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George Ritzer, Globalization: A Basic Text. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 (592pp.), ISBN 978-1-4051-3271-8, US$ 64.95
Reviewed by Paul Monaghan
Sociologist George Ritzer, the author of this textbook, has taken on a massive task: to define, analyze and illustrate the entire scope of a process that encompasses the whole planet and everyone on it. Simultaneously he wants to make it accessible to undergraduates. The author also hopes it will be useful to beginning graduate students and even scholars looking for an overview of the field. To accomplish this, the author draws together information from a wide array of disciplines and domains, including economics, science, history, politics, and culture. An appendix provides brief summaries of globalization's impact on the disciplines of anthropology, psychology and literary criticism. The result is a text as large and complicated as one might expect.
The author defines globalization as the process by which people, objects and information flow in multiple directions across the planet as well as the structures they encounter, which can be barriers or catalysts to the flows. The continued existence of barriers (including the new ones created by flows) is important to Ritzer's definition because the presence of barriers contrasts with the view found in many discussions of globalization that integration is the inevitable result of the globalizing process. The author invents his approach to globalization using the metaphors of solids, liquids, flows, and structural barriers. The liquidity of things that flow around the world can be seen in fruit from Chile or tuna from Japan, but also in communications technology, migrant labor, disease, and criminal behavior. As...