Blackwell Reference Online

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Comment on this article   Although the concept of globalization has become pervasive in both media and academic accounts of the world economy, its precise meaning has always presented us with a problem. Like many social scientific terms, globalization does not have a single point of origin, but emerged in the mid to late 1980s in several disciplines. Its first manifestations came in media and cultural studies as early as the 1970s – the notion of the “global village” (attributed to Marshall McLuhan) created by the spread of TV, telephones, information and communication technology (ICT), and other media providing a compelling and enduring image of the technological “shrinking” of space characteristic of many definitions of globalization. Such ideas were further refined to present globalization as a process – as the coming together of the world as one place ( Robertson and Lechner 1985 ; Robertson 1992 ). Such early sociological/ anthropological accounts coincided with increasing interest in the business studies and economics literatures as they picked up on both the implications of and opportunities created by globalization as a strategic move by corporations ( Ohmae 1990 ). The increasing size and complexity of the world's largest business agglomerations, the increasing dominance of trade over manufacturing, the rapidly changing geographies and demographies of production and ... log in or subscribe to read full text