8 Theories of Globalization – Explained!

All theories of globalization have been put hereunder in eight categories: liberalism, political realism,
Marxism, constructivism, postmodernism, feminism , Trans-formationalism and eclecticism. Each one of
them carries several variations.

1. Theory of Liberalism:
Liberalism sees the process of globalisation as market-led extension of modernisation. At the most
elementary level, it is a result of ‘natural’ human desires for economic welfare and political liberty. As such,
transplanetary connectivity is derived from human drives to maximise material well-being and to exercise
basic freedoms. These forces eventually interlink humanity across the planet.

They fructify in the form of:

(b) Suitable legal and institutional arrangement to enable markets and liberal democracy to spread on a
trans world scale.

Such explanations come mostly from Business Studies, Economics, International Political Economy, Law
and Politics. Liberalists stress the necessity of constructing institutional infrastructure to support
globalisation. All this has led to technical standardisation, administrative harmonisation, translation
arrangement between languages, laws of contract, and guarantees of property rights.

But its supporters neglect the social forces that lie behind the creation of technological and institutional
underpinnings. It is not satisfying to attribute these developments to ‘natural’ human drives for economic
growth and political liberty. They are culture blind and tend to overlook historically situated life-worlds and
knowledge structures which have promoted their emergence.

All people cannot be assumed to be equally amenable to and desirous of increased globality in their lives.
Similarly, they overlook the phenomenon of power. There are structural power inequalities in promoting
globalisation and shaping its course. Often they do not care for the entrenched power hierarchies between
states, classes, cultures, sexes, races and resources.

2. Theory of Political Realism:

Another group suggests that a dominant state can bring stability to world order. The ‘hegemon’ state
(presently the US or G7/8) maintains and defines international rules and institutions that both advance its
own interests and at the same time contain conflicts between other states. Globalisation has also been
explained as a strategy in the contest for power between several major states in contemporary world
politics.

They concentrate on the activities of Great Britain, China, France, Japan, the USA and some other large
states. Thus, the political realists highlight the issues of power and power struggles and the role of states
in generating global relations.

At some levels, globalisation is considered as antithetical to territorial states. States, they say, are not equal
in globalisation, some being dominant and others subordinate in the process. But they fail to understand
that everything in globalisation does not come down to the acquisition, distribution and exercise of power.

Globalisation has also cultural, ecological, economic and psychological dimensions that are not reducible
to power politics. It is also about the production and consumption of resources, about the discovery and
affirmation of identity, about the construction and communication of meaning, and about humanity shaping
and being shaped by nature. Most of these are apolitical.

Power theorists also neglect the importance and role of other actors in generating globalisation. These are
sub-state authorities, macro-regional institutions, global agencies, and private-sector bodies. Additional
types of power-relations on lines of class, culture and gender also affect the course of globalisation. Some
other structural inequalities cannot be adequately explained as an outcome of interstate competition. After
all, class inequality, cultural hierarchy, and patriarchy predate the modern states.

3. Theory of Marxism:
Marxism is principally concerned with modes of production, social exploitation through unjust distribution,
and social emancipation through the transcendence of capitalism. Marx himself anticipated the growth of
globality that ‘capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier to conquer the whole earth for its
market’. Accordingly, to Marxists, globalisation happens because trans-world connectivity enhances
opportunities of profit-making and surplus accumulation.

Marxists reject both liberalist and political realist explanations of globalisation. It is the outcome of
historically specific impulses of capitalist development. Its legal and institutional infrastructures serve the
logic of surplus accumulation of a global scale. Liberal talk of freedom and democracy make up a
legitimating ideology for exploitative global capitalist class relations.

The neo-Marxists in dependency and world-system theories examine capitalist accumulation on a global
scale on lines of core and peripheral countries. Neo-Gramscians highlight the significance of underclass
struggles to resist globalising capitalism not only by traditional labour unions, but also by new social
movements of consumer advocates, environmentalists, peace activists, peasants, and women. However,
Marxists give an overly restricted account of power.

There are other relations of dominance and subordination which relate to state, culture, gender, race, sex,
and more. Presence of US hegemony, the West-centric cultural domination, masculinism, racism etc. are
not reducible to class dynamics within capitalism. Class is a key axis of power in globalisation, but it is not
the only one. It is too simplistic to see globalisation solely as a result of drives for surplus accumulation.

It also seeks to explore identities and investigate meanings. People develop global weapons and pursue
global military campaigns not only for capitalist ends, but also due to interstate competition and militarist
culture that predate emergence of capitalism. Ideational aspects of social relations also are not outcome of
the modes of production. They have, like nationalism, their autonomy.

4. Theory of Constructivism:
Globalisation has also arisen because of the way that people have mentally constructed the social world
with particular symbols, language, images and interpretation. It is the result of particular forms and
dynamics of consciousness. Patterns of production and governance are second-order structures that derive
from deeper cultural and socio-psychological forces. Such accounts of globalisation have come from the
fields of Anthropology, Humanities, Media of Studies and Sociology.

