Globalization refers to the intensification of worldwide social, economic, cultural, and political interconnections—the compression of time and space such that events in one part of the world increasingly affect others. World-systems theory (Wallerstein) maps global inequality onto core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral zones structured by capitalist accumulation. Globalization transforms labor markets (outsourcing, migration), cultures (hybridization versus homogenization), and political authority (transnational institutions, declining state sovereignty). It simultaneously creates new opportunities and new vulnerabilities, and its benefits and costs are distributed unequally both between and within nations.
Trace the supply chain of a familiar commodity (a smartphone, a T-shirt) to reveal the global division of labor. Compare 'cultural imperialism' and 'hybridity' accounts of how local cultures respond to global media. Analyzing migration as both a cause and consequence of global inequality bridges economic and cultural perspectives.
From your study of social stratification, you understand how societies are internally organized by inequalities of class, status, and power. Globalization extends that analytical lens outward: it asks how societies are stratified relative to one another, and how the intensification of cross-border connections transforms inequalities both within and between nations. The core claim is that the contemporary world cannot be understood by studying societies as independent units — events in one place increasingly determine outcomes elsewhere, and that interdependence is structured, not random.
Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory provides the dominant structural map. He argued that capitalism has always been a world-system, not a collection of national economies. The system is organized into three zones: the core (wealthy, technologically advanced, capital-intensive nations that appropriate value from elsewhere — Western Europe, North America, Japan), the periphery (nations that produce raw materials and low-wage goods for the core, receiving a smaller share of value in return), and the semi-periphery (nations occupying an intermediate position, exploited by the core but exploiting the periphery in turn). This is not a description of culture or politics — it is a claim about the structure of the global division of labor and accumulation. A nation's position shapes what industries develop there, what wages workers earn, and what political leverage its government has. Movement between zones is possible but slow and contested.
Globalization transformed this structure in distinctive ways from the 1970s onward. Outsourcing and global supply chains relocated manufacturing from core to peripheral and semi-peripheral nations, driven by wage differentials. A smartphone might involve minerals from Congo, assembly in China, software from India, and marketing in the United States — with value captured disproportionately at the design and brand end of the chain, not the assembly end. Migration is the human face of this process: people move where labor is in demand, creating transnational communities with ties to multiple countries simultaneously. Remittances from migrants to their home countries exceed foreign aid flows globally — a reversal of the expected direction of resource transfer.
The cultural dimension is equally contested. The cultural imperialism thesis holds that globalization spreads American and Western cultural forms (fast food, Hollywood, pop music, fashion) at the expense of local traditions, producing homogenization — what sociologists sometimes call McDonaldization (George Ritzer's term for the spread of rationalization principles embodied in fast food). The cultural hybridity thesis, drawing on postcolonial theory, argues that this picture misses the active appropriation, fusion, and transformation that local cultures perform. Bollywood is not simply derivative of Hollywood; Korean pop music draws on American forms but produces something distinctively different that now flows back into the core. The metaphor of creolization — the development of new cultural forms from the mixing of distinct traditions — better captures what is observed than a one-way flow of cultural dominance.
Finally, globalization has reshaped political authority. The nation-state remains primary, but transnational institutions — the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, climate treaties — now constrain what states can do domestically and create new arenas for political contestation. The rise of movements explicitly responding to globalization, from anti-globalization protests in the 1990s to contemporary nationalist backlashes, reflects the distributional reality that globalization's benefits (consumer access to cheap goods, capital mobility, export opportunities) and costs (manufacturing displacement, wage pressure, cultural disruption) are not shared equally within nations — a point that your understanding of stratification should make unsurprising.
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