Globalisation - ReviseSociology

A useful Documentary illustrating Globalization – Mediterranean with Simon Reeve

This is a great resource for teaching some of the content of the global development module within A-level sociology.

I caught the final episode of the BBC’s Mediterranean with Simon Reeve on Sunday night, and I ended up watching the whole thing! It may only be in the Med, which is relatively local to the UK, but nonetheless this final episode is so useful for illustrating many aspects of globalisation.

In retrospect I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised at this: the Med is the boarder between Europe, the Middle East and Africa after all, so it spans three very different regions in the world.

The documentary series is available on iplayer for the next 8 months, so you can use it for teaching globalisation for almost the entire 2019-20 academic year.

I can’t speak for other three episodes, but the final one alone covers the following, mainly focusing on migration and environmental problems in the Med.

How over-fishing has led to the declining viability of fishing for a living in Tunisia and how this is making fishermen turn to people smuggling (destination Europe) instead.
The brutality of detainment centres in Tunisia – in which illegal migrants, mainly from Sub-Saharan Africa are kept and effectively work as slaves.
The hundreds of square miles of plastic covered farms in Southern Spain which grow year round salad veg, much of which we eat in the UK.

The plight of the workers (often illegal migrants) who work in said salad farms.
The fact that much of the plastic waste from said farms ends up in tiny shreds in the Med and in our food chain.

Simon Reeves also visits Monaco, the world’s most expensive place, and comments that it’s a sunny place for shady people. He doesn’t seem too impressed by this tax haven for the undeserving privileged having spent the previous month touring around some of the less advantaged places in neighbouring countries.

Anyway, it’s a great documentary: very sociological!

Huge increase in Chinese students studying at UK universities – a funny kind of ‘globalisation’

The U.K. now issues more than 100 000 student visas per year to Chinese students studying at British universities, with the numbers of Chinese students studying in the UK increasing at about 5% a year since at least 2013-14

Chinese students are by far the largest non-European student group living temporarily in the UK for 3 years or so while they pursue their degree courses. The next largest university feeder country outside of Europe is India, but only 20 000 student visas are issued to Indian students per year.

Moreover, if you look at the stats below, taken from the Higher Education Student Statistics Authority (nice ring to it that!) you can see that Chinese students are the only group from outside Europe who are coming into the UK in increasing numbers. Every other country is sending very similar numbers now compared to 2013-14.

Now to my mind this seems to be more a trend towards increasing bilateralism between China and UK universities, and if anything evidence of stagnant or even a decline in the ‘globalisation of British Higher Education’.

Relevance to A-level Sociology

This is most obviously relevant to the sociology of education module, especially useful as some quite nuanced evidence against the globalisation of education (IF like me you don’t think just two countries enhancing links between them is globalisation)

Problems of researching globalisation

Globalisation refers to the increasing interconnectedness of different regions across the world. Globalisation is one of the core themes within AQA A-level sociology, while research methods is a compulsory element.

It follows that the exam board could legitimately ask a question about the problems of researching globalisation. This post is just a few thoughts on how you might answer an exam question, which would probably be in the form of a 10 mark ‘Outline and explain two problems’ type question.

Two problems of researching globalisation

The first problem is that globalisastion is a difficult concept to define and operationalise. Sociologists disagree over what aspects are the most significant and worthy of study – economic, cultural and political globalisation are all possibilities. There is also disagreement over whether it’s a one way or two way process and whether it necessarily means the decline of the nation state.

This partly stems from the fact that it’s such an enormous process, reaching across the whole world,

Even within one aspect of globalisation such as economic globalisation there are so many things that we could look at to study – such as TNCs, GDP, the international division .of labour, free-trade policies, the WTO and so on, that it’s difficult to decide what to select as an indicator of globalisation.

These differences of opinion over what aspects of globalisation to focus on means that everyone ends up defining globalisastion differently and researching different things.

This means it’s hard to make sense of all the research on globlisation, hard to make comparisons, and hard to escape from the biases of the people who have selected different things to focus on.

As a result, new researchers can pretty much find justification for researching anything in relation to this topic, which can make the study of globalisation a bit ‘postmodern’ and lacking objectivity, direction, clarity and certainty.

A second problem is that it’s difficult to get data from every country, let alone every region in the world. There might be lots of official statistics collected in developed countries, but this is not the case in less developed countries.

In poorer regions of the world, there might not even be reliable information on birth and death statistics, making it difficult to keep track of even the most basic information. Another example is that school enrolment stats in many regions of Africa are notoriously invalid as an indicator of how many children attend school – they may enrol, but many fail to attended afterwards, meaning such stats could not be used to measure the quality of education globally.

Stats might also be collected in different ways – categories of crime might be different in different countries, or not even recorded in the case of lawless states. Governments are also well known for under-reporting war-deaths, especially civilian casualties, meaning it’s a problem to measure trends in global peacefulness.

If you’re doing qualitative research to make global comparisons, some countries might be hard to access because of conflicts, or simply time it would take to adjust to local cultures and languages and it would be difficult to do research in several countries at once within an appropriate time frame.

This could be overcome by employing teams of researchers in different countries, but this would mean more expense, be difficult to co-ordinate and you’d have to make sure everyone is researching in a similar way, which, given the problems with defining globalisation, could also be a tough call.

The globalisation of education

three examples of the globalisation are: PISA tests and league tables, international companies providing education services in more than one country, private schools and universities expanding into more than one country.

The globalisation of education refers to how a ‘global system’ of education is emerging, beyond the level of individual countries. Three examples of this are:

PISA league tables rank countries according to how well pupils’ score on English and maths tests.
International companies are increasingly providing educational services in Britain and abroad.

Private schools and universities are expanding abroad and offering services to fee-paying parents/ students.
The rise of online learning and digital education.

Below I will briefly consider each of these aspects of the globalisation of education in more depth, applying some sociological perspectives to provide some analytical depth.

PISA International Tests

PISA stands for the Programme for International Student Assessment which conducts standardised tests in dozens of different countries every three years in reading and literacy, maths and sciences and produces league tables which rank countries based on the average student performance.

These tests are conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development which is a global organisation aiming to promote peace, prosperity and equality of opportunity.

From a New Right/ neoliberal perspective the publication of league tables should encourage competition between countries as those countries nearer the bottom should not want to be down there and so adapt their education policies in order to improve their outcomes.

It should also promote comparative education research on the part of policy makers as they seek to investigate what it is about the education systems of high performing countries that makes them come at the top of the league tables.

The results of such cross national investigations could then be applied on a national basis, although to be successful policies may have to be adapted to fit local cultures.

International Companies and the Globalisation of Education

International companies are increasingly providing educational services in Britain and abroad.

One example of this is where companies such as Apple and Microsoft provide educational software to schools all over the world.

A second example is International exam boards providing assessment services and text books to different countries.

From a neoliberal perspective, this makes sense as these companies are efficient and in a better position to provide such services than especially governments in poorer countries (who tend to lack money).

From a Marxist perspective, this is a process of mainly Western companies gaining power and control over the education systems of poorer countries.

Private Schools and Universities setting up abroad

Private schools and universities from the UK are increasingly moving towards attracting more students from abroad and also setting up outposts in foreign countries.

According to a recent article in the Economist Britains’ 136 universities now have 39 campuses abroad educating 26 000 students, so these are very much global institutions.

From a neoliberal perspective this is very good for the UK education sector, it increases profits and more money flows into the UK.

From a Marxist perspective, looked at globally, these institutions only really benefit the elite, they do nothing for the poor, so this will just perpetuate global inequality.

Digital Education and Globalisation

Digital education has seen phenomenal growth over the last two decades, not only that coming from formal educational establishments such as universities which have restricted access for fee paying students but also much cheaper offerings from organisations such as Udemy and free to view educational services such as TED talks.

These online learning platforms are inherently global rather than national or local in nature simply because they can be access from anyone anywhere in the world who has access to a smartphone, and enough money in the case of paid-for courses.

The globalisation of education: analysis

There are certainly some moves towards education becoming more global, but it is not clear what kind of globalisation this is.

The people and institutions pushing the globalisation of education – the OECD, global companies such as Apple and Google, Universities and online learning platforms – these would probably be global optimists seeing this process as benefitting everyone – for example people in developing countries can benefit from access to free educational resources via Udemy and TED talks.

Global pessimists however might be more sceptical seeing the globalisation of education as more about the spread of Western market ideologies into the developing world.

It’s also worth being critical about how genuinely global education is – it is still nation states who maintain education systems through taxes and shape the national curriculums, for example.

Signposting

The material above is relevant primarily to the education topic within A-level Sociology, the specification for which explicitly states students need to know about the relationship between globalisation and education.

You might also like to consider this post on how globalisation more generally has affected education in the UK, and how education policy has responded to this.

Sources / Find out More

You might like to explore the wonderful world of PISA in more depth!

The Extinction Rebellion Protests

Thousands of activists from Extinction Rebellion gathered in London last week to stage the biggest civil disobedience event in recent British history.

