Compare Wallerstein’s world systems analysis to Ritzer’s interpretation of Appadurai’s five dimensions of global flows within the concept of globalization.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Globalization can be defined as “the rapidly developing and ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependencies that characterize modern life” (Tomlinson 1999:2). Whether through economic trade, corporate expansion, political alliances, military conquest, the Internet, or TV, the world has become more structurally intertwined, while individuals’ everyday lives are increasingly shaped by events taking place outside of their local environment. The world has become, in Marshall McLuhan’s words, a “global village.” At its root, world-systems analysis is a product of Wallerstein’s rejection of the conventional sociological practice of equating states (e.g., France, China) with societies. This intellectual position, according to Wallerstein, leads to erroneous explanations of social history and misguided predictions of future developments. To counter these pitfalls, he insists that the only unit of analysis capable of advancing the knowledge of the social sciences is the “world-system.” He defines his central concept, world-system, as a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence. Its life is made up of conflicting forces which hold it together by tension, and tear it apart as each group seeks eternally to remold it to its advantage. It has the characteristics of an organism, in that it has a life-span over which its characteristics change in some respects and remain stable in others. (Wallerstein 1979:229). Appadurai (1992) notes that the contemporary global order is marked by “disjunctures” between and within five dimensions or “scapes” of global cultural flows. These scapes, in turn, form the basis of the fluidity of today’s world and the multiple perspectives, images, and meanings that inform the worldviews of social actors, whether they be individuals, communities, corporations, or nation-states. These scapes include ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes.