Globalisation and Society

Introduction

Globalisation describes the widening, deepening, and accelerating connections among people, economies, institutions, technologies, and environments across borders. It is not one single process and it does not affect every place or social group in the same way. For that reason, this aiMOOC treats globalisation as a set of contested social processes involving flows of goods, services, capital, people, information, culture, risks, and political influence.

For university-level study, the central question is not simply whether globalisation is "good" or "bad". A stronger question is: How are cross-border connections produced, governed, experienced, and distributed, and who gains or loses under different conditions? You will examine economic integration alongside labour, inequality, migration, culture, digital networks, political authority, and environmental consequences.

The container port above is a useful entry point. A single consumer product may combine design, finance, raw materials, components, assembly, logistics, marketing, data, and retail across several countries. The physical movement of goods is therefore also a movement of contracts, standards, labour relations, risks, and power.

The Crash Course video introduces a key tension: trade and global integration can increase total economic opportunities while distributing benefits and costs unevenly. Use the video as a starting hypothesis, not as the final answer. Throughout the course, you will test claims against social evidence and alternative theoretical perspectives.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this aiMOOC, you should be able to:

Explain globalisation as a multidimensional and historically changing process rather than a purely economic trend.
Analyse global value chains by connecting firms, workers, consumers, states, and institutions.
Evaluate inequality across and within countries and distinguish aggregate gains from distributive outcomes.
Explain migration and transnationalism without reducing mobility to a single economic cause.
Compare cultural interpretations including homogenisation, hybridisation, and glocalisation.
Assess global governance while recognising the continuing power of states and local institutions.
Analyse digital globalisation through infrastructure, platforms, data, access, and power.
Evaluate environmental externalities and the difference between production-based and consumption-based responsibility.
Apply theoretical lenses to empirical cases and compare what each lens reveals or obscures.
Build evidence-based arguments that distinguish description, causation, values, and policy choices.

Understanding Globalisation

A Multidimensional Process

Globalisation links several dimensions that often develop at different speeds. Economic globalisation concerns trade, investment, production, finance, and transnational firms. Social globalisation concerns relationships, mobility, communities, institutions, and everyday life across borders. Cultural globalisation involves the circulation and adaptation of symbols, languages, media, food, fashion, beliefs, and identities. Political globalisation refers to cross-border rules, organisations, movements, treaties, and policy coordination. Digital globalisation involves networks through which data, services, media, work, and communication cross borders. Environmental globalisation arises because emissions, resource use, biodiversity loss, and ecological risks do not remain neatly inside political territories.

These dimensions interact. Cheap transport can reshape labour markets. Digital communication can sustain migrant families across continents. International law can alter corporate behaviour. Consumer demand in one country can influence land use or working conditions elsewhere. A sociological analysis therefore studies interdependence together with power.

The map of submarine communication cables makes digital globalisation physically visible. Online communication may feel "weightless", but it depends on cables, landing points, data centres, energy, regulation, and ownership. Digital connectivity is therefore both global and geographically uneven.

Historical Layers

Long-distance trade, migration, empire, religious exchange, and knowledge circulation existed centuries before the modern term globalisation. What changed over time were the scale, speed, density, technologies, institutions, and social consequences of these connections. Early trade routes linked distant societies; European colonial expansion reorganised land, labour, extraction, and political authority; industrialisation transformed transport and production; steamships, railways, telegraphy, and later aviation reduced time and distance; twentieth-century institutions built rules for monetary cooperation, reconstruction, development, and trade; containerisation, deregulation in many sectors, and digital communication accelerated cross-border production and information flows.

This history matters because present-day global inequalities did not begin from an equal starting point. Colonialism, slavery, unequal exchange, industrial concentration, resource extraction, and state-building left durable institutions and asymmetries. At the same time, formerly colonised and lower-income countries have not followed one single trajectory: many have pursued different development strategies, built new industries, expanded education, and gained influence in regional and global institutions.