Extinction Rebellion is an apolitical network whose main aim is to persuade governments to take urgent action on the climate and ecological emergency. Their main tactic is peaceful, non-violent direct action.

They have three main demands:

Tell the truth – Government must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change.
Act Now – Government must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.

Beyond Politics – Government must create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice.

Tactics over the last week in London have included a range of disparate disruptive actions such as blockading bridges, people gluing themselves to selected targets and die ins, all of this in addition to their being larger ‘people’s assemblies’ at various famous landmarks in the capital, with the usual debates, street theatrics, music, and cook-ins.

The cost to the economy is estimated to be millions of pounds, and the number of people arrested stands at over 1000, but with not one single police officer was injured during the last week’s peaceful protests.

Relevance to A-level sociology

The best fit is in with ‘globalisation and green criminology’.

Easy to understand is the fact that this is a global movement, so it’s a great example of ‘political globalisation’. NB – you may have missed this in the news, because as far as I can tell the movement started in the UK and London is by far the largest event.

In terms of green criminology – some actions of some of the protestors are illegal – criminal damage and public order offences for example, but they would claim that the ‘real criminals’ are governments around the world for failing to act on climate change.

There’s lots of other links to, but I’ll let you find them!

Globalisation and changes to family life

Globalisation has changed family life in the UK: birth rates have declined, families are smaller, childhood is more toxic and families are more unstable.

Globalisation has changed family life in the UK in several ways:

Family size has declined and there are more childless families. There are also more single person households. These trends are correlated with increase economic growth due to globalisation.
There is greater ethnic diversity and more families stretched across national borders. This is because of increased migration.

There are more pure relationships, negotiated families and higher divorce rates. All of these are related to the increased sense of risk and uncertainty which is part of globalisation.
There are more family-like global friendship networks and childhood is more toxic today, because of the globalisation of media flows.
There is more equality between men and women in relationships and more childless couples. This is linked to increased gender equality is an aspect of globalisation.

There is more experience of inequalities relating to the family and more relative social exclusion. For example poorer families can’t afford an annual holiday abroad.

mind map on how globalisation has changed family like in the UK

The relationship between globalisation and family life is one of the more difficult topics within the families and households module. In the blog post below I look at different aspects of globalisation and how these may have changed family life in the UK.

Aspects of globalisation you could consider include:

economic globalisation: increased trade and economic growth.

Increased migration: more people coming to the UK from other countries.
Globalisation of media: more global media flows penetrating family life.
Increased risk and uncertainty. These are also part of of postmodernisation.

Greater gender equality is also a global trend.

Aspects of family life you could consider:

Impacts on the structure of the family: what types of family are more common because of globalisation?
Relationships between men and women within family life.

How globalisation may have changed childhood and the relationships between parents and children.
How government policies on the family has responded to globalisation.

Globalisation and family life: analysis points

Two things to consider here:

what affects are more immediate and direct, which are indirect and more gradual?
What consequences are negative and positive. This relates to optimist and pessimist views of globalisation.

Economic globalisation and family life

Global optimists argue that economic globalisation has resulted in increasing trade which in turn has resulted in huge economic growth and rising prosperity.

Economic growth is correlated with declining birth rates and increasing life expectancy. This in turn means the average household size in the UK is smaller today. There are more one child households than ever and very few households with three or more children.

Increased life expectancy also means there are more multigenerational families with four generations alive. The number of beanpole families has also increased: long and thin families where three generations have only one child each, for example.

Property price speculation by global investors has driven up prices in the UK, especially in London. The basic costs of maintaining a family household had doubled in the last 30 years relative to inflation. This means many people today can’t afford to buy houses which puts some people off having children, so there are more childless couples and more people having families in later life.

The above trend also helps explain why so many young adults today ‘choose’ to live with their parents.

There seems to be a globalisation of ‘single person households’. There seems to be a global trend of increasing numbers of people choosing to live alone (not necessarily not being in relationships). This trend is positively correlated with economic growth: the richer a country the more people choose to live alone.

Increasing inequality is also a consequence of globalisation. For example the norm in Britain is for families to have a summer holiday abroad. However many families can’t afford this which may increase a sense of social exclusion.

Increasing immigration and family life

Increasing migration to the UK is part of globalisation.

Increasing migration to the U.K. means there is increasing cultural diversity and diversity of family structures. There are more families where British born people have had children with migrants from other countries.

Increased migration means more families are stretched across national borders and have family members living abroad, which in turn reinforces globalisation as more families maintain contacts through media and physical visits.