Constructivists concentrate on the ways that social actors ‘construct’ their world: both within their own minds
and through inter-subjective communication with others. Conversation and symbolic exchanges lead
people to construct ideas of the world, the rules for social interaction, and ways of being and belonging in
that world. Social geography is a mental experience as well as a physical fact. They form ‘in’ or ‘out’ as well
as ‘us’ and they’ groups.

They conceive of themselves as inhabitants of a particular global world. National, class, religious and other
identities respond in part to material conditions but they also depend on inter-subjective construction and
communication of shared self-understanding. However, when they go too far, they present a case of social-
psychological reductionism ignoring the significance of economic and ecological forces in shaping mental
experience. This theory neglects issues of structural inequalities and power hierarchies in social relations.
It has a built-in apolitical tendency.

5. Theory of Postmodernism:
Some other ideational perspectives of globalisation highlight the significance of structural power in the
construction of identities, norms and knowledge. They all are grouped under the label of ‘postmodernism’.
They too, as Michel Foucault does strive to understand society in terms of knowledge power: power
structures shape knowledge. Certain knowledge structures support certain power hierarchies.

The reigning structures of understanding determine what can and cannot be known in a given socio-
historical context. This dominant structure of knowledge in modern society is ‘rationalism’. It puts emphasis
on the empirical world, the subordination of nature to human control, objectivist science, and instrumentalist
efficiency. Modern rationalism produces a society overwhelmed with economic growth, technological
control, bureaucratic organisation, and disciplining desires.

This mode of knowledge has authoritarian and expansionary logic that leads to a kind of cultural imperialism
subordinating all other epistemologies. It does not focus on the problem of globalisation per se. In this way,
western rationalism overawes indigenous cultures and other non-modem life-worlds.

Postmodernism, like Marxism, helps to go beyond the relatively superficial accounts of liberalist and political
realist theories and expose social conditions that have favoured globalisation. Obviously, postmodernism
suffers from its own methodological idealism. All material forces, though come under impact of ideas,
cannot be reduced to modes of consciousness. For a valid explanation, interconnection between ideational
and material forces is not enough.

6. Theory of Feminism:
It puts emphasis on social construction of masculinity and femininity. All other theories have identified the
dynamics behind the rise of trans-planetary and supra-territorial connectivity in technology, state, capital,
identity and the like.

Biological sex is held to mould the overall social order and shape significantly the course of history,
presently globality. Their main concern lies behind the status of women, particularly their structural
subordination to men. Women have tended to be marginalised, silenced and violated in global
communication.
7. Theory of Trans-formationalism:
This theory has been expounded by David Held and his colleagues. Accordingly, the term ‘globalisation’
reflects increased interconnectedness in political, economic and cultural matters across the world creating
a “shared social space”. Given this interconnectedness, globalisation may be defined as “a process (or set
of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organisation of social relations and
transactions, expressed in transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction and
power.”

While there are many definitions of globalisation, such a definition seeks to bring together the many and
seemingly contradictory theories of globalisation into a “rigorous analytical framework” and “proffer a
coherent historical narrative”. Held and McGrew’s analytical framework is constructed by developing a three
part typology of theories of globalisation consisting of “hyper-globalist,” “sceptic,” and “transformationalist”
categories.

The Hyperglobalists purportedly argue that “contemporary globalisation defines a new era in which people
everywhere are increasingly subject to the disciplines of the global marketplace”. Given the importance of
the global marketplace, multi-national enterprises (MNEs) and intergovernmental organisations (IGOs)
which regulate their activity are key political actors. Sceptics, such as Hirst and Thompson (1996) ostensibly
argue that “globalisation is a myth which conceals the reality of an international economy increasingly
segmented into three major regional blocs in which national governments remain very powerful.” Finally,
transformationalists such as Rosenau (1997) or Giddens (1990) argue that globalisation occurs as “states
and societies across the globe are experiencing a process of profound change as they try to adapt to a
more interconnected but highly uncertain world”.

Developing the transformationalist category of globalisation theories. Held and McGrew present a rather
complicated typology of globalisation based on globalization’s spread, depth, speed, and impact, as well
as its impacts on infrastructure, institutions, hierarchical structures and the unevenness of development.

They imply that the “politics of globalisation” have been “transformed” (using their word from the definition
of globalisation) along all of these dimensions because of the emergence of a new system of “political
globalisation.” They define “political globalisation” as the “shifting reach of political power, authority and
forms of rule” based on new organisational interests which are “transnational” and “multi-layered.”

These organisational interests combine actors identified under the hyper-globalist category (namely IGOs
and MNEs) with those of the sceptics (trading blocs and powerful states) into a new system where each of
these actors exercises their political power, authority and forms of rule.
Thus, the “politics of globalisation” is equivalent to “political globalisation” for Held and McGrew. However,
Biyane Michael criticises them. He deconstructs their argument, if a is defined as “globalisation” (as defined
above), b as the organisational interests such as MNEs, IGOs, trading blocs, and powerful states, and c as
“political globalisation” (also as defined above), then their argument reduces to a. b. c. In this way, their
discussion of globalisation is trivial.