Globalisation Is Not the Same as Borderlessness

Globalisation can make borders more permeable for some flows while reinforcing them for others. Capital can sometimes move more easily than workers. Digital services may cross borders quickly while migrants face visas, detention, or restricted rights. Firms can distribute production internationally while governments continue to tax, regulate, subsidise, police, negotiate, and provide welfare within territories.

This is why claims that the nation-state has simply disappeared are too strong. States remain important, but their capacities and choices are shaped by markets, treaties, firms, social movements, geopolitical relationships, and problems that require international cooperation. The analytical task is to examine which actors gain room for manoeuvre, which lose it, and under what conditions.

Economic Globalisation and Global Production

Trade, Investment, and Global Value Chains

A global value chain divides the activities needed to create a product or service across firms and locations. These activities can include research, design, extraction, manufacturing, assembly, transport, software, finance, marketing, retail, repair, and disposal. Cross-border production can allow specialisation, larger markets, technology diffusion, and new employment. It can also create dependencies on distant suppliers, expose workers to competitive cost pressure, and make responsibility harder to locate.

The World Bank's work on global value chains has emphasised that participation can support productivity, income growth, and poverty reduction, but outcomes depend on domestic capabilities, institutions, education, infrastructure, market access, and policy. The World Trade Organization likewise stresses that trade can contribute to income convergence while benefits within and between economies remain uneven. University-level analysis should therefore separate total gains from their distribution.

Container ports reveal the geography of trade networks. High-throughput ports become strategic nodes where infrastructure, customs systems, shipping firms, labour, urban land, and global demand meet.

The Khan Academy video focuses on trade and transnational corporations. While watching, identify which mechanisms could increase efficiency and which could transfer risk or bargaining pressure to suppliers and workers.

Transnational Corporations and Power

A multinational corporation or transnational corporation coordinates economic activities across national borders. Its power does not come only from size. It may also arise from ownership of technology, brands, patents, data, standards, finance, logistics, or access to consumers. Lead firms in global value chains can sometimes shape conditions far beyond the workplaces they directly own.

However, corporate power is not unlimited. States set laws, workers organise, consumers mobilise, courts impose liability, investors change incentives, trade unions form cross-border alliances, and international standards influence expectations. The resulting system is a form of multi-level governance in which public, private, and civil-society actors interact.

Labour, Employment, and Social Upgrading

Global production can create jobs and enable movement from low-productivity to higher-productivity activities. Yet job quantity and job quality are different questions. The International Labour Organization has documented how global supply chains can combine employment opportunities with governance gaps, insecure contracts, long working hours, low wages, limited collective bargaining, or weak enforcement in some contexts.

The concept of social upgrading asks whether economic participation is accompanied by improvements in workers' rights, wages, security, voice, and working conditions. Economic upgrading by firms does not automatically produce social upgrading for all workers. You should therefore examine the bargaining power of workers and suppliers, national labour law, enforcement capacity, gendered job segmentation, purchasing practices, and the availability of social protection.

Globalisation, Inequality, and Social Stratification

Between-Country and Within-Country Inequality

Globalisation can coincide with falling inequality between some countries while inequality within particular countries rises, falls, or remains stable. These patterns are not contradictory because they refer to different units of analysis. Rapid growth in populous middle-income countries can reduce global between-country gaps even while wealth or income becomes more concentrated inside individual societies.

The Gini coefficient is one measure of inequality, but no single index captures all dimensions of advantage. University analysis should also consider wealth, wages, job security, education, health, housing, gender, race and ethnicity, citizenship, disability, and geographic location. Different indicators can tell different stories.

Winners, Losers, and Adjustment

When an economy opens to trade or new technologies, aggregate income can rise while specific sectors, regions, or occupations face disruption. Consumers may gain from lower prices or wider choice, exporters may gain new markets, and some workers may gain access to better-paid jobs. Other workers may experience plant closures, wage pressure, or a mismatch between existing skills and new opportunities.