Immigrant families to the UK have on average higher birth rates than non-immigrant families. A positive effect of this is that it reduces the dependency ratio, however a claimed negative consequence is an increased strain on public services, mainly schools.

Part of globalisation is people displacement following conflict, which sometimes results in the breaking up of families, U.K. policy has focused (to an extent) on taking in orphan refugee children, meaning more ‘global step/ foster families’.

Globalisation of media flows and family life

Cultural globalisation means more people create global friendship groups based on shared interests online. Many people regard these friendship networks as ‘family’, if we follow analysis from the Personal life perspective.

Globalisation also means more media flows. Children more active users of media, more exposed to global media events can have negative effects:

More difficult for parents to prevent radicalisation (e.g. Shamima Begum).
More exposure to global media events (mass shootings in USA, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, war and conflicts) children are more risk conscious – anxious kids, more mental health issues. (More ‘toxic childhood’.)

Parents are more paranoid, more restrictive parenting, less outdoor play.
In general you can argue more globalisation leads to childhood becoming more toxic.

Increased risk and uncertainty

Globalisation has resulted in more diversity, choice and uncertainty, resulting in decline of people committing to long term relationships. It is also more difficult to maintain long term relationships. Hence we have much higher rates of divorce in our global age.

Globalisation and postmodernisation are closely related. The new family norms are the pure relationship and the negotiated family.

Signposting

This post has primarily been written for students studying the families and households topic for A-level sociology.

Students may also like to read this broader introduction to Globalisation.

Amazon’s 0.05% U.K. Tax Rate

Amazon is in the news this morning, for paying only £67 million in tax on £7 billion revenue over 20 years. That £67 million is less than Marks and Spencer paid in tax last year alone, besides a much lower revenue

If you look at Amazon’s effective UK tax rate last year, it works out at 0.05%. It does this by basically basing its main sales operations in countries with a low tax rate… it basically ‘sells’ products to it’s UK subsidiary for next to (or probably 0) profit which then ‘sells these on’ for no profit to actual UK customers, hence very low tax.

Amazon is basically scamming the global tax system.

All of the big four global tech companies are notorious for avoiding tax, but Amazon is by far the worst…In terms of tax paid as a proportion of sales and profits, Amazon is the worst offender of the ‘big four’ tech companies.

In fact, Google is the only company whose paid taxes you can actually see with the naked eye, when shown to scale against the sales of the three companies! (Link to Tableau doc here):

Amazon paid even less tax than Facebook last year £4.5m on annual UK sales of £8.7bn and pre-tax profits of £72 million.

Google has the best tax record – it paid £49.3m in UK taxes last year, on UK sales of £5.7bn, on pre-tax profits £ 202.4 million.

I’m not going to comment on Apple here, because I think its figures might be distorted by its paying historical taxes in the last tax year which it failed to pay in recent years, following a recent HMRC investigation.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This example goes to prove the power of Transnational Corporations compared to Nation States. Where money is concerned, large global companies can easily avoid national taxes. This form of economic globalisation seems to suggest the decline of the nation . state!

Combatting this would take global co-operation, but it would require the vast majority of companies to agree… all it takes is .a handful of ‘rouge tax havens’ and any co-operation falls apart! It’s one of the many challenges in a global age!

Sources

The Guardian – Facebook’s UK tax bill rises to £15.8m – but it is still just 1% of sales

The Guardian – Amazon halved corporation tax bill despite UK profits tripling

BBC – Google’s tax bill rises to £50m

Would would falling back on WTO rules mean for Britain?

If the UK leaves the EU with ‘no deal’, it will fall back on World Trade Organisation Rules, but what does this mean?

The WTO and Free Trade

The WTO was founded in 1995 and sets the rule book by which global trade takes place.

One of the main things it has done over the past two decades is to reduce tariffs (basically taxes) levied by governments on imports and exports, and to promote a free-trade agenda.

In 1947, the average external tariff charged by GATT (the predecessor of the WTO) signatories was 22%, which was a massive disincentive to trade, by 1999 it was down to 5%, and today the weighted average tariff charged by the US and EU is 1.6%.

Over the same period, there has been a massive increase in world trade: In the 1950s international trade accounted for 8% of the world economy, today it accounts for 30% of a much bigger global economy.

The Limitations of the WTO

Recently, the WTO’s trade liberalisation has stalled, and most of the progress countries have made in reducing barriers to trade have been through regional and bilateral trade agreements. The European Union is a principle example of this: UK companies pay no tariffs on exports to Europe or imports from Europe, which makes trade easy.

