The term globalisation describes the integration of nations, cultures, and economies through the global network of trade, logistics, immigration and communication. Its primal focus is the economic side of global interactions through trade, foreign direct investment, and international capital flows; along with the socio-cultural and political impacts of this global interlinking.
Though, Theodore Levitt is widely credited as the person who coined the term, when in 1983 – as a Harvard Business School marketing professor – he penned an article for the Harvard Business Review entitled The Globalization of Markets, where he defined globalisation as ‘the changes in social behaviour and technology that allowed companies to sell the same products around the world,’ the term was first introduced in 1930 as an entirely new approach to education. William Boyd, the author of The History of Western Education, co-edited Towards New Education, introducing the concept of globalisation as a keyword in pedagogical study: “Wholeness,..integration, globalization..would seem to be the keywords of the new education view of mind.” Boyd acquired the term as a translation from the French globalisation, used by Ovide Decroly and his la méthode globale for teaching children to read in the 20s.
The economic meaning of the term developed nearly three centuries later in relation to the European Common Market, when in 1959 the periodic International Organization published an article reporting that: “The six community countries would take the following first practical steps toward their common market goal..the globalization of quotas.” The term referred to the first steps of the 6 founding members of the EU, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, in the progressive abolition of custom duties and quotas within the European Economic Community.
Three years later, and along the global rise of multinational corporations, analysing the impact of mass media and society, Marshall McLuhan coined the term global village. In 1974s Immanuel Wallerstein published The Modern World System and the notion of one world connected by a complex network of international economic exchange which main purpose is the accumulation of capital. And the wide usage of globalisation by economists and social scientists reached its popularity in the 1980s when multinational corporations were largely viewed as the key instruments of finance capital.
Developments in transport and communications, the Internet and new payment systems, and the increased volumes of free trade and movement of people, have accelerated the pace of globalisation over the past 30 years.
But has globalisation gone too far? The question was first asked in 1997 by the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, who foresaw that the cost of greater “economic integration” would be greater “social disintegration”, to be followed by the New York Times 2007 call that: “Globalization should be managed by governments that represent their people and our planet, not by corporate empires that represent only their own short-term interests,” and to this year’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting calling for a reform to globalisation and the Governing Globalisation panel discussing significant global loses and backlash to globalisation.
