Globalization From Below: Contingency, Conflict, Contestation

Abstract

In the past decade or so, “globalization” has become a firmly entrenched catch-phrase in such diverse worlds as industry, academia, and popular culture. Businessmen and economists tend to laud the coming global era, while critics (including many labor historians) worry about its effects. However, both sides of the debate often share assumptions about the nature of globalization. They agree that it is a fairly new process which involves coordination of massive flows of capital, goods, and labor across national borders, the increasing impotence of national governments in regulating those flows, the increasing eradication of local cultures by a homogenous Westernized world culture, and the increasing powerlessness of local people in every corner of the world (or, depending on one's point of view, empowerment of local people through access to Western goods and ideas).