Sociology. Anthony Giddens
sourced its various elements from all over the world.
Tempest (1996) reported that, in the late 1990s, Barbie’s body was made from oil produced in Saudi Arabia and refined there into ethylene, which Taiwan’s Formosa Plastic Corporation converted into PVC pellets. The pellets were then shipped to one of the four Asian factories – two in southern China, one in Indonesia and one in Malaysia. The plastic mould injection machines that shape the body were made in the USA and shipped out to the factories. Barbie’s nylon hair came from Japan and her cotton dresses were made in China with Chinese cotton (the only raw material to come from the country where most of the dolls were made). Nearly all the material used in the manufacture was then shipped into Hong Kong and on to factories in China by truck. The finished dolls left by the same route, with 23,000 trucks making the daily trip between Hong Kong and southern China’s toy factories. More recently, Noah (2012: 100) argues that ‘The same pattern persists today, but the volume and technological sophistication of today’s “Made in China” products are much greater.’
As for Barbie, sales fell by 6 per cent in 2013, but by 2019 were rising again, up 12 per cent in the fourth quarter of the year (Whitten 2019). This follows diversification of the traditionally slim, blonde-haired, white original version. Barbie is now available in a range of skin tones and body shapes (‘petite’, ‘tall’ and a ‘curvy body’ that reflects the influence of global celebrities such as Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian) and in a variety of employmentbased outfits, including a space suit (Kumar 2019). With a live-action movie in the next stage, who would bet against Barbie appearing in the tenth edition of this book?
Barbie literally embodies global commodity chains.
What Barbie production and consumption shows us is the effectiveness of globalization in connecting the world’s economies. However, it also demonstrates the unevenness of globalization, which enables some countries to benefit at the expense of others. We cannot assume that global commodity chains will inevitably promote rapid economic development across the chain of societies involved.
THINKING CRITICALLY
Is global Barbie an example of the positive potential of globalization to provide work and a wage to those outside the rich, developed world? Consider which social groups, organizations and countries stand to benefit most from the operation of the doll’s global commodity chain.
The argument that manufacturing industry is increasingly globalized is often expressed in terms of global commodity chains – worldwide networks of labour and production processes yielding a finished product. Such networks consist of production activities that form a tightly interlocked ‘chain’ from raw materials to the final consumer (Appelbaum and Christerson 1997). China, for instance, has moved from the position of a low- to a middle-income country because of its role as an exporter of manufactured goods. By 2018, China and India provided the largest shares of total commodity chain employment, at 43.4 per cent and 15.8 per cent respectively, with the USA being the main export destination (Suwandi et al. 2019). Yet the most profitable activities in the commodity chain – engineering, design and advertising – remain mainly in high-income countries, while the least profitable aspects, such as factory production, occur in low-income ones, thus reproducing rather than challenging global inequality.
Political globalization
Globalization is not simply the product of technological developments and the growth of transnational capitalist networks; it is also linked to political change. One key shift was the collapse of communism in a series of dramatic revolutions in Eastern Europe from 1989, culminating in the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. This marked the effective end of the so-called Cold War. Since then, countries in the former Soviet bloc – including Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, the states of the Caucasus and Central Asia, and elsewhere – have moved towards Western-style political and economic systems. The collapse of communism was hastened by, but also furthered, the process of globalization, as the centrally planned economies and communist parties’ ideological and cultural control were ultimately unable to survive in the emerging era of global media and a more electronically integrated world economy.
A second political development has been the growth of international and regional mechanisms of government, bringing nation-states together and pushing international relations in the direction of new forms of global governance. For example, McGrew (2020: 22) notes that ‘Today there are over 260 permanent intergovernmental organizations constituting a system of global governance, with the United Nations at its institutional core.’ The United Nations and the European Union are perhaps the most prominent examples of nation-states being brought together in common political forums. The UN achieves this through the association of individual nation-states, while the EU has pioneered forms of transnational governance in which a degree of national sovereignty is relinquished by states in order to gain the benefits of membership. Governments of EU states are bound by directives, regulations and court judgements from common EU bodies, but they also reap the economic, social and political benefits from participation in the EU single market.
International governmental organizations (IGOs) and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) are also important forms of an increasingly global politics. IGOs are bodies established by participating governments and given responsibility for regulating or overseeing a particular domain of activity that is transnational in scope. The International Telegraph Union, founded in 1865, was the first, but since then a large number of similar bodies have been created, regulating issues from civil aviation to broadcasting and the disposal of hazardous waste. They include the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
INGOs differ from IGOs in that they are not affiliated with government institutions. They are independent and work alongside governmental bodies in making policy decisions and addressing international issues. Some of the best known – such as Greenpeace, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), the Red Cross/Red Crescent and Amnesty International – are involved in environmental protection, healthcare and the monitoring of human rights. But the activities of thousands of lesser-known groups also link countries and local communities together.
What has emerged from the increasing range of transnational political bodies is essentially a form of political globalization, where the central issues are not related purely to national self-interest but take in international and global issues and problems. Modelski and Devezas (2007) see this as essentially the evolution of a global politics, the shape of which has yet to be determined.
Structuring the globalization debate
Accounts of globalization in sociology have been seen as three broad tendencies or ‘waves’ which ran throughout the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century. And, though there has been much work on specific aspects of globalization since then, the structure of the debate continues to flow across these basic positions. There is an additional approach to globalization, which Martell (2017: 14) calls a ‘fourth wave’, based on forms of discourse analysis that study existing narratives of globalization and the way they frame, discuss and shape globalization itself (Cameron and Palan 2004; Fairclough 2006). However, while the majority of studies agree that important material changes are taking place internationally, they disagree on whether it is accurate or valid to bundle these together under the umbrella of globalization. Because of this, and for reasons of space, in this section we concentrate on the first three waves.
An influential discussion of the three main positions in the debate is that of David Held and colleagues (1999). This presents three schools of thought – hyperglobalizers, sceptics and transformationalists – which are summarized in table 4.4. The authors cited for