If we were to fall back on WTO trade rules, there are some economic areas which still have very high tariffs – cars and car parts would face a 10% tariff every time they crossed a boarder (making BMWs a LOT more expensive! given international supply chains) and agricultural tariffs stand at 35%.

The latest Treasury forecast predicts that the UK economy would be 9.3% smaller in 15 years if we exited the EU under WTO rules.

Isn’t this just all part of ‘project fear’?

Of course Brexiteers argue that we could forge new bilateral and multilateral trade agreements once we leave the EU, but most estimates suggest that a no deal WTO fall-back Brexit would be detrimental to the UK economy.

However, what all of the above suggests is maybe that ‘globalisation’ isn’t so good for world trade anymore…. maybe it’s too difficult to sort out genuinely mutually beneficial trade agreements between all 160 odd member states of the WTO.

Instead it seems that regional agreements are much more important for economic growth – it makes sense that it’s easier to get a deal between a dozen local countries rather than ten times that number after all.

To my mind it seems unlikely that we’re going to be able to negotiate dozens of little deals with specific countries that outweigh the benefits of being part of a massive trading block like the EU!

Sources:

The Week, 26 January.

The Mafia’s increasing involvement in the food business…

Mafia syndicates in Italy have an estimated annual turnover of £150 billion, making it much larger than Italy’s largest holding company (which includes Ferrari).

Increasingly, it is not drugs or people trafficking which bring in the money for the Mafia, but there involvement in agriculture, or basic food production.

Today, the Mafia are invested in Italy’s food industry from ‘Field to Fork’…. their agricultural interests extend to extortion, illegal breeding, backstreet butchering and the burial of toxic waste on farmland.

In 2018 the estimated value of the ‘agromafia business’ stands at £22bn, equivalent to 15% of Mafia revenue. This may seem mundane, but think about it: everyone has to eat, and most people like to eat everyday, so it should be no surprise that this is a growth area… it’s simply where the demand is!

There are all sorts of ways the Mafia can make money out of the food business – the most obvious is counterfeiting, and it is estimated that up to 50% of all olive oil sold in Italy is cut with poorer quality oil. To do this, the Mafia makes use of its global criminal ties… cutting it with lower quality oil from Africa.

The Mafia also rebrand low quality wine as higher quality: they simply change the label.

One of the more unfortunate costs of this whole business is the thousands of workers who are currently being exploited working for Mafia controlled agribusiness. The figures are quite significant:

It’s also estimated that up to 5000 restaurants are controlled by the Mafia, which is useful for money laundering.

Up until quite recently the Mafia also used to lease huge swathes of public land and make a fortune by claiming back EU subsidies on this land, making a 2000% profit in the process: they basically used their white collar connections in local governments to make sure no one else got involved with the bidding process.

However, this final practice has been clamped down on.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This is a useful update to the globalisation and crime, and especially to Glenny’s work on the McMafia: it shows how the Mafia are ‘evolving’ in their global criminal activities.

Sources:

Agromafia: how the mafia got to our food…

Agromafia exploits hundreds of thousands of workers.

The increasing cost of organised crime

The cost of organised crime is now greater than the cost of terrorism, according to the National Crime Agency, according to this BCC News report.

Organised crime involves international gangs who traffic people and drugs and engage in cyber crime. The annual cost to the UK economy is estimated to be around £34 billion a year.

While this might surprise non sociologists, this should be of no surprise to sociology students: while terror attacks are very dramatic, this also makes them very news-worthy, and they do tend to be reported whenever they happen. However, these attacks are relatively rare.

In comparison, the kinds of crimes which organised crime gangs are involved in are more hidden, more low-key, and, frankly, more day to day. This is because these gangs may be organised on an international (or possibly regional?) level, but they have networked into various local neighborhoods in Britain’s towns and cities, linking the small scale local drug deal to the large international drug-cartel.

Having said that, the National Crime Agency deals with A LOT of different types of crime: as outlined below…

Thus IMO it’s not really fair to compare the cost of ALL of these to the costs of just terrorism.

HOWEVER, if we forget (the rather silly) comparison mentioned in the news what the NCA’s 2018 strategic assessment document (I can’t link to it because, ironically, my PC thinks the NCA’s web site is insecure!?!) shows us is the truly global nature of seriously organised crime.

For any student wishing to understand more about the scope of global crime, and why it’s so difficult to police, you should check out the work of Misha Glenny.

Tag: Globalisation

A useful Documentary illustrating Globalization – Mediterranean with Simon Reeve

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