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Developing a Global Perspective 17

accurately to the continuation of a structured ‘centre-periphery’ set of relations
between a powerful ‘core zone’ of a wealthy minority of countries, and a rather less
powerful and less wealthy majority.
The simplicity of these sceptical accounts is certainly attractive – especially to the
more politically minded and pessimistically inclined social scientist. Yet the sceptical
perspective can be criticised for presenting an overly dismissive account of some of
the undeniably important processes and outcomes of globalisation highlighted
throughout this chapter. At this point it is important to recognise that this distinction
between globalism and scepticism is not intended to be a ‘crude dualism’ (Held and
McGrew 2000). Instead, it should be seen as a spectrum within which most views
of globalisation can be located. As such, a conciliatory position as described
(and indeed as favoured) by Held and colleagues is that of the ‘transformationalist’
perspective. Here it is acknowledged that some forms of globalisation – both as
processes and outcomes – are undeniably taking place, and are associated with some
significant political, economic and social changes across some societies and regions.
However, it is also acknowledged that these changes and patterns are not experi-
enced across the world in a homogeneous form as a single ‘condition’. Instead,
the processes and outcomes of globalisation must be seen as uneven, disjointed and
contradictory, and subject to various differences and imbalances in power between
states, societies and communities. In providing an extreme example of this,
Held points to the obvious fact that “political and economic elites in the world’s
major metropolitan areas are much more tightly integrated into, and have much
greater control over, global networks than do the subsistence farmers of Burundi”
(Held et al. 1999, p.28).
From the transformationalist perspective, then, globalisation is manifest as a form
of ‘global-stratification’ rather than global-unification. Any global processes there-
fore need to be seen in terms of unequal and fragmented relationships where some
states, societies and communities are enmeshed in the global order at the expense of
other more marginalised actors. Thus, as Rizvi and Lingard (2010, p.24) reason:

globalisation is an outcome of various structural processes that manifest in
different ways in the economy, politics and culture. The globalised world is
fundamentally heterogeneous, unequal and conflictive, rather than integrated
and seamless. It is experienced differently by different communities, and even
individuals, and is sustained and created by people and institutions with
widely different histories and political interests.
This view of globalisation still recognises entities such as the nation state as key
sites of determination. As Mok and Lee (2003, p.18) describe, “seen in this light,
national governments are far from diminished but are reconstituted and restructured
in the growing complexity of processes of governance in the context of globalization”.
This is particularly the case with public sector domains of society such as education.
Indeed, from an educational perspective, the transformationalist approach has been