What Globalization Refers To

Globalization is among the most used and least precisely specified terms in contemporary social science. Part of the imprecision is unavoidable: the term points to a genuinely heterogeneous bundle of processes operating at different scales, with different drivers, and different distributional consequences. Part of the imprecision is avoidable, and the purpose of this topic is to disaggregate the bundle into analytically separable processes whose empirical content and sociological stakes can be examined one at a time.

The starting point is a working definition. Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, and Perraton, in the 1999 synthesis Global Transformations, propose that globalization refers to a shift in the spatial form of human activity such that social, political, and economic relations are organized across continental distances and generate flows and networks of activity, interaction, and power (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt, and Perraton 1999, pp. 16-20). They distinguish globalization along four dimensions: extensity (how geographically wide the networks reach), intensity (how dense the flows are), velocity (how fast they move), and impact propensity (how consequential they are for the places they touch). The four dimensions allow one to say, for instance, that the nineteenth-century world economy had high extensity but lower intensity than the present, while the present has extremely high intensity and velocity across specific domains.

It is useful to separate globalization from three adjacent processes with which it is often conflated. Internationalization refers to growing relations and exchanges between nation-states that remain organized as nation-states; the post-1945 expansion of trade treaties and diplomatic institutions is primarily internationalization. Transnationalization refers to the emergence of actors — corporations, NGOs, advocacy networks, diaspora communities — whose operations are not principally organized at the level of any single state. Universalization refers to the spread of particular cultural forms, norms, or institutional templates to cover the globe, which is an empirical question, not a definition. Globalization in the Held et al. sense encompasses elements of all three without being reducible to any of them (Held et al. 1999, pp. 27-28).

The analytical payoff of disaggregation is that different processes travel at different speeds and in different directions. Economic globalization, cultural globalization, and political globalization are not a single trajectory but three trajectories whose relative advance varies across decades and regions. Charles Tilly's historical work on contentious politics treats globalization as a phased process rather than a linear one, with a nineteenth-century phase, an interwar reversal, a postwar reconstruction, and a late-twentieth-century acceleration — each phase with its own specific actors, institutions, and contestations (Tilly 2004, pp. 95-102). Recognizing phases matters because the 2020s may well represent the opening of a new phase whose shape is not yet determined.

A further useful distinction is between globalization as process and globalization as condition. Process refers to ongoing change — more trade, more migration, more cross-border communication. Condition refers to the state of the world at a given moment — the degree to which social relations are already organized transnationally. Most contemporary empirical work examines the process question, because the condition is complex and not easily summarized in a single index. But the condition question matters for normative and political debates: if the world is already highly globalized in certain respects, then political projects of reversal face different obstacles than if globalization is merely an accelerating trend.

Finally, globalization is not only something that happens to societies; it is something that societies actively produce. The trade regimes, financial architectures, communication networks, and migration systems that constitute contemporary global connection are the product of specific policy choices by specific actors. This point, which runs through the topic, undermines any account of globalization as a natural or inevitable force and restores it to the domain of politics and institutional choice (Sassen 2001, pp. 11-17).