However frustrating this may be, it is not perhaps as surprising as it might at first
seem. For radicals especially—and they are, if anything, rather more guilty of a failure
to provide a precise minimal definitional standard—globalization is multifaceted
and complex. Accordingly, it does not avail itself easily of a simple definition. Such
authors, perhaps understandably, tend to be reluctant to frame their understanding
of globalization in discriminating terms and/or in terms that might easily be operationalized
empirically. Insofar as they define globalization at all, then, it is often
defined in an anecdotal manner—Giddens, for instance, introduced his 1999 Reith
Lectures on globalization not with a definition but with the story of an anthropologist
friend watching Basic Instinct on video in Central Africa (1999; see also Hay and
Watson 1999). After a few more anecdotes, Giddens’s audience probably gained a
pretty good sense of what he was talking about; what they probably did not get was a