Notes on EcHumanism, Holistic Governance, Pragdealism, and E-co-mmunication: Instruments for a 21C World-view, Governance and Practice (original) (raw)

Globalization and the knowledge society

Ekonomika, 2016

Globalization is a multi-layered, long-running and irreversible process, which includes intensive changes, deterritorialization and acceleration of social activities. One vitally important aspect of globalization concerns its impact on the knowledge society. Through Americanization of universities and the Bologna Process, globalization has commercialized higher education, turning knowledge into a type of commodity. Under the influence of market forces, the university is starting to lose its long-guarded autonomy, becoming just another subject of corporative capitalism. Homogenization, standardization, specialization, economies of scale, marketing concepts, consumerism, as well as the primacy of knowledge that contributes to economic growth and higher profits are some of the key factors that directly affect higher education systems and institutions throughout the world. The goal of this study is to determine whether globalization is altering the essence of higher education-and how. In conclusion, we may state that future research ought to be increasingly aimed at examining the chances and threats of globalization in the context of the knowledge society.

The Becoming of a Global World: Technology / Networks / Power / Life

2007

The Becoming of a Global World / 31 Actualization means contingency. Actualization, that is, what happens does not follow a plan of progress. Our history 'has neither departure nor arrival, origin nor destination' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 293). As such, globalization may be understood as a process without begin or end. Globalization is not a process that develops in a linear fashion, to say, from 'the West to the Rest'. 11 Gellner (1964: 12-3) remarked, more than forty years ago, that 'for two centuries it has been difficult for anyone from the West to 'think about human affairs without the image of an all embracing upward growth […]. It seemed a natural conclusion from the pattern of Western history, which was generally treated as the history of humanity. Western history seems to have a certain continuity and a certain persistent upward swing […]. Emerging from the river valleys of the Middle East, the story of civilization seems one of continuous upward growth, only occasionally interrupted by plateaus or even retrogressions: history seemed to creep gently around the shores of the Mediterranean and then up to the Atlantic coast, things getting better and better. Oriental Empires, the Greeks, the Romans, Christianity, the dark ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, industrialization […] all this is extremely familiar and still forms the background image of history for most of us.' History is not progressive; it does not develop like a ready-made plan. Rather than defining globalization as originating from a certain point, as notions like Westernization (or Americanization) imply, we have to acknowledge that 'human history did not follow a straight line […] on the contrary, at each bifurcation alternative stable states were possible, and once actualized, they coexisted and interacted with one another' (De Landa, 1997: 16). As such, it would be better to speak of becomings instead of Becoming. Becoming stresses the contingent nature of globalization, and the multiple actualizations that the de-and reterritorialization of flows bring forward. Just as human history is not marked by stages, or a plan of progress, human geography is not marked by bounded territories, but rather made of a multiplicity flows and the destratifications and restratifications they undergo (De Landa, 1997: 268). There is no original territory of globalization, no 'primordial totality that once existed, or a final one, that awaits us at some future date' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977: 42). By withdrawing from usually modern national state centric definitions of territory we can see how de-and reterritorialization forces constitute particular time-spaces: local, national, regional and global

The Knowledge Society in a Global Perspective

The inability of the knowledge society to establish itself globally is one of its most important drawbacks. All its analyses and models made and developed by social scientists and presented in political documents, hold good for societies in the most advanced countries only. Its project can only be realized successfully within the framework of a given nation state, when respective economic, social and political conditions exist in it. There exists no promising future for its project worldwide, though. Billions of people around the world would remain outside its scope in its realization. The knowledge society lacks a potential to bring a revolutionary change into social development – unlike the industrial society, which quickly became the master of the world in the 19th century. The wealth created by scientific progress, and an economy based on knowledge, are not at its disposal to be shared by all; this situation is not likely to undergo a change in the foreseeable future. Some important arguments are adduced in the paper, supporting this view.

Globalization: an open door for the knowledge economy

Economia: Seria Management, 2009

Globalization refers to an emphasized process of global integration and spreading a set of ideas related to the economical activity and goods’ production, the premises being the liberalization of international commerce and the capital flows, the speeding up of the technological progress and informational society. The cognitive society is more and more obvious and unanimously accepted, which actually proves its efficiency. If traditional, conservative communities, which are not open to change and reject from the start anything new on the horizon, still exist today, they are isolated cases that will eventually be "converted" by this wave of information that has become indispensable to any development because in its absence resources could not be used efficiently. Taking into consideration these elements, this paper wishes to give arguments to the fact that globalization can be seen as being an open door for the cognitive society.

