The Globalization and Development Reader: Perspectives on Development and Global Change, 2nd Edition

Introduction

As the title suggests, this section of the volume addresses what is meant by globalization. These seven pieces likely represent thousands of others. In addition to presenting various perspectives on what constitutes economic globalization, we are also illustrating the evolution of conceptualizations about globalization, ranging from Fröbel, Heinrichs, and Kreye’s embryonic conceptualization in the early 1980s, to a stridently optimist piece “In Defense of Global Capitalism” by Johan Norberg, Thomas Friedman’s 2005 reaffirmation of the magnitude of the transformation to globalization, and four pieces analyzing the frailty of the financialized and globalized world resulting from the “Great Recession” of 2008–10.

Writing at the Max Planck Institute in the late 1970s, Germans Folker Fröbel, Jürgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye described what was emerging as a “New International Division of Labor” (NIDL). In their book that coined this now common and centrally important term, they described a pattern of firms shutting down manufacturing plants in the developed countries and investing in the poor countries, shattering economies in regions where labor unions and worker protections were strong.¹ They saw devastating social effects in wealthy nations: “more and more workers are losing not only their jobs but also their acquired profession … they are thrown onto the labour market where … they are obliged to sell their labour-power as unskilled or semiskilled workers at considerably ...