Introduction and the Concept of Globalization

Practice vocabulary flashcards based on lecture notes regarding the definition, history, and theoretical perspectives of globalization.

Contemporary World

Refers to circumstances and ideas of the present age, dealing with problems and issues related to environment, population, wealth, power, tensions, and conflicts.

Globalization

The phenomenon of increasing interconnection between the world's economies as reflected in the flow of goods, capital, people, and ideas.

Kenichi Ohmae

A Japanese organizational theorist and management consultant who, in $1992$, defined globalization as the onset (beginning) of borderless.

George Ritzer

An American Sociologist who in $2015$ defined globalization as a transplanetary process involving increasing liquidity and the growing multidirectional flows of people, objects, places, and information.

Cesare Poppi

An Italian Sociologist who characterized globalization as a debate.

Hardwired Perspective

A perspective by Nayan Chanda ($2007$) suggesting globalization is rooted in basic human needs to improve life, traceable back to ancestors walking out of Africa roughly $50,000$ years ago.

Nayan Chanda

The founder and editor-in-chief of YaleGlobal Online ($2001$) who identified five urges toward a better life: commerce, religion, politics, warfare, and adventure.

Out of Africa Hypothesis

Also known as the Replacement Hypothesis, it posits that early populations of modern humans from Africa migrated and entirely replaced existing populations of archaic humans like Neandertals and Homo erectus.

Epochs of Globalization

Specific waves or periods of globalization including the globalization of religion ($4^{th}$-$7^{th}$ centuries), European colonial conquest (late $15^{th}$ cent), and Post-Cold War period among others.

Christopher Columbus

An explorer whose discovery of America in $1492$ is treated as a starting event of globalization.

Ferdinand Magellan

An explorer whose completed circumnavigation of the world in $1522$ is considered a milestone in the start of globalization.

World System Theory

A theory by Immanuel Wallerstein describing a social system with a power hierarchy between core, semi-periphery, and periphery regions integrated through the market.

Immanuel Wallerstein

American sociologist who authored World System Theory and envisioned the eventual emergence of a socialist world-government.

Core

Powerful and wealthy societies with high technological development and capital-intensive production that dominate and exploit peripheral societies.

Periphery

Regions commonly referred to as third-world countries that lack strong central governments, are labor-intensive, and provide cheap labor and raw materials.

Semi-periphery

States that act as a buffer zone between the core and periphery, featuring a mix of institutional activities from both.

Socialist World Government

Wallerstein's alternative world-system featuring collective ownership, elimination of exploitation, and the principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

Homogenization Theories

Cultural theories that see a global cultural convergence (coming together), highlighting uniform consumption patterns and cosmopolitanism.

Heterogeneity Approaches

Approaches that see continued cultural differences and highlight local cultural autonomy, cultural resistance, and polarization.

Cosmopolitanism

A state of being made up of diverse peoples, often associated with homogenization and uniform global patterns.