Globalization

Understanding the dynamics and Impact of Globalization: Africa as a consequence

of Social Construction of Reality and Ethno-Cultural Marginality; A Post Conflict
Liberian Case Study

Dr. Amos M.D. Sirleaf (PH. D.) 0880313111 Professor- Vice President-Blacology
Research and Development Institute, Inc. (USA-Liberia) Professor- Peace Studies,
Cuttington University: amdsirleaf@gmail.com. Blacology.com
amdsirleaf@cuttingtonuniversity.edu.rl

Introduction

Globalization" is a term that came into popular usage in the 1980's to describe (1)

the increased movement of people, (2) knowledge and ideas, (3) and goods and

money across national borders that has led to increased interconnectedness among

the world's populations, (a) economically, (b) politically, (c) socially, (d) safety,

security and culturally. From a Black African Nationalistic and Blacological

perspective, it is essential to point out that we as Black African people ,

specifically Liberian people, must by now be able to smartly use our traditional

knowledge in understanding of the world in order to convey to our people the

western knowledge and understanding from a positive aspect of our collective

consciousness of our development, 15 years within the 21st century.(Dr. Sirleaf

2014 USA).

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Globalization

Although globalization is often thought of in economic terms (i.e., "the global

marketplace"),(the global market economy). This process has many social.

Cultural, ideological, regional, continental, geographical, and political

implications as well. The major research question is Where is Africa, specifically

Liberia in the globalization process? (a) Many in local communities, vis--vis,

nations out of the peripherals of the peripheries, associate globalization with

modernization (i.e., the transformation of "traditional" societies into "Western"

industrialized ones. (b) At the global level, globalization is thought of in terms of

the challenges it poses on the role of governments in international affairs and the

global economy. In the context of the subject Globalization, Africa-sub of the

Saharan, of course Black-African people, specifically Post Conflict Liberia ,

remain as a consequence of Social Construction of Reality and Ethno-Cultural

Marginality. For instance, the perpetual economic underdevelopment of Africa,

perhaps is the most silent characteristics of most developing countries like Africa,

is their culture of poverty.

At the national level, this is manifested by structure (including communications

and transportation), limited use of modern technology, and low consumption of

some combination of low gross domestic product (GDP) per capita (an indirect

measure of per capita income), highly unequal income distribution, poor in

infrastructure (including communications and transportation), limited use of

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Globalization

modern technology, and low consumption of energy.(Post conflict Liberia and

other Third World Nations, unfortunately, and regrettably, fit this criteria

A. At the grassroots level, like post conflict Liberia, economic underdevelopment

connotes widespread scarcity, substantial unemployment, substandard housing,

poor health conditions, and an inadequate nutrition are some of the

contemporary definitions for Liberia.

B. One of the major research questions is why Third World countries are generally

much poorer than countries in Western Europe and North America? There is

also considerable variation among them and between world regions. Between

and among world regions lie Black African people and people of color.

C. The term globalization is thus a theoretical construct that is itself contested and

open for various meanings and inflections.

D. It can be described positively or negatively, in one way, it can, in many

instances, be defined as a systematic body of organized conservatively,

strategically institutionalized European neo-classical and neo-capitalistic

system of thoughts.

E. This theoretical aspect of this subject is of crucial importance to note. In other

worlds, it specifies the particular way in which politically, socially,

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Globalization

economically, and culturally marginalized nations, Africa-Liberia, as a case in

point, can carve out of the mass of seemingly unrelated concepts and

propositions a coherent and sufficiently demarcated body of ideas, peoples,

cultures, over which it alone claims jurisdiction. This phenomena it is a highly

complex and multidimensional processes in the economy, polity, culture, and

everyday life, with specific emphasis on Africa which remains as a Europeans

consequence of Social Construction of Reality and Ethno-Cultural Marginality.

