David Rowe argues that, contrary to what might have been expected, int — Globalization

"Low labour cost, along with flexibility in labour use, has become a key source of competitive advantage for firms. As external competition intensifies, the domestic industry has come under great pressure to restructure itself, to become more competitive and to adopt flexible policies with regard to production and labour. With a view to increasing global competitiveness, investors are moving more towards countries that either have low labour costs, or are shifting to informal employment arrangements. These changes create an entirely different political-economic environment for workers around the world. Greater international mobility of capital relative to labour puts workers from a given location at an immediate disadvantage, both in terms of bargaining power with the owners of capital (whose threat to move gains greater credibility) and with respect to the State. Thus the removal of domestic entry barriers and movement of capital to areas of cheap labour have caused intensification of domestic competition in many developing countries— especially those with surplus labour supply and those where labour is a major factor of production. This has been accentuated by potential investors citing the lack of flexibility in hiring and laying off workers as a concern, while targeting a developing country in which to invest. [...] Optimism with regard to labour as an agency of social progress has been replaced by pessimism that sees little prospect of workers acting on their own behalf."

"On globalization’s parallel track, demarcated by markets rather than territorial boundaries, corporations and firms have displaced nation-states as the key players on the international scene. They more often use the political institutions created by nation-states to work their will than they are used by those states to enact sovereign political objectives. Even philanthropies such as the Clinton Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the Ford Foundation have become weighty actors in the international marketplace, boasting an economic clout that many nation-states cannot begin to exercise."

"The processes associated with globalization have created hitherto unimaginable opportunities for cultural forms and practices to travel far beyond the indigenous sites and spaces in which they were first conceived and produced. While there have always been cultural movements and flows from one space to another, the intensity and extensity of contemporary intersections of the global and the local have forced scholars to look closely at the myriad ways in which culture is consumed – used up, made sense of, embraced, and explored. Examining this first sense of cultural ‘consumption’ takes up the difficult questions of cultural diversity and authenticity that have shaped much of the discussion around culture in/and globalization. For example, by looking at implications of the transformation of older cultural forms and the creation of new forms of global-local culture such as global literatures and world music, we can see the meaning and effects of social change on people’s identity and subjectivity."

"The problems and possibilities associated with the emergence of a global consumerist ethos is one with which scholars have only just begun to come to grips. For much of the past century, beginning with Thorstein Veblen’s investigation of conspicuous consumption in 1899, anxieties about commodity culture were treated as national or Western rather than global concerns. They have been explored in articles and books on a dizzying array of themes and topics, and from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Attempts to make analytic sense of the impact and significance of consumerism on modern cultures have been complicated from the outset by normative considerations – either of a moralizing character or by concerns about consumerism as a form of social control – as well as by the role played by consumerism in the rise of ‘mass’ societies. When these long-standing anxieties about consumption and consumerism are set against the space of the entire globe, coming to clear conclusions about its impact on global and local social relations is made even more difficult. The idea of consumerism as a form of social control, for example, blends easily into existing discourses of economic and cultural imperialism; what is described as ‘Americanism’ is often the threat of a consumer culture associated with US society. 7 Expressed more structurally, the addition of new global communication technologies and the increasing role of techno-scientific inquiry (labelled R&D) in the production of goods, have intersected with and altered practices of production and exchange, further multiplying the difficulties of accounting for consumption and consumerism in the world today."

"Projects to stop the spread of AIDS have tried to establish protective boundaries … by requiring HIV tests in order to cross national boundaries. The boundaries of nation-states, however, are increasingly permeable by all kinds of flows. Nothing can bring back the hygienic shields of colonial boundaries. The age of globalization is the age of universal contagion."

"Today, no country can ever truly cut itself off from the global media or from external sources of information; trends that start in one corner of the world are rapidly replicated thousands of miles away... A country trying to opt out of the global economy by cutting itself off from external trade and capital flows will still have to deal with the fact that the expectations of its population are shaped by their awareness of living standards and cultural products emerging from the outside world."