世新大學九十學年度碩士班招生考試試題

系所別	考試科目
社會發展研究所	英文

*考生請於試卷(答案卷)內作答

Read the following essay carefully and rewrite it in Chinese, making sure that you capture the author’s central argument and important points.

The Ends of Globalization

Introduction, by Don Kalb

This book does not need to open by claiming that globalization is the big current buzzword that is preoccupying the minds of managers, politicians, journalists, and academics in this last decade of the century. All other texts on the topic have already done so, And because they have recently formed into a real flood that cannot be followed by any single researcher, and because some of them are being sold by the hundreds of thousands, there s every reason to assume that this claim might be correct. Certainly so, when one realizes that only ten years ado it would have been hard to encounter the term anywhere.

Globalization is a complex and multileveled concept and social phenomenon. In principle, it does not claim more than a geographic fact: people and places in the world are becoming more extensively and densely connected to each other as a consequence of increasing transnational connected to each other as a consequence of increasing transnational flows of capital/goods, information/ideas, and people. But any effort at specification arouses intense debate. What is the relation between the three genres of items on the move? Is it a new phenomenon or not? What are its causes? What does it imply for the national state that had presumably become the pinnacle of the organization of social life in the postwar period—a “cordon-sanitary,”

According to Arjun Appadurai (1996)? What about the civic rights that were enshrined in the constitutions and modes of operation of these states? What does it bring to presumably homogeneous national cultures? How does it relate to olderconcerns, such as imperialism, cultural homogenization, and Americanization

? And, will we all be better off? Or do some classed and nations profit more than others? Dose it imply more equality between people in various parts of the world, within national states, or within the advanced world? Does it bring more freedom, more democracy?

This book singles out some of these questions. In particular it hopes to advance our understanding of globalization’s consequences for human equality and inequality; of the question of the role of the state; of the nature, effects, and driving forces of migration; of the question of cultural homogenization and heterogenization; and of the historical trajectory of the process. It will do so with a certain bias toward the experiences of the Western world, but not exclusively so. Moreover, it will deal with such questions in piecemeal fashion. Instead of sweeping statements about the state of humanity in the global age, the contributors to this book were asked to start to entangle more historically and empirically tractable issues—issues that also have a longer pedigree of scientific attention but are nevertheless basic to any overall discussion or broad vision of the topic. This book thus attempts to bring a sobering social science perspective to a public issue on which economists, business gurus, and philosophers have freely unleashed their abstract models and jumbo schemes.

The diverse empirical issues related to globalization discussed here have generally been dealt with in separate volumes. This book distinguishes itself by bringing them together in one interdisciplinary collection. It addresses elements of globalization that are studied by economists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and philosophers. By doing so, we recognize the need to try to grasp the whole set of issues that globalization entails. This book therefore transcends the exclusive and disciplinarily enforced attention of most texts on the subject to either questions of cultural homogenization/pluralization/hybridization, the more quantitative issues of economics and finance, or the more historical questions about politics and international relations. We encourage researchers and students on the one side of such disciplinary divides to become informed on aspects studied by those on the other, simply because, in the ultimate outcome, such aspects happen to intertwine and together, in their mutual interrelationships, shape the actual ways in which societies change and respond to their changing environments.

The social sciences may have become too specialized to still adhere to such an integrative task. But we keep attaching importance to the basic methodological idea social scientists study is human relationships, in particular how configurations of human relationships change and what the vectors and direction of such changes are. Economics, politics, and culture (to use that trinity) are just different institutional windows to make such social processes visible.

Reducing our attention to any one of them, as is generally done, would help sustain the simplifications that presently abound on the topic and see it as far too simple, undifferentiated, and smooth process that lends itself well to the elegant description in single-stranded series of data, such as stock-market indices and capitalization rations, or a clear-cut linear narrative, such as the end of the welfare state, the ends of history (Fuckuyama 1992),or the McDonaldization of culture (Ritzer 1993) If social science wants to regain some of the terrain lost to quick neoclassical problem-solvers or guru-type make-believers, we are convinced that it tenaciously has to do just that :

Embrace conceptual and empirical complexity and historical contingency and show paradox, friction, and contradication.