Globalization. George Ritzer
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education has spread through increasing areas of the world, with enrollments increasing from 100 million to 150 million students in only a decade (Altbach et al. 2019). This global spread is even truer of schools of business administration, especially those that offer MBA programs (Clegg and Carter 2007). Recently, American universities have, in effect, been opening “franchises” in various countries, especially the oil-rich Persian Gulf area. Universities are now even graded on various world rankings systems (Luque-Martínez and Faraoni 2019).
However, primary and secondary schools have not done as well in keeping up with globalization. Three key failures have been associated with today’s primary and secondary schools as they relate to globalization:
1 Schools are generally not engaging young people in learning with the result that when asked, most students say that school is “boring.” The various facets of globalization – economic, sociocultural, demographic – are everyday realities for young people, but the schools offer little that is relevant to those realities.
2 Schools, especially in the North, are not responding adequately to the needs of the large numbers of immigrant youth from the South. They often “quickly become marginalized as racially, ethnically, religiously, and linguistically marked minority groups… . The results of these general trends are painfully obvious in multiple measurable ways: from the high dropout rates among immigrant, ethnic and racial minorities in many wealthy countries, to stark differences in achievement patterns between native and racialized minorities” (Suarez-Orozco and Smith 2007: 3).
3 Arguably the most alarming problem is associated with the failures of schools in the less developed countries. As noted by UNICEF (2018), globally 11.9% of children are not in primary school, but 23.4% of children in the poorest countries are not in school. Globally 32.3% of children are not in upper secondary, but 50.4% in the poorest countries are not (UNICEF 2018). The problem is the worst in countries ravaged by conflict and natural disasters. As a result, they fall ever-further behind children in the North. In addition, these failures contribute to the enormous problem of illiteracy which is concentrated in the South and growing illiteracy there can only serve to widen the gap between North and South.
Primary and secondary schools need to change in order to adapt to the realities of the new global world.
The above gives at least a sense of the range of globalizations, but, in fact, even this iteration touches only on a small number of the globalizations to be dealt with in this volume. One important point about the idea that there are multiple globalizations is the fact that it further complicates the whole idea of finding a point of origin for globalization. Clearly, there are different points of origin depending on whether one is focusing on globalization in the economy, or politics, or science, or higher education, and so on. It clearly makes far more sense in the search for origins (assuming one wants to search for them) to specify different origins for each of the many forms of globalization than to seek out a single point of origin for globalization as a whole. Furthermore, even within each of the forms, there are sub-areas each of which is likely to have a different point of origin for the beginning of globalization (for example, malaria has been spreading globally for centuries).
WHAT DRIVES GLOBALIZATION?
This is another highly complex question with no easy answers. For example, if we accept the fact that there are multiple globalizations, then it is clear that it would be illusory to think that we could find a single driver, or even a small number of drivers. Yet, to seek out the drivers of each and every form of globalization would be a long and tedious process. At this point, at least, we need to restrict ourselves to a search for the drivers of globalization at the most general level. While we will focus on globalization in general, many of these same factors apply to at least some of the more specific globalizations.
One way to approach this is through one of the classic divisions in the social sciences – the distinction between material and ideational explanations. A material, or materialist, explanation would tend to focus on objective factors and forces. While there can be other material forces (e.g. the nation-state in the political realm), this generally comes down, as it did for Karl Marx (who was a materialist), to a focus on economic factors such as “forces” and “relations” of production, technology, and so on. It is this kind of thinking that leads many to the view that it is capitalism in general, or the contemporary MNC, that is the most important driving force in contemporary globalization.
The polar view, as it was for Marx, is that it is not material factors, but rather ideational (or “ideal”) factors, that are the main drivers of globalization. The emphasis on ideational factors was characteristic of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and his followers, the “young Hegelians.” Marx came of age in this intellectual context, but famously planted Hegel on his feet by focusing on material rather than ideational factors. However, Marx retained a secondary interest in such idea systems as ideology (for more on ideology, at least as it relates to the neoliberal view of globalization, see Chapter 4). Today, the idealist position on globalization is that the main drivers of the process are changes in thinking and ideas, as well as in information and knowledge. We have come increasingly to think in global, rather than in local, or even in national, terms. And, our knowledge base has followed suit so that it, too, is increasingly global in scope. A good example of the latter involves the issue of global climate change. In some ways (because, for example, of movies and books like Al Gore’s [2006] An Inconvenient Truth) we have come to know a great deal about global climate and climate change, perhaps a lot more than we know about our local climate (Brulle et al. 2012). And this greater knowledge about global climate change is leading at long last to more serious global efforts to deal with its causes and consequences. Thus, in this view, globalization is driven not by material changes, but by changes in ideas and knowledge.
Of course, there is a middle ground on this which sees both material and ideational factors as being of great importance. In terms of the history of social theory, Max Weber was the most famous social theorist to adopt such a view. While he set out, in contrast to Marx and the Marxists, to show the importance of ideational factors (e.g. the role of the ethos of Protestantism in the rise of capitalism in the West [Weber 1904–1905/1958]), this was in the context of a larger view that recognized the importance of both ideational and material factors (Weber 1927/1981). Actually, in the end, Weber saw material factors as the main drivers, but what is of greatest importance from our point of view is that he accorded importance to both. Thus, from this perspective, we can see globalization as being driven by a range of both material and ideational drivers. This is clear today in the global green movement which is driven by both ideas (e.g. those of Al Gore) and material realities (high gasoline prices or the drive for greater profit).
DOES GLOBALIZATION HOP RATHER THAN FLOW?
To the degree that globalization exists, does it flow or hop? In spite of occasional conflicts, it can be comforting to conceive of globalization in terms of flows. That is, it seems to suggest a kind of global equality with all parts of the globe being penetrated, at least theoretically, by these flows to more or less the same degree. However, as we all know, the world is characterized by great inequality (see Chapter 13 and 14). Therefore, all flows do not go everywhere in the world and, even when they do, they affect various areas to varying degrees and in very different ways. However, it is also possible that the idea of flows communicates the wrong, or at least a distorted, sense of globalization and that another metaphor might be more appropriate, at least for some parts of the world.
This is exactly what James Ferguson suggests in his work on Africa. He argues, rather, that at least in the case of Africa (and this idea applies elsewhere, as well), globalization “hops” from place to place rather than flowing evenly through the entire continent:
We have grown accustomed to a language of global “flows” in thinking about “globalization,” but flow is a particularly poor metaphor