Held and others present a definition of globalisation, and then simply restates various elements of the
definition. Their definition, “globalisation can be conceived as a process (or set of processes) which
embodies a transformation in the spatial organisation of social relations” allows every change to be an
impact of globalisation. Thus, by their own definition, all the theorists they critique would be considered as
“transformationalists.” Held and McGrew also fail to show how globalisation affects organisational interests.

8. Theory of Eclecticism:
Each one of the above six ideal-type of social theories of globalisation highlights certain forces that
contribute to its growth. They put emphasis on technology and institution building, national interest and
inter-state competition, capital accumulation and class struggle, identity and knowledge construction,
rationalism and cultural imperialism, and masculinize and subordination of women. Jan Art Scholte
synthesises them as forces of production, governance, identity, and knowledge.

Accordingly, capitalists attempt to amass ever-greater resources in excess of their survival needs:
accumulation of surplus. The capitalist economy is thoroughly monetised. Money facilitates accumulation.
It offers abundant opportunities to transfer surplus, especially from the weak to the powerful. This mode of
production involves perpetual and pervasive contests over the distribution of surplus. Such competition
occurs both between individual, firms, etc. and along structural lines of class, gender, race etc.

Their contests can be overt or latent. Surplus accumulation has had transpired in one way or another for
many centuries, but capitalism is a comparatively recent phenomenon. It has turned into a structural power,
and is accepted as a ‘natural’ circumstance, with no alternative mode of production. It has spurred
globalisation in four ways: market expansion, accounting practices, asset mobility and enlarged arenas of
commodification. Its technological innovation appears in communication, transport and data processing as
well as in global organisation and management. It concentrates profits at points of low taxation. Information,
communication, finance and consumer sectors offer vast potentials to capital making it ‘hyper-capitalism’.

Any mode of production cannot operate in the absence of an enabling regulatory apparatus. There are
some kind of governance mechanisms. Governance relates processes whereby people formulate,
implement, enforce and review rules to guide their common affairs.” It entails more than government. It can
extend beyond state and sub-state institutions including supra-state regimes as well. It covers the full scope
of societal regulation.

In the growth of contemporary globalisation, besides political and economic forces, there are material and
ideational elements. In expanding social relations, people explore their class, their gender, their nationality,
their race, their religious faith and other aspects of their being. Constructions of identity provide collective
solidarity against oppression. Identity provides frameworks for community, democracy, citizenship and
resistance. It also leads from nationalism to greater pluralism and hybridity.

Earlier nationalism promoted territorialism, capitalism, and statism, now these plural identities are feeding
more and more globality, hyper-capitalism and polycentrism. These identities have many international
qualities visualised in global diasporas and other group affiliations based on age, class, gender, race,
religious faith and sexual orientations. Many forms of supra-territorial solidarities are appearing through
globalisation.

In the area of knowledge, the way that the people know their world has significant implications for the
concrete circumstances of that world. Powerful patterns of social consciousness cause globalisation.
Knowledge frameworks cannot be reduced to forces of production, governance or identity.

Mindsets encourage or discourage the rise of globality. Modern rationalism is a general configuration of
knowledge. It is secular as it defines reality in terms of the tangible world of experience. It understands
reality primarily in terms of human interests, activities and conditions. It holds that phenomena can be
understood in terms of single incontrovertible truths that are discoverable by rigorous application of
objective research methods.

Rationalism is instrumentalist. It assigns greatest value to insights that enable people efficiently to solve
immediate problems. It subordinates all other ways of understanding and acting upon the world. Its
knowledge could then be applied to harness natural and social forces for human purposes. It enables
people to conquer disease, hunger, poverty, war, etc., and maximise the potentials of human life. It looks
like a secular faith, a knowledge framework for capitalist production and a cult of economic efficiency.
Scientism and instrumentalism of rationalism is conducive to globalisation. Scientific knowledge is non-
territorial.

The truths revealed by ‘objective’ method are valid for anyone, anywhere, and anytime on earth. Certain
production processes, regulations, technologies and art forms are applicable across the planet. Martin
Albrow rightly says that reason knows no territorial limits. The growth of globalisation is unlikely to reverse
in the foreseeable future.
However, Scholte is aware of insecurity, inequality and marginalisation caused by the present process of
globalisation. Others reject secularist character of the theory, its manifestation of the imperialism of
westernist-modernist-rationalist knowledge. Anarchists challenge the oppressive nature of states and other
bureaucratic governance frameworks. Globalisation neglects environmental degradation and equitable
gender relations.

https://www.politicalsciencenotes.com/articles/8-theories-of-globalization-
explained/642#:~:text=ADVERTISEMENTS%3A,of%20them%20carries%20several%20variations.