Gidden’s globalization
Giddens sees globalization as the motor of development that brings varied changes, which shape
modern societies. It is a process that contains varied, often opposing, tendencies. But we cannot
criticize globalization completely. Neither can we stop it. Yet we cannot ignore its potentially
negative effects, such as the growth of social unevenness, ecological and financial risk (global
risk society). As critics of globalizations show, different effects persist among different societies
in the world, even within one society.
According to Giddens, globalization affects societies, firms and the personal lives of
people. The result is a hierarchical system of three distinct levels (left panel, Fig. 2). Individual
citizens (people) affect transnational corporations or local firms and their respective industry
value chains. And people are also members of the global society where TCs grow, in turn
influencing individual people’s quality of life through time. In order to meet their objectives,
transnational firms also form global industry value chains, which influence our global society
both in the short and in the long term, i.e., with time lags or delays.