Models of Globalization

Abstract

All of us are, willy-nilly, by design or by default, on the move. We are on the move even if, physically, we stay put: immobility is not a realistic option in a world of permanent change. And yet the effects of that new condition are radically unequal. Some of its become fully and truly “global”: some are fixed in their “locality”—a predicament neither pleasurable nor endurable in the world in which the “globals” set the tone and compose the rules of the life-game.—Zygmunt Bauman,Globalization: The Human Consequences (2)To say that globalization is ubiquitous is stating the obvious. forglobalizationhas become a household word in boardrooms, local and international institutions, the academy, and the media. It also shapes the everyday life of all but the most disadvantaged communities. Besides having the world at my fingertips twenty-four hours a day, courtesy of CNN and other news channels, I am connected by a mere click of the mouse, even in South Africa, to colleagues across vast geographic distances locally and abroad. The supermarket down the road in my Johannesburg suburb offers me the choice of Oprah's Book Club, the “taste of Provence,” and African, Indian, Chinese, English, and a host of other flavors, not to mention Coca-Cola, because I live in a society made up of different cultures and ethnicities. Without having to move even a mile, I feel like M. de Vogüé, of whomHarper's Magazinesaid in 1892, “[He] loves travel; he goes to the East and to the West for colors and ideas; his interests are as wide as the universe; his ambition, to use a word of his own, is to be ‘global’” (“Global”).