The End Of Globalization And The Challenges Civilizations Face In The Post-Global Approach

2013

The Globalization processes are presented in a system of three consecutive stages of globalization. With reference to the first two stages, we can observe an intcrpretation analogy postulated by Robbie Robertson [2003]. However, thc assumed civilization perspective points at a different interpretation of the third stage of globalization, here pertaining to the IT revolution. The consecutive stages thus outlined in this system constitute an independent trend aiming at integration on thc level of material culture, which is largely complcmented during the &cbm of the third stage of globalization, i.e. about 2025. The end of globalization is understood as complementation of the proccss commenced five centuries ago together with new categorics of accompanying challenges. The author presents civilizational challenges faced on the threshold of a post-global order and considcrs a likely scenario for the processes that will follow the third stage of globalization.

Stehr, Nico, "Societal transformations, globalisation and the knowledge society," International Journal of Knowledge and Learning 2007

In what sense, then, can it be said that contemporary societies are becoming more and more dependent on the production, dissemination and use of knowledge? Are we witnessing a change from a social world in which 'things' simply 'happened' to a world in which things are more and more 'made' to happen? Finally, what is the nature of the linkage between social transformations, the globalisation process and knowledge in the modern world? (1) I will discuss the place of knowledge in prominent social theories of modern society as well as the place of knowledge in major policy efforts that proceed from the assumption that knowledge plays a key role for large scale social transformations; (2) I will advance a sociological conception of knowledge and (3) I will apply it to the social analysis of change in modern society.

Towards a global knowledge economy

In the epoch of modern globalization, knowledge economy has become a prolific approach in the 21st century because of its self-sustaining capability to survive in the coming global economic battle and its growing importance as one of the key sources of growth in the global economy where organizations and people acquire, create, disseminate and use knowledge more efficiently for the greater aspect of economic and social development as well. It has a unique role to restructuring at the latest stage of development considering its core philosophy towards the sustainable global economic challenge. Here, the core idea of the knowledge driven economy is not merely a demonstration of high tech industries; it means something more than of its traditional concept, a set of new sources of competitive advantage which can easily be applied to all sectors, all companies and all regions at the same time to establishing its feasibility in an effective manner. “Knowledge Economy”, the phrase was popularized by Peter Drucker as the title of Chapter 12 in his book “The Age of Discontinuity”. But, the initial foundation for the knowledge economy was introduced in 1966 in the book “The Effective Executive” by Peter Drucker. In this book, Drucker described the subtle difference between the manual worker and the knowledge worker. According to him, the manual worker works with his or her hands and produces goods or services. In contrast, a knowledge worker works with his or her head, not hands, and produces ideas, knowledge and information. Peter Drucker also emphasizes that knowledge economy is a relative concept; a vague definition of knowledge which creates the key problem in the formalization and modeling of knowledge. Because, it is not proper to consider information society as interchangeable with knowledge society; information is usually not equivalent to knowledge as their use depends on individual and group preferences which are "economy-dependent". Here, due to the recent triumph of ICT, all traditional economic patterns have been changed now; a new concept of knowledge economy has been introduced which is playing a pregnant role to meet up the today’s challenge of globalizing and to keep the world beyond our imagination.

The possible paths of a new globalization

International Journal of Development and Sustainability, 7(9), 2310–2333, 2018

This paper is focused on the structural and evolutionary examination of the current global crisis and restructuring by supporting in terms of methodology that, first, in every interpretation of the global crisis we ought to analyze and perceive the historical and evolutionary character the dynamics of the global socioeconomic space have while, second, all the dynamic dimensions of the modern world-economic, technological, social and geopolitical-should be examined together, in their narrow dialectic co-adaptation and co-evolution. The multi-faceted crises of every socioeconomic system are both the products and the producers of globalization crisis over a co-determinatory and co-evolutionary course, unfolding inside a contemporary capitalism which intensifies unceasingly the dialectic reproduction of the global interdependence. This crisis of this capitalism is sustained, nourished and reproduced by the absence of a "new wave" of effective innovations, throughout all the levels of socioeconomic activity. The overcoming of the crisis therefore requires prior installation and assimilation of new, effective change management mechanisms at all levels of contemporary reality. Based on the available data it is estimated that the challenge of building a new global developmental trajectory engages with all the levels of analysis and intervention: the individual and the collective, the material and the symbolic, the national and the local, the social and the economic, the microeconomic and the macroeconomic, the cultural and the political. The only sustainable way out of the global crisis goes through the effort to adapt progressively to a new evolutionary thinking of perceiving the global crisis dynamics, which represent the internal forces of innovation and effective change management within every socioeconomic system and on a planetary scale and across every level of action.