It is possible, for example, to journey around
the world in just over a day on commercial airlines. Less than fifty years
ago, the journey from England to Australia took about a week. In 1870,
it would take seventy days for surface mail to travel from London to
New Zealand. With the advent of the telephone, faxes, and more recently
e-mail and video conferencing, such communication has become almost
instant. We live, if the hyperbole is to be believed, in a ‘global village’
and the term that is most commonly used to refer to this apparent
shrinking is ‘globalization’ (see Figure 1.1).