earnings than their equally qualified counterparts in the stagnating "rust belt" cities. The brain hubs are also good at attracting the best and brightest from around the world, while low-skilled immigrants typically go to the low-tech cities (2012: 93). **Lesson 8. MOBILITY, MIGRATION AND THE GLOBAL CITY: ATTRACTING THE "CREATIVE CLASS"** Over the past three decades, the globalization of the labour markets has created a new type of professional nomadism. Being a dynamic hub of the global capitalist economy and, to use Bauman\'s (2005, 2007) term, a highly "liquid" environment, makes the global city a crucible of demographic and social change; a hub of "creative destruction" that, according to Moretti (2012: 148), characterizes successful market economies. A high level of economic dynamism, and accompanying population mobility, are considered signs of economic health: it has been somewhat of a mantra that the "competitive economy" requires a "flexible workforce". Submitted to the requirements of competitiveness and mobility are both businesses and employees. Globalization has not only created the global labour market, causing an increase in transnational mobility and migration, but has simultaneously affected local labour markets (Castles and Miller, 2003). Employment mobility has been markedly increasing since the early 1970s, especially in the English-speaking countries which are the most dynamic in this respect. In the twenty-first century, a loyal "company man" and a "job for life" are largely matters of the past. Moretti (2012: 155) considers the United States as a hyper-mobile outlier among relatively sedentary developed countries (he compares his native Italy where generations of the same family live in the same city, and often in the same suburb or street), but in fact all English-speaking countries have considerably higher mobility -- residential and job mobility, which are interconnected -- than anywhere else. Overall, the service sector is inherently more dynamic and flexible than the manufacturing sector which shrunk dramatically in the English-speaking countries post the 1973 "oil shock", while some other developed countries, such as Singapore and Germany for example, decided to keep it going. The importance and reputation of global cities is largely built on their ability to attract the key professional and innovative workforce, as well as investors, but also to have all the other necessary workers, including those in the low-skilled, poorly-paid service sector, at hand and on demand. The highly educated are the most footloose section of the population: the professional middle classes, having in general more control and autonomy in their workplace, and a tendency to understand their working life as a "career", often change jobs and many are ready to relocate to another city or country (Colic-Peisker 2010; Moretti, 2012: 155). They move largely by their own plan and career design. The lower-skilled service workers often move jobs by necessity, but are not as ready to move between cities and countries. These two sections of the increasingly polarized workforce fit nicely into the classical conceptual dichotomy of "cosmopolitans vs. locals" proposed by Merton back in the 1950s and further developed by Gouldner in the late 1970s. Merton\'s (1968: 447--74) dichotomy was placed in the context of "latent social roles" in the community, and Gouldner (1989) applied it to formal organizations. The community life of "locals" was preoccupied with local problems, while "cosmopolitans" (Gouldner, 1989: 401, calls them "itinerants") were, using Merton\'s (1968: 448) expression, more "ecumenical" and sought social status outside the local community, usually from their professional peers, because their local community could neither validate nor reward their professional competence. By extension, cosmopolitans were more mobile (Merton, 1968: 449). Clearly, the world needs both types, those more rooted and those easily detached, but the globalized capitalist economy favours and rewards the highly qualified and the mobile. The international education market, which nowadays moves considerable middle-class populations of young people across the globe, represents a significant potential of the "creative class" in large, attractive cities. According to OECD (2012) the international tertiary education market has grown fourfold since 1975, reflecting the economic interconnectedness of the globe and creation of a veritable global labour market. All cities worthy of the "global city" title are nowadays also magnets for international students. The synergies between education, research and industry are crucial for global capitalism and its global "nodes"; these synergies therefore seem to be crucial in achieving a global city status in the twenty-first "knowledge" century. Following Moretti\'s (2012) argument presented above, it is plausible that global cities indeed need to be brain hubs and good human ecosystems attracting and retaining the creative class. Richard Florida in his work on the "creative class" (2005: 27) presents a similar argument about the "critical functions of cities and regions in 21st century creative capitalism" (2005: 27), also arguing that "geography is not dead", as it was predicted in the 1990s, because of the reach of Internet connectedness. Therefore, cities remain the critical "incubators of creativity" by attracting the crucial workforce of the "creative capitalism" (Florida, 2005: 29). This is further elaborated below, using the case studies of the two largest Australian cities, Sydney and Melbourne. **Lesson 9. DIVERSITY AND COMMUNITY IN THE GLOBAL CITY** In a sociological sense, diversity is a rather vague and ambiguous, context-dependent concept, at the same time carrying positive and negative connotation. In government documents and speeches of politicians in high-immigration countries (all English-speaking countries belong to this category) it is usually presented as a potential for both positive and negative outcomes. As a positive, diversity represents potential for successful merging of cultures and ideas, what usually comes under the label "cosmopolitan". There is no cosmopolitanism without diversity. Although these two concepts are often associated and taken to have a large overlap in meaning, they may also carry very different and even opposite meanings. Namely, as a negative, diversity can mean a potential for fracturing social cohesion and social capital, as well as a synonym for disadvantage of those seen as "diverse" or "Others". For example, over the past decade the Australian government bureaucracies have used the formula "linguistically and culturally diverse" (CALD) to describe disadvantaged immigrant minorities: refugees, asylum seekers, temporary labour migrants and international students hoping to secure the famous "PR" (permanent residence) -- in short everyone whose hopes for a better life encounter significant barriers and are not always fulfilled. From the perspective of "natives" (the Australian-born, and especially Anglo-Australians), visible and "audible" diversity can cause discomfort about the increasingly assertive presence of the "Other" in their midst (Ang, 2001). Concentrations of "diversity" (CALD-high areas) are therefore also areas of socioeconomic disadvantage in main Australian immigration gateway cities Sydney and Melbourne. Middle and outer suburbs with high manufacturing employment in the past, now areas with few job opportunities, also areas with scant presence of services -- good schools, hospitals and other essential institutions -- and therefore suffering "traffic disadvantage" -- long commuting times to jobs and services. All immigrant-attracting global gateways therefore contain populations, economic concentrations and social stratifications that reflect and perpetuate global inequalities. Many recently arrived immigrants, especially those in the "CALD" category coming from globally peripheral destinations, often lead precarious lives in global cities, working in the grey economy, experiencing occupational downgrading, poor housing and employment and housing instability. Apart from their economic importance, the visible cultural and community features of global cities are also relevant for their global role. Global cities are home to a diverse and visible set of protagonists of the "urban lifestyle": artists, bohemians, new media designers, gay and youth subcultures, university students and immigrants, creating a remarkable and also highly visible "ethnic" and cultural diversity. These groups with their more of less "alternative" and eclectic lifestyles have a natural home in "global cities", and exert a singular influence in defining various urban subcultures, often giving character to certain areas within big cities. Florida (2005: 113--14) and many earlier urban anthropologists and sociologists, starting from the early twentieth century Chicago School, saw the connection between boh

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