A complex process involving the worldwide diffusion of cultural products, the streamlining of international manufacturing and trade, the standardization of global financial markets, and the prevalence of new media technology capable of simultaneous real-time transmission of content everywhere in the world. Often described in terms of a âshrinkingâ of the planet, the reality is in fact the opposite: globalization is the result of the massive expansion of processes and enterprises that were once national or at most regional in scale and scope. Globalization is a highly contested term. First of all, there is no agreement that it actually exists; second, where there is agreement that it exists, there is considerable argument about when it began; third, where there is agreement about both its existence and its origin, there is disagreement about whether this constitutes anything new. Complicating matters is the fact that globalization is not âownedâ by any single discipline and could even be said to have been simultaneously invented by several disciplines at once. So, when an economist, a historian, and a sociologist speak about globalization, it cannot be taken for granted that what they have in mind is exactly the same thing. Not surprisingly, perhaps, there is also very little agreement about whether globalization is a good or bad thing---there is no consensus view on either the Left or the Right. Does globalization exist? The evidence would seem to be overwhelming. The existence of institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court, and the United Nations, not to mention multinational corporations like FordÂź, Coca-ColaÂź, and MicrosoftÂź whose businesses reach to almost every corner of the globe, is a compelling argument for the affirmative case. But there are those, like American anthropologist James Clifford, who make the counter-claim that there are still hundreds of millions of people in the poorer parts of the world completely unaware of globalization. This view holds true if globalization is viewed strictly as a phenomenon that one has to be conscious of or directly participate in for it to exist. Beck, Ulrich and other risk society theorists have shown, however, that this is not the case. For example, it is widely accepted that climate change is a global phenomenon brought about by human actions that affects every person on the planet whether they are aware of it or not. Assuming that globalization does exist, that there are enough processes and enterprises of a global scale and scope to agree that it is a reality, then when did it start? This is a periodizing hypothesis and as such the answer turns on whether one can point to what amounts to paradigm shift, a moment when things became different in kind. dependency theory and world-system theory scholars like AndrĂ© Gunder Frank and Wallerstein, Immanuel, among others, argue that what we know of as globalization today is simply international trade by another name and that has been going on since ancient times. On this view, globalization is simply the latest and most extensive phase of process that has been ongoing for more than 2,000 years, and therefore nothing particularly new. The counter argument is that the latter half of the twentieth century has seen such seismic changes in international trade regulation, business practice, technological advancement, geopolitical alignment, and culture in general, that one is compelled to take the view that there is something radically different happening today compared to even the recent past (i.e. before World War II). The two most obvious indicators of this change are the financial markets and the media---the fact that the latter has taken to almost obsessive reporting of the former is doubtless the reason for its visibility, but its genuine global potency was made abundantly apparent in the so-called credit crunch of 2007â9. Anyone watching a major news service like CNN or BBC cannot help but have the impression that globalization is a fact: almost everything is reported in terms of its global impact (or alternatively in terms of the way the global impacts on the local). In cultural terms, globalization manifests itself in two ways: (i) the global diffusion of products originally associated with a single culture or nation (e.g., sushi, hamburgers, French fries, coffee, chocolate, and so on are available practically everywhere in the world); (ii) a global breaking down of local tastes, or to put it another way, a global cosmopolitanism of taste (e.g., sushi is available everywhere because tastes have changed to accommodate it). American sociologist Ritzer, George has tried to characterize globalization as McDonaldization, but this is a simplification---it assumes that globalization spread like a virus from a single site, namely the USA, whereas in fact it is the product of concurrent changes of the kind that only something like complexity theory would be capable of theorizing properly. Further Reading: F. Jameson and M. Miyoshi The Cultures of Globalization (1998). A. MacGillivray A Brief History of Globalisation: The Untold Story of Our Incredible Shrinking Planet (2006). M. Steger Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (2003).