Глобальна економіка

3.1. Концепт глобалізації: історичний і міждисциплінарний аспекти

The concept of globalization has emerged over the last two decades from a number of distinct intellectual traditions and academic disciplines.

Three distinct academic origins to the current usage can be identified. The first is in business and management theory dating back to the 1960s.

Amongst a number of management gurus and within US business schools a number of commentators published what were initially business manuals concerned with how to run and improve the competitiveness of large US multinational firms. This represented a new, ‘cutting-edge’ area of management science at the time when US firms sought to expand their operations into more countries around the world. By the 1970s, the debate around the development of the multinational business organization had produced a sizeable literature and a number of theorists began to argue that firms needed to become global in the scope of their operations rather than replicating multiple national-scale operations. Key management thinkers began to refer to this process as ‘globalization ’ and by the 1980s this was already becoming one of the key vogue concepts pushed in both the academic literature on management and in the popular business literature. Commentators like Kenichi Ohmae, many of whom were themselves business practitioners working for large corporations or management consultancies, argue that the issue of globalization at firm level was the key challenge for business in the latter part of the twentieth century [1, с. 4-5].

Second is a diverse set of academic contributions across social and cultural theory, which again stem from the 1960s. Most notable amongst these is Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the ‘global village’ which sought to capture the way in which modernity was increasingly integrating global society through new forms of communication. Also important are concepts that emerged from the burgeoning environmental movement, which began to propagate a conceptual understanding of the Earth and its natural resources as a finite entity. ... The idea of ‘Spaceship Earth’ undoubtedly continues to resonate in debates around the global environment today.

Third, but no less important than the others, are a series of academic literatures across political economy and the social sciences that were more specifically concerned with post-Second World War international economic development and politics. During the 1960s, a number of different strands of academic theory were engaging with the ‘development-as- modernization’ paradigm which had characterized the new Bretton Woods institutions’ approach to the developing world. Many drew on classical social, political and philosophical theories including Marx, Weber and Durkheim. Notable predecessors to globalization theories include those of Andre Gunder Frank and others on ‘dependent development’, contending that the Third World was held in a state of underdevelopment by the capitalist First World. Similarly, Immanuel Wallerstein’s ‘world systems analysis’ developed this theoretical line in arguing from a Marxian perspective that the capitalist world economy was characterized by core-periphery relations and that a capitalist world system had become ‘global in scope’ during the twentieth century.

However, it was not until the late 1980s that globalization as a term began to become common currency between these various descrete literatures and spheres of discussions. Crossover between academic disciplines began to occur, and the occasional journalist or policy commentator started to use the word. This was certainly catalysed by the end of the Cold War and the ‘triumph of free-market capitalism’. This process accelerated through the 1990s as globalization usage ‘took off, first measurably in the number of academic articles, then quickly in book titles and newspapers. By the mid-1990s the word had ceased to be obscure jargon and could be found across the Internet and popular media. Its entrance into all major global languages and everyday usage probably became assured when mass protests at G8 summits began to be attributed to the ‘anti-globalization’ movement in the later 1990s [1, с. 6].