. It is safe, therefore, to articulate that a critical theory of globalization attempts to

specify the interconnections and interdependencies between different levels such as

the economic, political, cultural and psychological, sectionalist as well as between

different flows of products, ideas and information, people, and technology. Critical

Thinking and philosophical theory describes the mediations between different

phenomena, the systemic structure which organizes phenomena and processes into

a social system, and the relative autonomy of the parts, such that there are both

connections and disjunctions between, say, the economy and culture. Concerned to

relate theory to practice, critical theory also attempts to delineate the positive

potentials for greater freedom and democratization, as well as the dangers of

greater domination, oppression, and Destruction (Keller 1989). Grounded in

historical vision, critical theory stresses the continuities and discontinuities

between past, present, and future, and the possibility of constructive political
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Globalization

action and individual and group practice, grounded in positive potentials in the

current constellation of forces and possibilities (Best 1995).

A. Social and Cultural manifestations of globalization

Though there are many social and cultural manifestations of globalization, here are

some of the major ones:

Informational services: The past two decades have seen an

internationalization of information services involving the exponential

expansion of computer-based communication through the Internet, social

media, media network, social network, and electronic mail. On the one

hand, the electronic revolution has promoted the diversification and

democratization of information as people in nearly every country are able to

communicate their opinions and perspectives on issues, local and global, that

impact their lives. Political groups from Chiapas to Pakistan have effectively

used information technology to promote their perspectives and movements.

On the other hand, this expansion of information technology has been highly

uneven, creating an international "digital divide" (i.e., differences in access

to and skills to use Internet and other information technologies due

predominantly to geography and economic status). Africa-Black Africa is a

case, often; access to information technology and to telephone lines in many

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developing countries is controlled by the state or is available only to a small

minority who can afford them...

B. NEW SERVICES:

In recent years there has been a significant shift in the transmission and

reporting of world news with the rise of a small number of global news

services. This process has been referred to as the "CNN-inaction of news,"

reflecting the power of a few news agencies to construct and disseminate news.

Thanks to satellite technology, CNN and its few competitors extend their reach

to even the most geographically remote areas of the world. This raises some

important questions of globalization: Who determines what news what is

"newsworthy?" Who frames the news and determines the perspectives

articulated? Whose voice(s) are and are not represented? What are the potential

political consequences of the silencing of alternative voices and perspectives?

C. Popular culture:

The contemporary revolution in communication technology has had a

dramatic impact in the arena of popular culture. Information technology

enables a wide diversity of locally-based popular culture to develop and

reach a larger audience. For example, "world music" has developed a major

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Globalization

international audience. Old and new musical traditions that a few years ago

were limited to a small local audience are now playing on the world stage.

On the other hand, globalization has increased transmission of popular culture

easily and inexpensively from the developed countries of the North throughout the

world. Consequently, despite efforts of nationally-based media to develop local

television, movie, and video programs, many media markets in countries of Africa,

Asia, and Latin America are saturated with productions from the U.S., Europe and

a few countries in Asia (especially Japan and India). Local critics of this trend

lament not only the resulting silencing of domestic cultural expression, but also the

hegemonic reach of Western, "alien" culture and the potential global

homogenization of values and cultural taste. From all indications, globalization

must be understood by Africans form such as:

1. a new treatment from Black-African intellectual virtues as basis for

understanding and sharing the nature and goals of the Black African people in the

argument of the globalization policy.

2. A simplified and more culturally, ethnically, and sensitively intuitive argument

casting system of equitability on globalization decision making.

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Globalization

3. Streamlined and condensed coverage over globalization dialogues across the

globe will be imperative for the Black-African people to equally participate.

Meanwhile, the technology of Global Culture involves promoting life-style,

consumption, products, and identities. Transnational corporations deploy

advertising to penetrate local markets, to sell global products, and to overcome

local resistance. Expansion of private cable and satellite systems has been

aggressively promoting a commercial culture throughout the world. In a sense,

culture itself is being redefined for previously local and national cultures have been

forces of resistance to global forces, protecting the traditions, identities, and modes

of life of specific groups and peoples. Culture has been precisely the

particularizing, localizing force that distinguished societies and people from each

other. Culture provided forms of local identities, practices, and modes of everyday

life that could serve as a bulwark against the invasion of ideas, identities, and

forms of life extraneous to the specific local region in question. Indeed, culture is

an especially complex and contested terrain today as global cultures permeate local

ones and new configurations emerge that synthesize both poles, providing

contradictory forces of colonization and resistance, global homogenization and

new local hybrid forms and identities.