Whether disruption becomes a temporary adjustment or a long-term social divide depends partly on institutions. Education, retraining, labour mobility, collective bargaining, regional investment, unemployment insurance, taxation, public services, and competition policy can alter the distribution of costs and benefits. This is why globalisation is not an external force operating outside politics; domestic policy mediates global pressures.

Class, Gender, and Unequal Exposure

Globalisation is experienced through social positions. Highly mobile professionals may benefit from international labour markets while low-wage workers encounter more constrained mobility. Women can gain paid employment through export industries while also facing occupational segregation, care burdens, or vulnerability to insecure work. Migrants may fill essential roles yet have weaker bargaining rights. Informal workers may be linked to global production without direct employment by the firms whose products they help produce.

Intersectional analysis asks how class, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, age, and location combine. Avoid treating "workers", "consumers", "migrants", or "developing countries" as internally uniform groups.

Migration, Mobility, and Transnational Society

Why People Move

International migration has economic, political, social, educational, family, and environmental causes. Wage differences matter, but so do conflict, persecution, study, family reunification, professional opportunity, colonial and linguistic ties, recruitment networks, and existing diasporas. Migration decisions are often made by households rather than isolated individuals.

The map shows the share of residents who were born in another country. Read it carefully: a high share does not automatically tell you why people moved, whether they have equal rights, or whether migration is temporary or permanent. Maps make patterns visible but can hide biographies, legal categories, and power relations.

Transnationalism, Diasporas, and Remittances

Transnationalism refers to social practices and institutions that connect people across more than one country. Migrants may maintain family obligations, political interests, business links, cultural practices, or digital relationships across borders. Diasporas can support trade, investment, knowledge exchange, advocacy, and cultural creativity.

Remittances can support household consumption, education, health, and local investment, but they do not substitute for public institutions or broad development policy. Migration can also produce concerns about "brain drain" when skilled workers leave sectors with shortages, yet circulation and return migration can create "brain gain" through skills, networks, finance, and entrepreneurship. The outcome depends on context.

Citizenship, Belonging, and Borders

Migration makes visible the difference between economic participation and political membership. A person can work, pay taxes, raise a family, and contribute culturally in a society while having limited voting rights or insecure residence. Debates over migration therefore concern not only labour supply but also citizenship, identity, welfare, human rights, security, and national narratives.

A rigorous analysis avoids both romanticising mobility and describing migrants as passive objects of policy. Migrants exercise agency, but that agency is structured by law, resources, social networks, employers, borders, and discrimination.

Culture, Identity, and Everyday Life

Homogenisation, Hybridisation, and Glocalisation

One interpretation of cultural globalisation emphasises homogenisation: similar brands, entertainment formats, consumer practices, or languages appear in many places. A second emphasises hybridisation: cultural forms mix, producing new combinations that cannot be reduced to a single origin. A third emphasises glocalisation: global products, institutions, or ideas are adapted to local contexts.

These processes can occur at the same time. A global media platform may distribute a standard technical infrastructure while users create locally specific genres, humour, politics, and identities. A restaurant chain may standardise its business model while changing menus to fit local tastes and religious practices. Global culture is therefore neither simple sameness nor unlimited diversity.

The presence of a global brand in Osaka is evidence of cross-border commercial reach, but the photograph alone does not prove cultural homogenisation. To investigate glocalisation, you would compare menus, advertising, labour practices, consumer meanings, and local competitors across places.

Cultural Power and Representation

Cultural exchange occurs within unequal markets. Some languages, platforms, film industries, music industries, universities, and news organisations have far greater global reach than others. This raises questions about cultural imperialism, representation, ownership, and whose knowledge becomes globally authoritative.

At the same time, audiences interpret and remix media rather than simply absorb it. Cultural producers outside dominant centres can reach transnational audiences, and diaspora networks can circulate forms in multiple directions. The key analytical question is not whether culture moves, but how the conditions of circulation shape visibility, voice, and value.

