ABSTRACT
Our position here is somewhat paradoxical in that we simultaneously acknowledge that globalization has a long history, and yet we also are concerned with the novel features of more recent developments. At least three basic stances have been taken with respect to the origins of globalization. Some have argued that its origins lie with that of human civilization generally, hence it is part of a process that is now more than five centuries old. In this formulation, the problematic of globalization originates with the emergence of universalistic religions that established the universal-particular dichotomy that cuhninates in the contemporary problematic of globalization.2 A second, more influential, approach-world-systems theorylinks globalization with the origins of capitalism, culminating in the sixteenth-century emergence of a global economy.3 But a third perspective-which has exploded in the 1990s as the most typical form of "globalization theory"-considers globalization a more recent phenomenon, dating at the earliest from the mid-twentieth century or perhaps the last two decades. Anticipations of this type of analysis can be found in the theories of postindustrial society that elnerged in the 1960s. But the decisive shift carrIe with the literature in the 1970s and 1980s on the so-called "post-Fordist" transformation of production processes as a global process, as well as related accounts of an information society, cultural globalization, or a postmodern culture.4
