Globalization Literature Review

It is quite interesting to know that no phenomenon in the contemporary world can capture the current global trend in the social, cultural and political economy better than what is now generally referred to as globalization..

Although over the last two decades, studies and referencing to globalization have become increasingly, the concept itself can be traced back to a much earlier period as early as at the sixteenth century, with the vast European conquests in the hitherto unknown New World (Hedd and Anthony, 2002; Frank, 1998; Anderson, 2005)

The description of what globalization itself means cuts across different concepts, due to its approach or understanding among different authors, researchers, government, communities, cultures

Globalization can also be define as the process of international integration arising from the interchange of basic social arrangements such as world views, products, ideas, politics, right, values, norms, ideology, identity, citizenship, culture (AlRodhan & Stoudann, 2006; Beerkeens 2003). Scholte (1999) refers to Globalization as a “processes whereby many social relations acquire relatively distanceless and borderless qualities, so that human lives are increasingly played out in the world as a single place.”

In the book “the great globalization debate”, David Held and Anthony McGraw (2002) states that:

Globalization denotes the expanding scale, growing magnitude, speedingup and deepening impact of interregional flows and patterns of social interaction.It refers to a shift or transformation in the scale of human social organization that links distant communities and expands the reach of power relations across the world's major regions and continents (Held & Anthony,2002

“Despite the growing debate on the exact meaning of globalization, , there are areas of consensus to show that the last few decades have seen intensification of the process of globalization” : noteworthy advancements in general transportation, the arrival of new telecommunications infrastructure) ; agricultural and cultural exchanges programs and accelerating interdependence between states ( Wolf, 2014; Morale-Gomez and Melesse, 1998; Pigman,2010; Langhorne, 2001; Luke and Ó Tuathail 1998). These were further established by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) who identified four basic aspects of globalization: trade and transactions; capital and investment movements; migration and movement of people; and the dissemination of information and knowledge” (International Monetary Fund,