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Globalization

Globalization of the Economy and the Systems of Power and Inequality

An understanding of economics helps the temporarily disaffected to realize that

their transition is a necessary and healthy consequence of economic competition

within a system of power and equality. That economic competition underlies and

makes possible the continually growing abundance of wealth, that without it they

would be dramatically worse off, and therefore it is in everyone's interests to

support. It must be mentioned that difference in communication and transportation

technology, combined with free-market ideology, have given goods, services, and

capital unprecedented mobility, northern countries want to open world market to

their goods and take advantages of abundant, cheap labor in the south, politics

often supported by southern elites. They use international institutions and regional

trade agreements to compel poor countries like Africa to integrate by reducing

tariffs, privatizing state and labor standards. The result has enlarged profits for

investors but offered pittances to labors, provoking a strong backlash from civil

society. In essence, one of the most psychological racial warfare in the

international systems is within the globalization and technological transfers

political doctrines. In the context of politics, one would like to articulate from a

social effect that, if political institutions are inherently constrained in what results

they can produce, political ideologies are not constrained in what they can

promise. To maintain the plausibility of what they promise, however, they must
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Globalization

first establish and then maintain a particular vision of social processes that will

define a solution within the scope of political actions. In the context of

globalization and technology transfer, although most people tend to think of them

as individual characteristics or systems identity that is built into the very structure

of society and it is a social fact that derives out of analysis of international cultural,

ethnic, religious, and sectionalism based on racism.Locating a psychologically

structured phenomena in an historic social construction of national and

international realities, and racial oppression in the structure of social, political,

ethnic, and cultural institutions, provides a different frame of analysis from that

which would be obtained by analyzing only powerful institutions of international

systems., Capitalism is dynamic. The structure of production is continually

changing. Every participant in the economic system has the incentive and the

moral responsibility to plan for the future, to match their skills to the productive

opportunities in the economy and to enhance their skills and focus them on new

areas as the economy changes. Success in capitalism requires paying attention to

the market and responding appropriately, no matter your level of production, from

janitors and bricklayers to validation engineers to captains of industry. To succeed,

you cannot stand still. Complacency is failure. As Andy Grove is fond of saying,

"only the paranoid survive." Illustratively, therefore, it becomes imperative to

address the American competitiveness directly to this subject; I firmly believe that

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Globalization

one of America's greatest strengths is the adaptability of its people. The American

people can create change, and thrive on it. The historic accomplishments of the

United States in science, in invention, in engineering, and in business are without

peer. Americans are the people best positioned to prosper in the globalized

economy.

D. The UN equal World Globalization

Globalization also involves the dissemination of new technologies that have

tremendous impact on the economy, polity, society, culture, and everyday life.

African and the Third World nations are not equally viewed within the world

globalization. The research question is, is the so-called dissemination of new

technology equitable in all countries? Time-space compression produced by new

media and communications technologies are overcoming previous boundaries of

space and time, creating a global cultural village and dramatic penetration of global

forces into every realm of life in every region of the world, with racially culturally,

and ethnically limited penetration in Africa. New technologies in the labor process

displace living labor, make possible more flexible production, and create new labor

markets, with some areas undergoing deindustrialization (i.e. the "rustbelt" of the

Midwest in the United States), while production itself becomes increasingly

transnational (Harvey 1989). The new technologies also create new industries, such

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as the computer and information industry, and allow transnational media and

information to instantaneously traverse the globe (Morley and Robins 1995). This

process has led some to celebrate a new global information superhighway and

others to attack the new wave of media and culture of race, class, and system of

imperialism, which leaves Africa as victim of globalization.

