globilization and economy

sociology

The Agricultural Revolution

allowed humans to settle, produce surplus food, and specialize in nonfarming jobs, which led to the development of trade, money, cities, laws, and complex economies. Over time, these economies expanded through empires, colonies, and mercantilism, setting the stage for global trade and the Industrial Revolution.

Money

refers to an object that a society agrees to assign a value to so it can be exchanged for payment. In early economies, money was often objects like cowry shells, rice, barley, or even rum.

Mercantilism

is an economic policy based on accumulating silver and gold by controlling colonial and foreign markets through taxes and other charges. The resulting restrictive practices and exacting demands included monopolies, bans on certain goods, high tariffs, and exclusivity requirements. Mercantilist governments also promoted manufacturing and, with the ability to fund technological improvements, they helped create the equipment that led to the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution

transformed manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation through machines, assembly lines, and new technologies, greatly increasing efficiency, production, and global trade. While it boosted wealth and population growth, it also created social inequalities and harsh working conditions that led to ongoing labor and safety concerns.

Market socialism

describes a subtype of socialism that adopts certain traits of capitalism, like allowing limited private ownership or consulting market demands.

Postindustrial societies

focus on information and services rather than manufacturing, with most workers employed in the tertiary (services) and quaternary (knowledge and research) sectors. Advances in computers, the Internet, and digital technologies have transformed production and created new industries, making information a key commodity in modern economies.

mutualism

under which individuals and cooperative groups would exchange products with one another on the basis of mutually satisfactory contracts (Proudhon

Convergence theory

a sociological theory to explain how and why societies move toward similarity over time as their economies develop

depression

(a sustained recession across several economic sectors)

Globalization

refers to the process of integrating governments, cultures, and financial markets through international trade into a single world market.

global assembly lines

where products are assembled over the course of several international transactions. For instance, Apple designs its next-generation Mac prototype in the United States, components are made in various peripheral nations, they are then shipped to another peripheral nation such as Malaysia for assembly, and tech support is outsourced to India.

global commodity chains

where internationally integrated economic links connect workers and corporations for the purpose of manufacture and marketing (Plahe

xenophobia

which is an illogical fear and even hatred of foreigners and foreign goods.

automation

which replaces workers with technology,

Polarization

means that a gap has developed in the job market, with most employment opportunities at the lowest and highest levels and few jobs for those with mid-level skills and education.

outsourcing

—or contracting a job or set of jobs to an outside source—of manufacturing jobs to developing nations has greatly diminished the number of high-paying, often unionized, blue-collar positions available.

underemployment

a state in which a person accepts a lower paying, lower status job than their education and experience qualifies them to perform. Second, unemployment statistics only count those:

structural unemployment

which describes when there is a societal level of disjuncture between people seeking jobs and the available jobs.This mismatch can be geographic (they are hiring in one area, but most unemployed live somewhere else), technological (workers are replaced by machines, as in the auto industry), educational (a lack of specific knowledge or skills among the workforce) or can result from any sudden change in the types of jobs people are seeking versus the types of companies that are hiring.