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Helen Li

IDC 4001H-Prof. Maciuika

February 2, 2014

Globalization—Having the Same Desires all around the Globe

​            Modernization and globalization are both the causes and effects of economic expansion. Entrepreneurs, or the bourgeoisie as Karl Marx refers to them, are underlying activists that created the modernized world we have today.

In order to expand their own companies and incur higher revenues, corporations struggle to reach out to consumers on the international level, thus bringing new technologies and innovations. As a result, modernization quickens. As mentioned in Marshall Berman’s introduction to All that is Solid Melts into Air, industries force themselves to constantly renovate and “revolutionize” to compete against each other, and these economic changes bring along social and political changes causing former beliefs to become history.  For example, in the article, “Rocket Machine: How to Build Companies from a Kit,” a network company, Rocket Internet, has seventy-five firms in fifty countries, bringing new concepts and ideas to other countries. As industries expand internationally, broadening free markets, governments slowly surrender their authority. According to Ulrich Beck in What is Globalization?, the role of government went from controlling to safeguarding. Consequently, individualism becomes widely accepted and recognized.

Knowledge transfer and cultural diffusion play a main part in modernization and globalization. Due to free markets and eventually a free world market, economic, social, and political interaction with other countries is inevitable. As Beck mentions, companies outsource jobs to other countries to limit cost and increase efficiency. However, this also allows for a transfer of knowledge. Additionally, nations are forced to trade and create contracts with each other. Companies such as Rocket, promote the sharing of information across nations to enhance its firm’s knowledge of marketing and information technology. This new knowledge learned is then used to make higher profits.

In the twenty-first century, we are all in one interconnected society after being globalized, but soon our definition of “modernization” would become the future’s definition of “history.” And what keep us in this web and push us from modern times to history would be our unchanging desires to advance forward and make the most “profits” out of everything.