Chapter 4: Globalisation, development and
underdevelopment
Defining globalisation
The world is being seen as ever more global in character and orientation. This trend has
witnessed in increasing actual and potential interactions between different parts of the globe.
However, the impact is distributed unevenly across the Earth. In the South being included and
excluded from globalisation processes can be a major catalyst or hindrance to development.
Scheck and Haggis: globalisation is the intensification of global interconnectedness, a process
that they see as associated with the spread of capitalism as a production and market system.
Kiely: Globalisation refers to a world in which societies, cultures, politics and economies have, in
some sense, come closer together.
Globalisation is also referred as the rise of the ‘information society’ with development of new
technologies.
The risk of globalisation for the poorest nations is that they are being ‘integrated’ into a world
system, but in a precarious and marginalised position as a result of unequal power, trading and
financial arrangements.
yet , there remains much controversy about the likely developmental consequences of the
diverse strands which make up globalisation. The major theme of this chapter is that these
global tendencies are highly uneven, both spatially (between places and regions), and socially
(between peoples and groups).
Globalisation and development: ‘for and against’/’solution or problem’
Introduction
There are at least three distinct aspects to the current processes of global change that we are
witnessing:
1. The world is effectively ‘shrinking’ in terms of relative distances
2. Better communications make it possible to hear about what is happening elsewhere in
the world more swiftly than we ever did before.
3. The ascendancy (=overwicht) of global corporations and global marketing activities is
resulting in the availability of many standardised and globalised products and global
media throughout the world. For example, Big Macs, Levi jeans and Facebook but also
the ‘Global Financial Crisis’ in 2008
Strands of globalisation: economic, cultural and political
Economic globalisation: distance has become less important to economic activities (large
corporations in far distant regions, global production networks).
Cultural globalization: Western forms of consumption and lifestyles spread across the global
(global homogenisation)
, Political globalisation: erosion of the former role and powers of the nation state (Rise of
institutions such as the EU, UN, World Bank)
Globalisation and development/underdevelopment: a contentious issue
Pro-globalizers: globalisation will bring the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people
globally through freer trade and integration of economic activity. Equal and homogene world
Anti-capitalist / anti-globalisation: increasing inequalities between the Global South and the
Global North is the consequence of globalisation. ‘Uneven geographical development’ is a
product of the development of capitalism.
Globalisation as development
Places around the world are fast becoming, if not exactly the same, then certainly very similar.
The world will become more ‘Westernised’ or more ‘Americanised’: social and cultural
homogenisation. Westernisation is seen as a natural and desirable reflection of the globalised
spread of development
Globalisation and marginalisation
Globalisation is resulting in greater flexibility, permeability, openness, hybridity, plurality and
difference, both between places and between cultures. Globalisation is viewed as being closely
connected with the process of uneven development, and the perpetuation and exacerbation of
spatial inequalities.
Economic processes may not necessarily favour countries, places and people in the Global
south who often exist and operate in a ‘dominance-dependence’ relationship with the
corporations and institutions of the Global North.
Hallmarks of Western tastes, consumption and lifestyles (i.e. McDonalds) are available to all,
but reinterpreted locally, and take on different meanings in different places.
Evidence shows that globalisation is anything but a new process - it has been operating for
hundreds of years. It started with the age of discovery. It is associated with increasing
differences between peoples and places, rather than with evenness and uniformity.
Global transformations: a shrinking world or a more unequal world?
A shrinking world?
Both critics and proponents point to the major changes that have occured in the fields of
transport and communications as technological advances have brought places closer together.
Over the past 40 years there has been much talk about the world becoming a ‘global village’,
and the associated ’compression’ or ‘annihilation’ of space by time, in the context of what is
referred to as the ‘shrinking world’.
The main aspects of this change are:
1. The world has effectively become a ‘smaller place’ in terms of the time it takes to travel
around it as a result of a process known as ‘time-space compression’, according to
which the time to cross physical distance reduces with new transport and technological
advances (figure 4.2)
2. Increasingly aware of what is happening in other far-distant places, without the need to
move from our home localities. This is achieved via the mass media, social media and
