Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Globalization has become one of the central but contested concepts of contemporary social science. The term has further entered everyday commentary and analysis and features in many political, cultural, and economic debates. The globalized world order originates in the international organizations and regulatory systems set up after World War II – including the United Nations, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization), the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. However, the end of the Cold War was the prelude to the maturity of the concept of globalization, since after 1989, it was possible at least to imagine a “borderless” world in which people, goods, ideas, and images would flow with relative ease and the major global division between East and West had gone. A world divided by competing ideologies of capitalism and state socialism gave way to a more uncertain world in which capitalism became the dominant economic and social system. Coinciding with these changes, a major impetus to globalization was the development and availability of digital communication technologies from the late 1980s with dramatic consequences for the way economic and personal behavior were conducted. The collapse of communism and growth of digital technologies further coincided with a global restructuring of the state, finance, production, and consumption associated ... log in or subscribe to read full text