Thursday, 1 August 2013

Getting To Grips With Globalisation

The term ‘globalisation’ is frequently quoted by politicians, economists, business owners, environmentalists and the list goes on ... but what does it actually mean?! Globalisation is traditionally seen as a primarily economic concept ... ‘the functional integration of the World’s economies’, but the term now has wider connotations. When looking for a definition of the term there seemed to be no standard meaning. Globalisation was defined as the following:
 
Ø  The process enabling financial and investment markets to operate internationally, largely as a result of deregulation and improved communications.
Ø  The process by which a company, etc., expands to operate internationally.
Ø  The worldwide movement toward economic, financial, trade and communications integration. Globalisation implies the opening of local and nationalistic perspectives to a broader outlook of an interconnected and interdependent world with free transfer of capital, goods, and services across national frontiers.
 
It is therefore clear that the term globalisation is used by different people to mean different things. Pupils being taught to the topic for the first time need to be made aware of this complexity but without introducing too much confusion. The topic may need to be broken down into smaller more manageable facets such as; economic, political, cultural and environmental globalisation. The definition on BBC Bitesize GCSE answers ‘what is globalisation?’ very succinctly:
 
Ø  The process by which the world is becoming increasingly interconnected as a result of massively increased trade and cultural exchange. Globalisation has increased the production of goods and services. The biggest companies are no longer national firms but multinational corporations with subsidiaries in many countries. Globalisation has been taking place for hundreds of years, but has speeded up enormously over the last half-century.
 
Now that I have looked into the topic of globalisation it is clear that there are many different terms to understand and areas to explore.

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