A Genealogy of ‘Globalization’: The Career of a Concept

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“A Genealogy of ‘Globalization’: The Career of a Concept” by Paul James and Manfred Steger illustrates how the globalization process has been happening from the 1930s to the 1950s. Although the buzz of the word ‘globalization’ started in the twenty-first century, the word is believed to have been used many centuries ago. According to Dufoix, a French sociologist, globalization refers to “the religion of the first occurrence” (James & Steger, 2014, p.418). James and Steger assert that globalization was used in various senses in English as early as 1930. However, due to the poverty of the genealogical and historical comprehension of globalization, it is challenging to tell who coined the word and the first time it was used.
The epistemological and genealogical foundations of the globalization concept are under-researched. In other words, despite this word being used by numerous articles to describe multiple things, there is limited information on when it was introduced. In that light, James and Steger emphasize the introduction of the concept of globalization, which they believed started in the 1930s. Globalization has a discontinuous and short story, which many researchers and scholars do not bother to explore (James & Steger, 2014). The most fascinating thing is that despite the concept of globalization used in numerous articles before the twentieth century, many authors did not define it. Major books and articles began defining it after it was first defined in the Merriam-Webster Third New International Dictionary in 1961 (James & Steger, 2014).
The author depicts that there is no etymology or extended discussion of the globalization concept. Many dictionaries and encyclopedias do not bother illustrating or defining globali...