Globalisation is generally recognised as a long contemporary process driven by the rapid development of information technology and other forces to link and expend human activities, to construct the power of state and economic organisations through the elimination of space and the generation of time (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton, 1999, p.13, Orga, 2012, p. 154-158, Waters, 2001, p. 1-5, 15, ). This growing interconnectedness has made both positive and negative impacts on the global economy, politics and culture. The following summary of conceptualising globalisation is an attempt to provide an insight into the processes and effects of globalisation.
In the introductory section of the book, “Globalisation Transformation: Politics, Economics and culture” (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton, 1999), Held and his fellow scholars identified three major accounts of the nature and meaning of globalisation, which are the Hyperglobalists, the Sceptics and the Transformationalists (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton, 1999, p 3-10.). The first two accounts both empathise a strong correlation between globalisation and economy, accompany with the change of state power. Their conceptualisation of globalisation was criticised as “prefiguring a singular condition or end-state, that is fully integrated global market with price and interest rate equalisation” (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton, 1999, p 11.). In comparison, the Transformationalists seems more open-minded to this process in terms of future trajectory of globalisation:
“There is no a prior reason to assume that globalisation must simply evolve in a single direction…for these transformationalists, globalisation is conceived in terms of a more contingent and open-ended historical process” (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton, 1999, p 11.).
Despite holding different perspectives of the processes of globalisation, researchers are more concordant with what