Digital Globalisation

Platforms, Data, and Network Effects

Digital networks allow many services, images, messages, financial transactions, and work tasks to move across borders almost instantly. Platform companies can coordinate large markets without owning every asset used in them. Their influence may grow through network effects: a service becomes more useful as more participants join.

Digital globalisation also creates new forms of labour and governance. Freelancers can sell services internationally, firms can manage distributed teams, and activists can organise across borders. Yet platforms can set rules, rank visibility, collect data, and change access conditions. Questions about competition, privacy, content moderation, taxation, labour classification, and data sovereignty are therefore central social questions.

The Digital Divide

The digital divide is not only a divide between people who have or do not have internet access. It also includes connection quality, device ownership, affordability, language, accessibility, digital skills, online safety, and the ability to convert access into educational, political, or economic opportunities.

Infrastructure maps should therefore be read alongside social indicators. A country can be connected to international cables while rural regions, low-income households, or marginalised communities experience poor access. Global connectivity is built through local infrastructures and institutions.

Political Globalisation and Global Governance

Institutions Beyond the State

Global governance refers to rule-making and coordination that address cross-border issues without a single world government. Actors include the United Nations, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, regional organisations, treaty bodies, national governments, courts, firms, trade unions, professional associations, non-governmental organisations, and social movements.

These institutions differ in membership, authority, accountability, expertise, and enforcement. A treaty may be legally binding while a voluntary corporate code is not. A global standard may shape behaviour even without formal coercion. A powerful state can influence negotiations more than a small state, yet coalitions of smaller states can also change agendas.

Sovereignty as Capacity and Constraint

Globalisation does not simply remove sovereignty; it can transform how sovereignty is exercised. States sometimes sign treaties that constrain future policy in exchange for predictable cooperation. Governments may pool authority through regional institutions. They may also compete for investment, regulate capital, screen foreign investment, control migration, subsidise industries, or impose sanctions.

A useful distinction is between formal sovereignty and effective capacity. Two states may possess the same legal status while differing greatly in tax capacity, bargaining power, administrative expertise, market size, technological resources, or geopolitical influence.

Contestation and Social Movements

Globalisation has generated social movements both supporting and opposing different forms of global integration. Labour networks, environmental organisations, human-rights groups, alter-globalisation movements, business associations, nationalist movements, and development campaigns all seek to shape rules and public narratives.

The 1999 protests around the WTO ministerial meeting in Seattle became a prominent symbol of contestation over trade, labour rights, environmental standards, corporate power, and democratic accountability. The image should not be read as evidence that "society opposed globalisation" as a whole. It documents one contested political moment involving diverse groups with different goals.

Environmental Globalisation

Shared Problems and Unequal Responsibilities

Climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean pollution, and resource extraction connect societies through ecological systems as well as markets. Production may occur in one country while consumption occurs in another, making responsibility difficult to assign. Supply chains can shift some environmental pressures away from consumers who benefit from the final goods.

Consumption-based emissions attribute emissions to the consumers of goods and services, adjusting for carbon embodied in imports and exports. Production-based emissions assign emissions to the territory where they are produced. Neither measure is universally "correct"; each answers a different question. Comparing them reveals how trade can separate the location of consumption from the location of environmental impact.

Climate Justice and Global Cooperation

Climate justice asks how responsibility, vulnerability, historical emissions, development needs, and capacity to act should shape climate policy. Low-income populations may contribute relatively little to cumulative emissions while facing severe climate risks. At the same time, rapidly industrialising societies need energy and infrastructure to improve living standards.

Global cooperation is difficult because countries face different costs, incentives, resources, and historical positions. Policy debates therefore involve finance, technology transfer, carbon pricing, regulation, adaptation, loss and damage, industrial strategy, and fairness across generations and borders.

