Globalization

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Eastern Telegraph Company 1899 chart of underseatelegraph cabling. An example of modern globalizingtechnology in the beginning of the 20th century.

Globalization is the process of international integration arising from the interchange of world views, products, ideas, and other aspects of culture.^[1][2] Globalization describes the interplay across cultures of macro-social forces. These forces include religion, politics, and economics. Globalization can erode and universalize the characteristics of a local group.^[3] Advances intransportation and telecommunications infrastructure, including the rise of the Internet, are major factors in globalization, generating further interdependence of economic and cultural activities.^[4]

Though several scholars place the origins of globalization in modern times, others trace its history long before the European age of discovery and voyages to the New World. Some even trace the origins to the third millennium BCE.^[5][6] Since the beginning of the 20th century, the pace of globalization has proceeded at an exponential rate.^[7]

In 2000, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) identified four basic aspects of globalization: trade and transactions, capital and investment movements, migration and movement of people and the dissemination of knowledge.^[8] Further, environmental challenges such as climate change, cross-boundary water and air pollution, and over-fishing of the ocean are linked with globalization.^[9] Globalizing processes affect and are affected by business and work organization, economics, socio-cultural resources, and the natural environmen