The Term and Characteristics of Globalisation - Essay Example

Political science (political analysis) Globalisation calls into question the adequacy of comparative politics and international relations as methods to understand the organization and exercise of power in social life. The growth of a global dimension of social relations can even cast doubt on the very project of political science and the academy's practice of disciplinary divisions more generally. Contemporary accelerated globalisation gives ample cause for a paradigm shift in social analysis toward what might be called 'world system studies'. That said entrenched intellectual traditions and institutional forces exert substantial resistance to such a change. In this paper we have taken two theoretical concepts to analyze globalisation. The term 'globalisation' is commonly shorthand for 'globalising processes'. Privileging the verb rather than the noun form is a significant tactical move since we do not wish to convey the intuition that we comprehend globalisation in reified and simply naturalistic ways. Exposing people around the world to the same ideas, images and market pressures is the power of globalization that exerts pressures on societies and cultures to become more alike. In Power: A Radical View Lukes define power rhetorically: "is it not the supreme and most insidious exercise of power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things " (1974: 24). Steven Lukes and William Connolly argued that the exercise of power must be, to some meaningful degree, the product of choice, because a normatively compelling definition must preserve the relation between power and responsibility. According to Lukes: The reason why identifying [the exercise of power] involves the assumption that the exerciser(s) could have acted differently - and, where they are unaware of the consequences of their action or inaction, that they could have ascertained these - is that an attribution of power is at the same time an attribution of (partial or total) responsibility for certain consequences. (Lukes; 1974: 55-6) Lukes' dimensions of power evidence points to the misrecognition of real interests by the majority of state actors on a global scale. Thus within globalisation, generic agency has increased its tendential character towards dominant agency-and this means that the prospects for radical agency within a global civil society are more limited and co-opted than before. Arendt define power as " Power --is actually the reality behind the use of violence". She holds that political theory needs to adopt such a new sense of power in order to achieve an adequate understanding of the nature of political rule. Many of the characteristics of globalisation are determined by the structural power that is the development of technology particularly computers and electronic communication. On power, Lukes concludes that there are various answers, all deeply familiar, which respond to our interests in both the outcomes and the structure of power. Perhaps this explains why, in our ordinary unreflective judgments and comparisons of structural power, we normally know what we mean and have little difficulty in understanding one another, yet every attempt at a single general answer to the question has failed and seems likely to fail. (1986, 17) Structural power inferred from the structures of the national level to international level. Each national industry of a country's moving to the forces of globalization and offers ready indicators of its degree of integration into the global world economy. Future developments in technology are likely to increase this tendency rather than otherwise. So, power is moving from a national to international level as the process of internationalization is just a case of developing that has characterized most of human history, the continuous expansion from the local. Both globalisation and internationalization are going on today. A more pragmatic attitude to both markets and the accompanying internationalization and globalisation can have great merits. Moreover, Emphasis on the political significance of groups such as ethnic groups, local and multinational companies, guerrilla and terrorist groups, and social movements has been one of the most persuasive arguments of globalisation. As Lukes (1974) globalisation suggests a deep and complex set of events, pluralism may be insufficient to gain a full understanding of the process. Thus, Central to contemporary processes of globalisation are new forms of economic organization and the spread world-wide of cultural messages through new media and information and communications technologies. Power in Globalisation is responsible for and responsive to space-time compression where distances, both virtual and actual, can be covered far quicker than in previous times and where people, goods and images encounter each other on an almost instantaneous basis. The move of political power to powerful economic actors involved by neo-liberal globalization defies the customary state-centered center of constitutional law. Current debate has countered to this confront in normative terms, whether by reinterpreting rights or conveying their ends, e.g. to attain private actors. though, globalization demoralize the liberal legalist epistemology on which these approaches rest, by positing the subsistence of numerous sites of legal production, (e.g. multinational corporations) away from the state. This dynamic, between globalization and legal pluralism on one side, as well as rights constitutionalism on the other, offers the framework for dealing with the question of rights constitutionalisms counter hegemonic prospective. From Ontological point of view negations and uncertainty of globalisation are not reducible. Recognition that there are added potential