Theoretical Perspectives

Modernisation, Dependency, and World-Systems Approaches

Modernisation theory historically emphasised internal transformation from "traditional" to "modern" institutions and often treated industrialised societies as reference points. Critics argue that this can underestimate colonial history, unequal exchange, and multiple development paths.

Dependency theory argues that underdevelopment can be reproduced through unequal relationships between wealthier and poorer economies rather than representing an earlier stage on one universal path. It directs attention to trade structures, external ownership, debt, and the extraction of value.

World-systems theory analyses a capitalist world economy organised through core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral positions. It is useful for studying durable structural inequality but can be criticised when categories become too rigid or when political, cultural, and local variation receives too little attention.

The Khan Academy overview introduces several globalisation theories. Compare its categories with the explanations above and ask what each framework treats as the main unit of analysis: the nation, the world economy, institutions, firms, networks, or social actors.

Hyperglobalist, Sceptical, and Transformationalist Positions

A hyperglobalist position emphasises a major historical shift in which global markets, technologies, and networks increasingly constrain nation-states. A sceptical position argues that claims of a borderless world are exaggerated and points to regionalisation, persistent state power, and historical precedents. A transformationalist position treats globalisation as a profound but open-ended reconfiguration of power and social relations rather than a simple decline of the state.

These are ideal-typical positions, not boxes into which every scholar fits. Their value lies in generating different questions. If trade becomes more regional, a sceptic may see confirmation, while a transformationalist may interpret regionalisation as one form of changing global order.

Network and Global Production Perspectives

Network approaches focus on nodes, flows, infrastructures, and relationships. They are useful for studying cities, digital platforms, migration networks, financial systems, and logistics. Global production network approaches go beyond a linear supply chain by examining firms, states, workers, institutions, and territories as interconnected actors.

These perspectives emphasise that the same global process can produce different outcomes in different places. A factory, port, data centre, university, or migrant neighbourhood is not merely "local"; it can be a node where global relationships become socially concrete.

Case Study: The Global Life of a Smartphone

A smartphone is a useful analytical object because it combines minerals, advanced components, patents, software, design, assembly, logistics, marketing, platform services, electricity, data, repair, and waste. Different stages may occur in different countries, and the highest-value activities do not necessarily occur where the largest number of workers are employed.

To analyse the smartphone sociologically, trace at least six relationships: resource extraction, manufacturing labour, intellectual property, logistics, consumer culture, and electronic waste. Then add a seventh relationship of your choice, such as digital surveillance, taxation, repair rights, gender, migration, or climate impact.

The case illustrates an important principle: globalisation is not an abstract force floating above society. It is reproduced through concrete decisions about contracts, technologies, laws, wages, infrastructures, consumption, and disposal.

Globalisation Under Pressure

Resilience, Regionalisation, and Strategic Policy

Pandemics, wars, financial crises, cyberattacks, shipping disruptions, and extreme weather can expose the vulnerability of tightly connected systems. Firms and governments may respond through diversification, larger inventories, regional sourcing, domestic capacity, or strategic partnerships. These responses do not necessarily mean the end of globalisation; they may represent a reorganisation of global interdependence.

Concepts such as reshoring, nearshoring, and friendshoring describe different attempts to relocate or politically align production. Each involves trade-offs among cost, resilience, security, employment, and international cooperation. Avoid treating any one strategy as automatically efficient or socially just.

Fragmentation and Cooperation Can Coexist

Different sectors can globalise or fragment at the same time. Digital services may expand internationally while trade restrictions grow in strategic technologies. Tourism may recover while migration controls tighten. Regional blocs may deepen internal integration while competing more strongly with other blocs.

The empirical question is therefore not "Is globalisation ending?" but "Which connections are strengthening, which are weakening, and who is reorganising them for what purpose?"

