Page 23 - Education in a Digital World

10 Developing a Global Perspective

regarding government and institutional activities (what he refers to as ‘ideoscapes’),
the global movement of trade and capital (‘financescapes’) and global flows of media
content (‘mediascapes’). A final component in Appadurai’s model is the transportation
technologies that facilitate these movements of people, goods, ideas and information.
These ‘technoscapes’ range from the shipping container to the wireless internet
connection. In all these ways, globalisation therefore implies a number of potential
changes to social organisation and social relations. These include an internationalisation
and liberalisation of practices and processes underpinning the increasingly unrestricted
exchange of information, ideas, objects and people between organisations around
the world. These changes also include the dissemination of objects and experiences
around the world on a ‘de-territorialised’ basis where social space is separated from
physical place or location.
While useful, these descriptions still tell us little about the nature of the products,
policies and outcomes of the processes of globalisation. In this sense, Levitt’s original
description is useful in reflecting the fundamentally economic nature of the concept of
globalisation. Indeed, when using the phrase ‘globalisation’ most people are – at
least implicitly – referring to the growth of economic globalisation over the past
forty years or so. As far as many commentators are concerned, the globalised nation
of the economic sphere is all encompassing. Regardless of geographical location or
social background, most readers of this book will be aware of recent changes in
international trade, global patterns of consumption and the outsourcing of production
to other regions. If nothing else, these changes are typified by the growing impor-
tance of multinational and transnational corporations in everyday life – described by
Rizvi and Lingard (2010, p.28) as “the single most powerful force in creating global
shifts in economic activity”. Indeed, the activities of corporations such as Wal-Mart,
Exxon Mobil and Citigroup could be said to be shaping the world in which we live
in increasingly interconnected and interdependent ways.
It is important, therefore, to distinguish between different elements of ‘global’
economic reorganisation. For example, it could be argued that the past forty years
have seen a growing interconnectedness of economic markets and a creeping realisa-
tion of ‘global common markets’. In industrial terms, for example, the production of
goods and services now take place through worldwide production markets and
international forms of trade and exchange. Worldwide demands for a sufficient
‘global’ quantity and quality of skilled labour is also of continued importance – not
least the growing demand for high-skilled intellectual workers. In financial terms,
the past forty years have also seen the emergence and dominance of worldwide
financial markets. As all these substantial examples illustrate, economic globalisation
needs to be understood as a multifaceted issue.
That said, any consideration of the contemporary significance of globalisation and
the global also needs to look well beyond the economic. As Hirst and colleagues
have argued, one of the appealing but infuriating aspects of globalisation as an area
of investigation and debate is its all-encompassing character: “the term ‘globalisation’
seems to have an almost infinite capacity to inflate – so that more and more aspects