The language of globalization has increasingly become a part of a common intellectual agenda over the last couple of decades. It is a term that sometimes operates in an umbrella fashion, providing shelter for a range of theories to do with economics, cultural consciousness, politics, informational technology and a whole raft of global ethical flows to do with justice, citizenship, accountability, care of the environment and the like. Its definition is far from settled and is susceptible to a range of nuances. Those who write in the field invariably feel obliged to offer yet another working definition to capture this emerging sense of an interrelated one world, shaped by a compression of time and place.

The frequent employment of this protean label is relatively recent: word watchers can look back to its first recorded usage, maybe in 1944. This was a period in which there was a widening use of terms such as global attitudes and, unfortunately, global warfare. In the more fully fledged form of globalization it seems to have begun to insinuate itself increasingly into the way we speak about the world from the early 1960s. Its present popularity is even more recent and perhaps is tied to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the bipolar politics of the Cold War. Its ready usage has arguably seen the relative demise of the once commonly invoked description of some countries and economies being Third World.