How to Analyse Globalisation Critically

A Five-Step Analytical Framework

Scale: Identify whether the claim concerns the world, a region, a country, a city, a firm, a household, or an individual.
Mechanism: Explain the process connecting cause and outcome rather than relying on correlation.
Distribution: Ask who gains, who pays, who is exposed to risk, and how outcomes differ across social groups.
Power: Identify who can set rules, move resources, refuse participation, organise collectively, or shift costs to others.
Counterfactual: Compare the observed outcome with a plausible alternative, not with an unrealistic world without trade, technology, migration, or politics.

This framework helps you avoid two common errors: treating globalisation as a single independent variable and assuming that a national average describes every person in that country.

Reading Data and Media Responsibly

When you encounter a global map, graph, video, or headline, ask who produced it, which year it represents, how concepts were measured, what is missing, and whether the visual scale exaggerates or hides differences. Distinguish stocks from flows, absolute numbers from percentages, current levels from historical change, and correlation from causation.

For example, the share of foreign-born residents is not the same as the annual migration rate. A country's Gini coefficient does not tell you its median income. Trade openness does not by itself reveal labour rights. Consumption-based emissions and production-based emissions answer different questions. Methodological care is part of social analysis.

Key Concepts at a Glance

Concept	Working meaning	Question to ask
Globalisation	Increasing cross-border interconnection and integration across multiple domains	Which flows, actors, and institutions are actually becoming more connected?
Interdependence	Mutual dependence among actors or societies	Is the dependence symmetrical or does one side have more alternatives?
Global value chain	Cross-border organisation of activities that create a good or service	Where are value, risk, and decision-making located?
Transnational corporation	Firm coordinating activities across more than one country	What gives the firm bargaining or rule-setting power?
Transnationalism	Social practices sustained across national borders	How do people maintain relationships and institutions across territories?
Glocalisation	Adaptation of global forms to local contexts	What changes when a supposedly global model enters a specific place?
Global governance	Cross-border rule-making and coordination without a single world government	Who participates, who decides, and how are rules enforced?
Digital divide	Unequal access to and effective use of digital technologies	Who can turn connectivity into real social, political, or economic capability?
Social upgrading	Improvement in workers' rights and employment conditions	Does economic upgrading improve workers' lives and bargaining power?
Climate justice	Fairness in the distribution of climate responsibilities, risks, and capacities	How should historical responsibility and present vulnerability shape policy?

Interactive Tasks

Quiz: Test Your Knowledge

Which description best captures globalisation in this course? (A multidimensional process of expanding cross-border connections) (!A complete disappearance of national governments) (!A synonym for international trade only) (!A single policy adopted by all countries)

Why can aggregate gains from trade coexist with social conflict? (Benefits and costs can be distributed unevenly) (!Every worker receives the same wage increase) (!Trade removes all differences among regions) (!Consumers always lose when imports rise)

What does a global value chain describe? (Activities for producing a good or service distributed across locations) (!A list of national currencies) (!A treaty that abolishes labour law) (!A measure of cultural similarity)

What is the main idea of transnationalism? (Social practices and relationships can be sustained across national borders) (!Migrants must permanently cut ties with their origin country) (!All political authority shifts to corporations) (!Cultural identities become identical everywhere)

Which concept describes adapting a global form to a local context? (Glocalisation) (!Sovereignty) (!Containerisation) (!Protectionism)

What does the digital divide include beyond simple internet access? (Affordability skills devices quality and effective use) (!Only the number of social media posts) (!Only the location of national capitals) (!Only the price of exported hardware)

What do consumption-based carbon emissions do? (Adjust territorial emissions for carbon embodied in trade) (!Measure only emissions from international aviation) (!Exclude emissions connected to imported goods) (!Assign all emissions to multinational corporations)

Which perspective argues that underdevelopment can be reproduced through unequal external relationships? (Dependency theory) (!Symbolic interactionism) (!Demographic transition theory) (!Behaviourism)

Why is a sceptical perspective useful in globalisation debates? (It tests whether claims of borderlessness exaggerate actual change) (!It assumes every international connection has ended) (!It treats culture as economically irrelevant by definition) (!It proves that states never cooperate)

