OPV 312
Globalisation, Markets and Education: Lecture 4
Article: Christie
❑Christie's Article Cont’d
❑Understanding Globalisation
Presentation
❑Castells and the Information Age
Outline
❑Appadurai, Flows and Landscapes
❑Preparations for the Next Lecture
Christie’s Article: Cont’d - Understanding Globalisation
❑Globalisation: vast (great in size) and complex (complicated) issue
❑Interpreted differently in different discourses (conversation)
❑Could be misunderstood as ‘grand narratives’ (comprehensive/overarching explanation of
knowledge) or universal experience of people
❑Limited value for understanding local experiences (not the big picture)
❑The global net(work), market and image may overshadow human agency (make choices
and impose them on the world)
Understanding Globalization: General Perspective
❑Education and schools do not exist in isolation (why
not?)
❑Educators must be aware of the broader context that
shapes education and schooling
❑Some history of South Africa is vital to appreciate
globalization
Understanding Globalization: General Perspective
❑Apartheid and colonialism associated with capitalism
❑ANC adopted a socialist discourse (government/public as a whole has control over the
economy)
❑1970s and 1980s ANC developed socialist policies involving nationalisation of industries
and a major role for state intervention
❑Late 1980s and early 1990s, ANC reconsidered its economic policies
❑E.g. 1996, government announced a new macro-economic strategy called GEAR (Growth, Employment,
and Redistribution).
❑ GEAR emphasized privatization, reduction in public spending, increased user fees to subsidize public
provision
Understanding Globalization: General Perspective
❑Changes had a direct impact on South African including the education system (To be
discussed in the next lecture)
❑Two different forces created tension in government policy
Local one toward Global one towards
redistribution and market, competition
social equality and privatization
socialism capitalism
ANC globalization
Understanding Globalization: General Perspective
❑Globalisation is usually referred to as linkages and interconnections between states, and
the creation of a world system
❑Globalisation is not only an economic process, rather…
❑Globalisation is a contested term that refers to diverse processes embracing political,
social, technological, economic, and cultural changes
Economic Globalisation
POSITIVES NEGATIVES
• Interconnectedness: cross-border • Not every one, or nation benefits
movement of goods, service, capital from globalization
• Global communication: social media • Benefits unevenly distributed
• Mass transportation – created new • Big gap between those who are able
opportunities to enjoy new cultural goods and
• Access to information, products services
• Distance – is not a problem • Creates greater social stratification
• Contact across cultures, learning about and more inequality in society
the other (digital divide)
• Shortening of distance/time • Global economy undermine the
• Increasing of economic interdependence power of the nation-state
of national economics across the world
Political Globalisation NEGATIVES
POSITIVES (political cooperation) • Loss of state sovereignty or
• Interconnection - Governments national autonomy
can learn from each other • Nation states are not
• Smaller countries can work powerless, but need to
together and gain more balance four pressures:
influence internationally Transnational capital
• Promotion/spread of human Global political structure (UN,
rights and democracy, values like WTO and EU: help to increase)
freedom and fight against abuses
Domestic (particular country)
• Access to international aid and pressures and demand –
financial support maintaining political legitimacy
• Contributes to world peace Own internal needs and self
• Reduces risk of invasions, and interests
limitation on nationalism
Cultural Globalisation NEGATIVES
• Homogenized consumer culture: people
POSITIVES
use same technologies, eat same food,
• Awareness and appreciation of diversity??
wear same clothing, speak the same
• Sharing of the same culture
language, exposed to the same media
images (Universalized Style or
McDonaldisation of society)
• American colonialism
• Imposition of same cultural images, tastes,
and attitudes on everyone, everywhere.
