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For liberalists lobalization is an outcome of people’s strivings to escape poverty as well as to achieve civil and political rights. On a liberalist account it is inherent in market dynamics and modern democratization that these forces should eventually interlink humanity across the planet (Scholte, 2015). Political rea lisms Political realists assume that territorial sovereign states are the principal actors in world politics. Proponents of this approach further presume that states are inherently acquisitive and self-serving, making for inevitable competition as their insatiable appetites for power clash.
To manage this navoidable interstate conflict, some political realists have advocated the use of a balance of power, where any attempt by one state to achieve world dominance is countered by collective resistance from other states. Other political realists have suggested that a dominant state can bring stability to world order if this so-called ‘hegemon’ maintains international rules and institutions that both advance its own interests and at the same time contain conflicts between other states.
In the vein of hegemonic stability theory, globalization can be explained as a way that the dominant state of the day n the case of recent history the USA – has asserted its primacy and concurrently created an environment of controlled competition among states. On this account large-scale contemporary growth of transplanetary connectivity has allowed the US state to promote its national interests and further its power. In another variant of political realism, globalization could be explained as a strategy in the contest for power between several major states in contemporary world politics.
On this line of argument, transplanetary connectivity has advanced as the governments of Britain, China, France, Japan, the LJSA and other large States have exploited the potentials Of global relations to bolster their respective power positions. Marxisms Marxism is the principal political economy critique of liberalist orthodoxy. This approach is adopted by researchers who are principally concerned with modes of production, social exploitation through unjust distribution, and social emancipation through the transcendence of capitalism.
Marxist arguments about globalization have emanated from all fields of social enquiry, albeit most especially from Geography, Politics and Sociology. Marxists reject both liberalist and political realist explanations of globalization. On Marxist accounts, the technological advances that enable globalization have not been propelled, as liberalists argue, by ‘natural’ human drives for economic growth, but by historically specific impulses of capitalist development.
Likewise, say Marxists, the legal and institutional infrastructures that facilitate globalization have emerged not so much to spread market efficiency across the planet, but to serve the logic of surplus accumulation on a global scale. Meanwhile Marxists dismiss liberalist talk of freedom’ and ‘democracy’ as being not real impulses behind increased transplanetary connectivity, but a legitimating ideology for exploitative global capitalist class relations.
Similarly, for Marxists, state policies and inter-state struggles for power are not, as political realists claim, the actual drivers of globalization, but rather expressions of deeper forces of capitalism and class struggle. Constructivisms In contrast to the methodological materialism of liberalist, political realist and Marxist explanations of globalization, a range of other accounts have taken methodologically idealist approaches. In these cases, transplanetary connectivity is said to have arisen because of the way that people have mentally constructed the social world with symbols, language, interpretation, and so on.
From ideational perspectives, globalization has resulted from particular forms and dynamics of consciousness. For methodological idealists, patterns of production and governance are second-order structures that derive from deeper cultural and socio-psychological forces. Such accounts of globalization have come especially from the fields of Anthropology, Humanities, Media Studies, and Sociology, although idealist arguments have lso influenced some researchers in Geography, Politics and even Business Studies.
One type of ideational explanation is constructivism, an approach that has been popular particularly since the 1 990s among International Studies scholars in North America and Western Europe who wish to develop an alternative perspective to liberalism and political realism. As the theoMs name suggests, constructivism concentrates on the ways that social actors ‘construct’ their world: both within their own minds and through inter- subjective communication with others.
Particularly, constructivists examine ow inter-subjective communication generates common understandings of reality, shared norms for social behaviour, and notions of group identity and solidarity. Conversation and symbolic exchanges lead people to construct ideas of the world, rules for social interaction, and ways of being and belonging in that world. Constructivist research to date has not focused on explaining globalization; however, such an account can be extrapolated from existing works and the general premises of the theory.
These would suggest that transplanetary connectivity has increased as people have reimagined ociety on transworld rather than, or in addition to, country-national-state lines. Postmodernisms In contrast to constructivism, other ideational explanations of globalization do highlight the significance of structural power in the construction of identities, norms and knowledge. For shorthand convenience these approaches are here grouped under a single label of ‘postmodernism’.
However, others have pursued this broad genre of argument under the names of ‘poststructuralism’ and ‘postcolonialism’. Whatever the precise appellation, these perspectives understand society first of all in terms of nowledge power: that is, how power structures shape knowledge; and how certain knowledge structures support certain power hierarchies. With their emphasis on modes of knowledge as power, postmodernist and postcolonialist arguments succeed in incorporating ideational elements into explanations of globalization while also keeping questions of politics to the fore.