Using a social structural analysis of system of power-system that differentially

advantage and disadvantage groups or nations depending on their social locations

within the international systems of globalization, race, class, and the international

global system, turn one attention to how they work. For several centuries,

globalization proceeded on an increasingly rising curve, bringing more and more

areas of the world into the world market-system. World War One and its aftermath

produced a slowing down of this process, however, first, enmeshing much of the

Western world in a highly destructive war, followed by a period of economic boom

and bust, protectionism, growing nationalism, and the failure of internationalist

economic and political policy. World War Two once again engulfed much of the

world in an even more destructive and global war, though already during the war

itself events occurred that would shape the post-War world economic order. At the

Breton Woods conference in 1944, monetary arrangements were undertaken which

would help produce a globalized world order. At the end of this meeting, the World

Bank and I.M.F. were founded, two major economic institutions that would be at
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Globalization

the basis of later arrangements such as GATT and NAFTA. With the end of the

war, world trade exploded with a vengeance. National trade barriers were

systematically dismantled and eroded, global economic forces penetrated local

economies, and a global consumer and media culture traversed the globe.

E. The impact of globalization

The impact of globalization is felt first and foremost in economic life. The

globalization of the economy refers to the increasing integration and

interdependence of all realms of economic life, including trade, finance,

production, and consumption. Debates about economic globalization include

whether integration has helped or hindered the plight of poor people around the

globe; whether jobs lost to 'outsourcing' really contribute to the health of an

economy by lowering end-users' costs; whether business and accounting practices

and principles (so-called 'corporate governance' issues) developed in one social

context can be transferred and utilized productively across national boundaries;

and whether government policies should promote foreign direct investment in

every sector of the economy or whether some sectors should be protected for the

benefit of domestic companies. The following articles have been assembled to shed

light on these and other related issues. Technology is also advancing one

culture and one language. The US has more computers than the rest of the

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Globalization

world combined. English is used in 80 percent of websites, yet fewer than

one in ten people worldwide speak the language. Everywhere, Internet

access divides educated from illiterate, rich from poor, young from old

and urban from rural. For many countries feeling the deadening and

harmonizing impacts of economic globalization, protecting cultural

diversity has become as important a fight as preserving biodiversity.

Many societies, particularly indigenous peoples, view culture as

their richest heritage, without which they have no roots, history or

soul. Its value is other than monetary. To commodity it is to

destroy it.

F. Some Advantages of globalization

Increased free trade between nations. Increased liquidity of capital

allowing investors in developed nations to invest in developing nations

Corporations have greater flexibility to operate across borders

Global mass media ties the world together

Increased flow of communications allows vital information to be shared

between individuals and corporations around the world. Greater ease and

speed of transportation for goods and people

Reduction of cultural barriers increases the global village effect. Spread

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Globalization

of democratic ideals to developed nations. Greater interdependence of

nation-states

Reduction of likelihood of war between developed nations

Increases in environmental protection in developed nations

G. Some Disadvantages of globalization

Increased flow of skilled and non-skilled jobs from developed to

developing nations as corporations seek out the cheapest labor. Increased

likelihood of economic disruptions in one nation affecting all nations.

Corporate influence of nation-states far exceeds that of civil society

organizations and average individuals. Threat that control of world media

by a handful of corporations will limit cultural expression. Greater

chance of reactions for globalization being violent in an attempt to

preserve cultural heritage. Greater risk of diseases being transported

unintentionally between nations

Spread of a materialistic lifestyle and attitude that sees consumption as

the path to prosperity

International bodies like the World Trade Organization infringe on

national and individual sovereignty. Increase in the chances of civil war

within developing countries and open war between developing countries

as they vie for resources

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Globalization

Decreases in environmental integrity as polluting corporations take

advantage of weak regulatory rules in developing countries.