than can perhaps be recognized, is a step in conceding diverse level of being. Information has constantly been the definitive resource in capitalism: the center was on its worth as software in technology. Currently in global capitalism, center is on the developed production of symbols, and images - the capability to make up unusual realities. As well as amalgamating and to some degree de-humanizing globalization, particularly informationalism, heaves issues personal ingenuity and core issues of being to the front position. On the other hand, Discourse concept in globalisation, probably attained its maximum influence as a social construct. Globalisation is an uncontrollable force against which all governments are powerless and that the only option is to submit to the pressures and provide all forms of social protection. The extent of globalisation has been exaggerated, the neo-liberal option has been chosen by many governments rather than being forced upon them and some states-particularly the USA-may have secured greater relative external power through the process. But even if a medium-sized European state has some room for maneuver, left-wing state-centrists need to demonstrate its extent if they suggest that autonomous social transformation is possible. Thus, Globalisation is generally considered to refer to a series of social construct processes and therefore is not characterized by the institutional trappings which. Moreover, globalisation is regarded as being in the ascendancy, transforming economic, cultural and social conditions. Yet despite its fundamental effects, globalisation as a phenomenon remains largely unregulated. In contrast to the national and to some extent the regional levels; there is little equivalent global governance. Most international organizations are apparently little more than the sum of their individual members' preferences. That is not to say that there are no important multilateral activities and institutions. Given that economic and military power is concentrated, 'global orders' may emerge, broadly reflecting the interests of those most powerful. Moreover, in such conditions global institutions can constrain weaker states in both economic and security terms. Indeed, if anything, the existing panoply of international institutions seem better designed to facilitate rather than regulate globalisation whether in the form of investment flows, currency movements, etc., or in removing obstacles and providing infrastructure. Such organizations have 'helped create international markets in industrial goods by linking communication and transportation infrastructure, protecting intellectual property and reducing legal and economic barriers to trade'. There is then a mismatch between the different levels; in the case of the nation-state we are concerned with well-established institutional arrangements which have been able to maintain considerable autonomy although perhaps the formal trappings of sovereignty are at odds with a loss of real sovereignty in some domains. In the case of globalisation we are concerned with social construct processes which are not effectively regulated by equivalent authorities, in part because states are unwilling to relinquish their formal sovereignty to regulate global forces through collective action. In the middle is regionalism where perhaps the fit between institutional capabilities and the processes at work is closer than in the other two cases, but where there remain significant problems of collective action, not to mention mechanisms for legitimizing action and providing some sense of affinity or identity. Thus, the discourse of globalisation 'captures the increasingly widespread consciousness or "reflexive" awareness of the interdependence of local ecologies, economies and societies' (Wiseman 1998:14). Globalisation, does not result in a global narrative, but points to the very impossibility of such a narrative through the production of the globe as a space where people are wide spread. In other words, while space-time compression has tendencies towards uniformity in bringing the globe under increasingly integrated processes, it also provides the basis for a questioning of the guiding assumptions that have underpinned those very processes of globalisation, providing a basis for the recognition of and support for cultural difference. Rather than, therefore, globalisation resulting in the universalising and homogenizing of modernity in bringing together diverse cultures, the modern is thrown into doubt and question. This still provides the possibility of continuing the assertion of privileged 'Western' views of the world-the discourse of modernity and the project of enlightenment, progress and emancipation through the application of science and processes of economic development. However, for us, Robertson's view on the very impossibility of such a narrative is persuasive, a view associated with the discourse of post modernity and the assertion of difference and doubt as to the emancipator consequences of modern forms of development. The universalising and internationalizing logic of modernity thereby undermines the conditions for its own hegemony through the processes it sets in play. The more effective modernity has become then the greater the compression of space-time and integration of the globe and the less universal modernity appears, a surfacing of difference that both frames and is framed by post modernity. In some ways, therefore, the strength of the challenges to the politics and epistemology of the 'West' by feminist, post-colonial and post-structuralist writers and activists in their bringing to the fore of difference can be said to respond to, help to produce and be part of the processes of globalisation. Thus, Globalisation refers to processes and practices that result