The concept of globalization has several significant underlying drivers. From the political perspective, the world has been facing the necessity to integrate and collaborate since the end of World War II and since the end of the cold war period, in order to bring the order back. From the technological and economic perspective, the rapid technological change, especially from the 20th century, has successfully increased the production efficiency significantly. This would successfully bring together the production resources originally scattered around the world and resolve the problem of resource scarcity (Bartlett & Beamish, 2014). As a result, corporations contemporarily are facing decreased production cost and intense competition due to technological changes, more diverse market demands, as well as governments’ requirements for opening the domestic market and attracting foreign business (Bartlett & Beamish, 2014). There are various definitions of globalization, all of which being more or less related to the concept of the world as a more integrated network. In the academic work A Globalizing World?: Culture, Economics, Politics, David Held has provided four major features of the megatrend globalization, namely the stretched social relations, intensification of flows, the increased interpenetration and the emergence of a global infrastructure (Held, 2004).
According to Held’s theory, within the context of globalization, decision making of a single entity would have wider influence because the social relations between players in different fields and businesses have been stretched, brought closer by global integration. Within this context, flows and interactions moving across the national borders will be intensified. As the social relations become stretched, the scattered world cultures are brought together at into a more local range, becoming more integrated and internally diversified. A global infrastructure will then emerge in order to keep the interconnections between different countries work in a healthy and regulated way. These are basically explanations of Held’s four features of globalization. As much theoretical value as it provides, this theory also faces considerable challenges and arguments. This paper, will in detail discuss the feature of the increased interpenetration, and global infrastructure, analyzing its validity and relations with real-life cases. In the process of discussion, different viewpoints towards globalization from globalists (viewing globalization as an inevitable trend), inter-nationalists (believing most activities are regional rather than global) and transformationalists (recognizing globalization is inevitable yet arguing regional scopes are still important ) will be referred to (Held, 2004).
In conclusion, globalization is a macroscopic concept encompassing various different categories of contemporary issues regarding politics, economics and sociology. Informed by Held’s four basic features of globalization, this concept can be explained as the tendency of increased integration and interaction between increasingly more countries in the world (including both developed and developing countries). As the examples suitably applicable for analyzing Held’s two out of four feature introduced above, the validity of Held’s theory has already been proven. This integration and interaction usually cover all aspects of social life and national development, from economic, politics, cultural exchange to the change and communication of different mindsets generated by different cultures. From the discussion above, it can be noted that globalization is a concept with two facets, bringing both benefits and damage to the party involved. Certain institutions and entities should therefore, play an effective role in facilitating international communication and maximizing the value brought by globalization, while at the same time, controlling the level of damage.
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