Chapter 12 Review Questions

Answer: Globalization refers to the process of increasing interconnectedness of people, products, ideas, and places due to improvements in transportation, communication, and information technology systems. It has led to an increased interconnectedness because of this improvement as material and physical connections around the planet have improved thanks to an improvement in shared global infrastructure. Globalization has also increased interconnectedness thanks to a renewed spatio-temporal element as places that once felt far away are suddenly closer to reach thanks to better information and communication technology. Finally, globalization has increased the planet’s interconnectedness thanks to its cognitive element, which has seen an increased dissemination of ideas, especially around the notion of human rights. Sharing ideas, however, has its potential drawbacks if those ideas consist of consumerism and materialism, or the types of ideas based on unrealistic body images from North America that are harmful for women across the planet.

Answer: The three main theories sociologists use to explain globalization and global inequality include modernization theory, world systems theory, and world society theory. Modernization theory seeks to isolate the features that predict which societies will progress and develop. According to this theory, a society’s internal features, including its economic, social, and cultural systems help or hinder its development, and all these features should share the broadly similar goal of modernizing in the same way as Western Europe and North American societies modernized. According to modernization theorists, humans have been poor for most of their history, and tradition is standing in the way of anti-poverty practices such as monocropping. World systems theory was developed by Immanuel Wallerstein as a critique of modernization theory. World systems theory explains the world as based on a transnational division of labour between core, semi-periphery, and periphery countries. The final theory sociologists use to explain globalization and global inequality is world society theory. World society theory explains that countries are becoming increasingly similar due to the consequences of emerging of both global institutions and a world culture more and more since World War II.  

Answer: The Gini index is a measure of inequality between countries, or global inequality, that demonstrates how inequality differs depending on what country is under consideration. It measures income inequality on a scale of 0 to 1, with 1 representing the maximum level of inequality and 0 representing the maximum level of equality. This measurement is done by comparing the incomes of the richest and the poorest in a society or across countries. However, we can also compare inequalities in health, education, and employment when we measure the Gini index. 

Answer: Global inequality is a serious problem with detrimental impacts for billions of people across the planet. Several ways have been developed to address global inequality including development assistance, debt relief, and micro-financing. Development assistance is financial aid given by governments and some non-governmental charitable agencies to support a country’s economic, social, and political development. The second way to address global inequality advocated by many around the world is debt relief, or the forgiveness of loans provided to developing countries. With so much money going to debt repayment, developing countries have less money to spend on social programs such as education. Some countries are forced to sell off their national institutions to pay for the debt. In response, international campaigns have called for the forgiveness of this debt incurred by developing nations. Third, micro-financing involves donors from anywhere on the planet providing small loans for individuals and organizations in developing countries to run a small business producing commodities for local markets.

Answer: According to world systems theorists such as Wallerstein, unequal trade relations create negative consequences for periphery countries in several ways. The first is that periphery countries are pressured to produce a small variety of cash crops for export. In addition, periphery countries are urged to extract natural resources in their raw format and export them to core countries for processing, destroying the local environments of the periphery countries. Finally, these unequal trade relations create low-wage and low-skill jobs in the periphery countries while protecting high-wage and high-skill jobs for the core countries.