in globalised outcomes. This also enables us to avoid the determinist trap. While recognizing that globalisation is itself both material and discursive with all that implies in terms of constitutive effects, we can still locate ourselves in a discourse that does not leave us open to accusations of eliminating agency or inducing fatalistic pessimism. Things could always be other than they are and what they are is always diverse. With the surfacing of the locatedness of each and all, the significance of location in interpreting the contemporary condition is accompanied by a sense that location is complex and ambiguous, with a diasporan (dispersion of a people from their original homeland )quality, 'a process of multi-locationality across geographical, cultural and psychic barriers' (Brah 1996:194). It is thus the attempt to think across frontiers that is part of the Endeavour of this text, to create a different type of space through which to discuss pedagogy, even as we question any simple notion of their collapsing. Complexity is the key. Globalisation then is no single or simple phenomenon-another reason perhaps why globalizing processes is a better term. To speak in this way means that notion of flow, relationality, movement and networks tend to be given heightened priority. As modernism challenged realism in the attempt to 'make sense' of the changes taking place in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century capitalism, so new ways of 'making sense' of the contemporary situation are necessary. Included in this of course is the notion of globalisation itself, for, as Chambers (1994:3) suggests, 'in the accelerating processes of globalisation we are also increasingly confronted with an extensive cultural and historical diversity that proves impermeable to the explanations we habitually employ'. This new postmodern form of sense-making for some writers is in many ways a way of not being able to make sense-reflexively making sense of the bewildering suggests a bewildering practice of representation if it is to be internally consistent. Harvey's view is that, while modernism is a crisis of representation, postmodernism points to a crisis of signification (Hay, 2002:236). Thus, while 'modernism conceives of representations as being problematicpostmodernism problematises reality' (Lash 1990:13). It is this differential nature of the problematic that has led to postmodernism being conceived as a manifestation of what more controversially is considered to be a wider condition of post modernity. This also points to one of the issues in debates about discourses of globalisation-that is whether they are practices of representation and/or signification, as it is the constitutive power of globalisation rather than its empirical reality that is in question, if we take the latter rather than the former stance. This is not to deny the material reality of the world but to view that reality as always already mediated, rather than separate from its representations-a move 'from the analysis of social reality as such to the analysis of signs, languages, discourse, and talk-the media through which social reality comes into being and disperses itself across and through a body politic' (Lemert 1997:74). Practices of signification are themselves material. The reading of signifying practices as practices of representation and vice versa lies at the heart of many of the mistranslations that take place in debates over post modernity and globalisation (Hay, 2002:221). Discourse talks about the role of ideas in political analysis. According to Hay critical political analysis of globalisation must surely start with the empirical evidence, however, contested it interpretation may prove. (2002: 224) The idea of globalisation maybe a causative factor as problematising and interrogating the process underpin the globalising tendencies. It is important to reset the temptation to appeal to globalisation itself as a casual factor or process working, apparently independently of the actions, intention and motivations of real subjects. It is precisely this appeal to casual without subjects to summons the logic of necessity and inevitability to often associate with the notion of globalisation. (Hay, 2002). Thus, the critical account of the globalisation to political analysis formulation is pushed out of contemplation. Political science is dominated today by public administration studies and the application of models, developed strictly within management science, to political issues, also articulated fully and clearly on the basis of rational-choice assumptions. Finally, there can be little doubt either that political practices, at local and global level, manifest an embedded alliance in the shift towards non-political politics that is towards the so-called modernization of politics within the advanced political economies. Work Cited Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London: UCL Press. Lukes, S. (1974) Power; A Radical View, London Macmillan. Chambers, I. (1994) Migrancy, Culture, Identity, London: Rutledge. Hay, C. (2002), Political Analysis, Palgrave Macmillan. Lash, S. (1990) Sociology of Postmodernism, Lemert, C. (1997) Postmodernism Is Not What You Think, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wiseman, J. (1998) Global Nation Australia and the Politics of Globalisation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richard Edwards, Robin Usher (2000) Globalisation and Pedagogy: Space, Place, and Identity, London: Rutledge. Hannah Arendt, On Violence ( New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969, 1970), p. 41. Tooker Eds., Affluence and Cultural Survival, 1981 Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, Washington D.C., Ethnological Society, 1984. Lukes S ed 1986 Power Blackwell, Oxford Read More