Postmodernist theories highlight the significance of modern rationalist epistemology as a mindset that has been vital to the techno-scientific advances and bureaucratic institutions that have made globalization possible. Like Marxism, then, postmodernism helps to go beyond the relatively superficial accounts of liberalism and political realism to the deepersocial conditions that have prompted globalization. Feminisms For their part, feminist accounts of globalization have brought gender relations to the fore.
Whereas other theories have identified the principal dynamics behind the rise of transplanetary and supraterritorial connectivity in terms of technology, state, capital, identity or discourse, feminists have put the spotlight on the social construction of masculinity and femininity. That is, he roles and behaviours assigned to biological sex are held to mould the overall social order and significantly to shape the course Of history, including the spread of globality.
Feminist perspectives on globalization are adopted by researchers whose main concerns lie with the status of women, particularly the structural subordination of women to men. These arguments stress that women have tended to be marginalized, silenced and violated in global communications (e. g. , lower Internet access), global migration (e. g. , abused domestics and sex workers), global finance (e. g. limited availability of credit), global organizations (e. g. , few leadership positions), and global wars (e. g. , rape on the battlefield).
Feminist approaches to globalization have appeared across all fields of social studies and humanities, albeit perhaps most frequently in Politics and Sociology. Feminist accounts of globalization have provided welcome antidotes to the gender-blindness that has generally afflicted other perspectives. Everyday experience makes plain that people in global as in all other spaces act partly in accordance with socially constructed sex roles. The ‘private’ sphere of the household and intimate relations is obviously as integral and influential in most people’s lives as the ‘public’ sphere of the workplace and citizenship.
The reproductive economy is clearly as central to the sustenance of social relations as the productive economy. Yet ‘malestream’ research on globalization (and social life generally) has tended to render these crucial matters invisible. Scholte unpacks four social forces or dynamics that have driven the development of globalization – Capitalism, governance/regulation, identity, and rationalist knowledge. Explain each of these. Capitalism Capitalism characterizes a social order where economic activity is oriented first and foremost to the accumulation of surplus.
In other words, capitalists (who might be individuals, private firms, publicly owned enterprises, or other collective actors) attempt to amass ever-greater resources in excess of their survival needs. Capitalist production contrasts on the one hand with a subsistence economy (where no surpluses arise) and on the other hand with profligacy (where any surplus is immediately depleted through luxury consumption). Under capitalism surpluses are invested in further production, ith the aim of acquiring additional surplus, which is then reinvested in still more production, in the hope of obtaining still more surplus, and so on.
A capitalist economy is thoroughly monetized, money greatly facilitates accumulation, particularly since surpluses are easily stored and shifted in this fungible form. In addition, the manipulation ofvalue by means of monetary calculations (including prices, wages, interest charges, dividends, taxes, currency revaluations, accounting formulas, etc. ) offers abundant opportunities to transfer surplus, especially from the weak to the powerful. Since most parties in a capitalist order are seeking to accumulate to one degree or another, this mode Of production involves perpetual and pervasive contests over the distribution of surplus.
Such competition occurs both between actors (individuals, firms, etc. ) and along structural lines (of class, gender, race and more). Some of the struggles are overt, for example, in wage disputes. Other conflicts remain latent, for instance, when many poor people in the South are unaware that much of their countrys limited surplus value is being transferred to wealthy people in the North through the repayment of lobal debts. These and countless other experiences have shown historically that capitalism tends to breed exploitation and other inequities unless deliberate countervailing measures are implemented.
Governance/Regulation The term ‘governance’ is subject to many different understandings and in the book, the word is taken to mean regulation in a generic sense; thus governance refers to processes whereby people formulate, implement, enforce and review rules to guide their common affairs. Much governance happens through government, in the sense of regulatory activities through ocal and national public authorities. However, governance can entail more than government.
Governance can extend beyond state and sub state institutions to include suprastate (macro-regional and global) regimes as well. Moreover, governance can span private regulatory mechanisms along with public sector arrangements. Hence governance goes beyond government to cover the full scope of societal regulation. Society might be considered to have a ‘mode’ of governance (a general way of making, implementing, enforcing and reviewing rules), much as it has a mode of production (a eneral way of extracting, processing, distributing and consuming resources).
Moreover, just as a mode of production may change over time (say, from feudalism to capitalism, or from early to advanced capitalism), so the prevailing structure of governance can also alter through history. Indeed, globalization has transpired in conjunction with a shift from a statist towards a polycentric mode of regulation. Whereas statism concentrates the construction and application of social rules in centralized national territorial governments, polycentrism disperses regulation across multiple substate, tate, suprastate and private sites, as well as dense networks that interlink these many points of governance.