H. Summary and Conclusion

Understanding the dynamics and Impact of Globalization: Africa

as a consequence of Social Construction of Reality and Ethno-
Cultural Marginality. The economic changes brought about by
globalization will affect different people in different ways.
Everyone benefits from globalization through a general increase
in production which causes generally lower prices. While the
diffuse nature of this benefit makes its magnitude difficult to
measure, it is certainly real. RACEAND RACIALISM: THE WAY OF
THE WEST; A SYSTEM OF WHITE SUPREMACY AND BLACK-
AFRICANS AND PEOPLE OF COLOR AS INFERIOR

This scholarly article is conceived as a sympathetic treatment of

the scourge of the historic racial disparities of Black-African
people and other people of color. Much of this article is about
reaction to the perpetual covert and some times overt global
racial institutionalization of Black-African People and other people
of color. This article challenges many dogmas of so-called social
science. as well as many underlying assumptions about racial
issues and cultural differences. This challenge is based on more
than the origin of humanity and the question of God in the
context of racism, Blacology cries. I write on this pre-historic and
with contemporary social perspective and at a time when the
social dynamics or race and its relationship to gender and class
are changing some how progressively or in another time
retrogressively.

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Globalization

I. RACE AND RACIALISM: THE WAY OF THE WEST; A SYSTEM

OF WHITE SUPREMACY AND BLACK-AFRICANS AND PEOPLE
OF COLOR AS INFERIOR. Why Race, Class, and Gender are
still potential contemporary international social, cultural,
ethnic, gender and religious problems in the 21st century?
Is It significant to lament that there is a contemporary
racial tolerant school of thought that since Barrack
Hussan Obama has become the first Black-African
President in the United States, it becomes a fallacy of
relevance to deduce that the intensity of racialism has
elongated or somehow compromised. In the context of
the United States where the author of this article lived
over 38 years and went to school, is a nation where
people are supposed to be to rise above their origins.
There is a believe that those who want to succeed can do
so with hard enough work and good efforts under the
premise that the United States was founded on the
principle of equality. Although equality has been
historically denied to Black African people many people
of color, there is no prospect for an absolute eradication of
racism. The question is why race, class, gender still
matter? They are mattered based of the below listed
underlined factors: (1) the persistent social, cultural,
economic, and educational structures in e ways that value
some lives, with specific emphasis on Black-African people
than others. (2) Currently in the United States, there exists
White privilege. (3) They remain the foundations for the
American system of power,

The impact of globalization is greater for individuals with a greater interaction

with the affected industries. For people brought into the international economic

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Globalization

system as a result of globalization, there are large and obvious benefits. Displaced

workers in those industries will need to find new employment, but the fact that a

relative overproduction in their industry caused them to lose their job necessarily

implies a relative underproduction, and therefore employment opportunities,

elsewhere in the economy.

The burden of adjustment falls most heavily upon those most able to bear it, and

even this may be greatly diminished through planning. Savings provides liquidity

during a person's transition to a new field. Savings are the source of funds for

paying ongoing expenses such as food and housing as well as new expenses such

as education. Forethought enables a person to anticipate the economic changes

before they occur. Forethought includes identifying possible alternative industries

to work in, beginning an education in them, and saving enough money to make the

transition more comfortable when it arrives.

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References:

See George M. Scott, Randall J. Jones, Jr. and Louis S. Furmanski:

Contemporary International Problems: World Politics, 2004.

See www.globalpolicy.org searched in 2008

See www.investorwords.com. Searched in 2008

See www.businessdictionary.com. Searched in 2008

See http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_GLOBALTREND2020_S1.HTML.

Searched in 2008.

See Howard Handelman; the Challenge of Third World

Development, 2011 Custom Edition.

See Dr. Amos M.D.Sirleafs Understanding the Dynamics of Politics

in Cultural Pluralism : An Experimental Perceptive of Post Conflict

Liberias 2017 predictions. Unpublished article 2006, Strayer

University-USA.

See Margaret L. Anderson and Patricia Hill Collins: Race, Class,

and Gender, an Anthology, 2010, USA.

See Thomas Sowell: Race and Culture, A World View, 1994.

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