Página 29 - Coordinación de Servicios de Información

GLOBALIZATION
• "Spread of a buzzword: Innovations in language often intimate
that something important is unfolding in a given historical setting.
· . Until the 1980s notions of globality generally figured Iittle in con–
ceptions of sociallife. Such terminology resided at the margins of
speech and meaning. In discussing world affairs, speakers nearly
always invoked the vocabulary of 'international' rather than 'glo–
bal' rela tions and, with isola ted exceptions ... the world 'global'
was absent from the titles of publications. As recently as the mid-
1980s, concepts of 'global governance', 'global environmental
change', 'global gender relations' and 'global political economy'
were virtually unknown. Yet now, just a few years later, ideas of
globality pervade the language of journalists, politicians, bankers,
advertisers, officials and researchers the world overo ..
· . in pre-global times, world social geography was a matter of scat–
tered places: social relations involved crossing distance, as mea–
sured between points fixed in three- dimensional territorial space.
Although developments in transport and communications, such
as railways and postal services, had the effect of reducing time–
space separations, they never eliminated distance. In contrast, in
the globalized world of today people can by various means relate
with one another irrespective of their longitudinal and latitudinal
positions; as it were on a 'supra territorial' planeoGlobal events can
-via telecommunications, digital computers, audiovisual media,
rocketry and the Iike- occur almost simultaneously anywhere and
everywhere in the world.
· .. as the term is understood here then, globalization refers to the
emergence and spread of a supraterritorial dimension of social re–
lations. In institutional terms, the process has unfolded through
the proliferation and growth of so-called ' transnational' corpora–
tions, popular associations and regulatory agencies.... globality
has been tealized among other things in twenty-four hour, round–
the-world financial markets, whole world production lines and a
host of global consumption articles. Normatively, globalization has
occurred through the expansion of worlwide standards
English for Economisls 27