• Removes diversity (one culture)
New Ways of Thinking about Globalisation
1. Manuel Castells: Socialist view of Globalisation
2. Arjun Appandurai: Anthropologist perspective of
Globalisation
Manuel Castells: Information Age (also known as
Computer-, Digital of New Media age)
❑Controversial and challenging theorist: Emphasis on structure and technology (ICT)
❑Arguments
❑New global economy based on information technology
❑‘… power to access networks, and switch between multiple networks, is essential to
participate in the information age’ (electronic media replaces the traditional media)
Castells: Information Age
❑‘… possible to connect some people, firms, territories that are regarded as
valuable, and discard those who are devalued’ (sub-Saharan Africa are black holes
of the information age which are increasingly irrelevant for the global information
technology)
❑North and South of the world division are no longer there because of the internet
❑In developing countries, small groups of ‘elites’ participate in the networked
informational economy while many ( the majority) are left out
Castells: Information Age
❑Stable jobs disappearing and replaced by flexible labour
❑Specialised workers use information and innovation to generate value and
reshape profiles to meet demand
❑Majority are ‘generic labour’ with basic education and no specific skills
❑Part-time and casual jobs, living for survival, informal and criminal sector
Castells: Information Age
❑Global economy is highly creative and productive, and exclusionary
❑Economically and technologically, the global system is vulnerable
❑E.g. unstable financial markets not easily regulated
❑Increased productivity might be more goods produced than can be sold (not a big
demand, but an oversupply)
❑Socially and politically, the system excludes two-thirds of humankind to the margins of
survival.
Castells: Information Age
❑Prediction: excluded may play the game of global capitalism by different rules e.g.
growing global criminal economy (Mafia or Drug cartels)
❑Also predicts terrorism by individuals and organisations that may have access to
technologies of destruction
Castells: Possibilities for Action
❑Building an internet-based economy should be a priority to link everyone to
the net
❑Poor countries may not have resources for technological development: Proposes multi-
lateral international aid
❑Investment in education:
❑ No point in investing in an expensive infrastructure if people are not able to take
advantage of its opportunities
❑For people to find, analyse and use information, they need education
❑Advocates for reformation of the education that is responsive to technologies
❑Provision of quality education and not ‘warehousing children’
Castells: Possibilities for Action
❑Question for Reflection: Discussion
Is Castells’ confidence in technologies as an engine for
development realistic?
Arjun Appadurai: Flows and Landscapes
❑Proposes a different imagination of globalisation
❑Major Arguments
❑World trade, imperialism and movement of people
not a new phenomenon (aspect known through senses)
❑ Existing discourses of economy, culture and politics
require new ways of thinking
❑Globalisation should be imagined from ‘Flows and Landscapes’
Appadurai: Flows and Landscapes
❑Global world is like ‘Flows’ that capture unpredictable movements of speed, scale and
volume which cross boundaries as if there weren’t there
❑Flows could be easy movements but also turbulent and destructive washing away
everything e.g. washing away cultural diversity
❑Global world is like ‘overlapping landscapes of fluid, irregular shapes’
❑Landscapes bring people into complex and changing relationships where different
perspectives give a different meaning
Appadurai: Landscapes
1. Ethnoscapes: Shifting landscapes of people moving in global times as
tourists, students, exiles, refugees. Movement and the imagination of
movement, is as much part of global societies as are the more stable relationships
of family and kinship.
2. Technoscapes: Fluid global configurations of technologies that are unevenly
distributed across the world; can’t be explained and predicted by traditional
economic discourse. And in their complex interrelationships, they cannot simply
be explained and predicted by conventional economic discourse.
3. Financescapes: Disposition (character) of global capital is difficult to
follow as currency markets, national stock exchanges, and commodity
speculators move megamonies through national turnstiles at blinding
speed, with vast, absolute implications for small differences in
percentage points .
4. Mediascapes and 5. Ideoscapes: Landscapes of ideas and images
circulating across the world through technology to private homes and
public outlets, to squatter settlements and remote rural areas – not
controllable and predictable
Appadurai: Landscapes
❑Stresses the importance of imagination and of thinking differently;
❑The five ‘Scapes’ interact and influence each other in complex ways and dislocating
(disturbing) ways
❑Working with disjunctive (lacking connection/consistency) flows opens spaces for
new understanding, and also for intervention.
❑Criticises academic view of globalisation that has little regard for poor and
marginalised groups
Appadurai: Possibilities for Action
❑Calls for theory and research on ‘globalisation from below’ that speaks for the poor,
marginalised and vulnerable
❑ Challenges neoliberalism, capitalism etc
❑Illustration: Activist movement among the poor in Mumbai, India
❑New form of politics that taps into the expert knowledge of the poor on how to survive
poverty
❑Illustrates deep democracy where marginalised people have vision, imagination and agency
– not victims of their circumstance
Preparations for next lecture
Continue Reading:
Christie, P. (2008). Changing Schools in South Africa:
Opening the Doors of Learning
Focusing on the following Sections:
✓Knowledge Economy and Education
✓Setting an agenda for schooling in global times
✓Schools for the future
Thank You