What is the strongest first step when evaluating a globalisation claim? (Identify the scale mechanism evidence and distribution involved) (!Assume a national average applies to every group) (!Treat correlation as proof of causation) (!Ignore the historical period of the data)

Memory Game

Interdependence	Mutual reliance among actors or societies
Glocalisation	Adaptation of global forms to local contexts
Remittance	Money transferred by migrants to people in another country
Sovereignty	Authority associated with governing a political territory
Containerisation	Standardised freight system that transformed global logistics
Transnationalism	Social practices maintained across national borders
Externality	Cost or benefit imposed on others outside a transaction

Drag and Drop

Match the correct terms.	Topic
Global value chain	Cross-border organisation of production activities
Social upgrading	Improvement in labour rights and working conditions
Digital divide	Unequal capacity to access and use digital networks
Global governance	Cross-border coordination without a single world government
Climate justice	Fair distribution of climate responsibilities risks and capacities

...

Crossword Puzzle

Globalisation	What term describes expanding cross-border connections across economic social political cultural and digital life?
Migration	What is the movement of people from one place of residence to another called?
Remittance	What one-word term means money sent by a migrant to people in another country?
Glocalisation	What concept describes adapting a global form to a local setting?
Sovereignty	What term describes governing authority associated with a political territory?
Interdependence	What term means mutual reliance among connected actors or societies?

LearningApps

Cloze Text

Globalisation involves cross-border connections in economic political cultural social digital and environmental life, producing greater

. A global value chain can distribute design extraction production logistics and marketing across multiple

. Aggregate gains do not guarantee equal outcomes because benefits and costs can be distributed

. Migration can create social relationships that continue across national borders, a pattern known as

. Cultural globalisation can involve the local adaptation of global forms, often called

. Digital connectivity depends on physical infrastructure as well as skills affordability and access, which is why scholars study the

. Consumption-based emissions assign carbon associated with imported goods to the place of

. Critical analysis asks about scale mechanisms distribution power and a plausible

.

Open-Ended Tasks

Easy

Globalisation diary: Keep a one-day record of ten products services media items or interactions in your routine that depend on cross-border connections, then classify each by economic cultural digital social political or environmental dimension.
Supply chain sketch: Choose an everyday product and create a labelled diagram showing at least five stages from raw materials to consumption, marking where labour regulation or environmental risk could enter.
Media comparison: Find two news reports from different countries about the same global issue and write a short comparison of framing sources vocabulary and missing perspectives.
Migration interview plan: Design an ethical interview guide about mobility belonging and transnational ties without asking for sensitive legal or personal information, and explain why each question is appropriate.

Standard

Global inequality data brief: Compare two inequality indicators for three countries using a reliable dataset, explain what each indicator measures, and show why rankings can change when the measure changes.
Platform globalisation map: Create an annotated map of the infrastructures actors rules and user groups behind one global digital platform, including at least one issue of data governance and one issue of labour.
Glocalisation photo essay: Produce a photo essay or illustrated storyboard showing how a global cultural form is adapted in a local context, with captions that distinguish observation from interpretation.
Trade and labour podcast: Record a five-minute podcast evaluating how participation in a global value chain could create both employment opportunities and decent-work risks, using at least three credible sources.

Advanced

Global production network case study: Research one industry and produce a network analysis connecting lead firms suppliers states workers logistics finance and civil-society actors, then identify where bargaining power is concentrated.
Migration policy debate: Prepare a policy memo that evaluates one migration policy from the perspectives of migrants employers public institutions and local communities, making trade-offs and evidence explicit.
Carbon accounting investigation: Compare production-based and consumption-based emissions for selected countries and explain how international trade changes interpretations of responsibility and climate justice.
Global governance simulation: Organise a negotiation on a cross-border problem with roles for governments firms workers civil society and an international organisation, document the final agreement, and analyse which actors had the strongest leverage.

Learning Assessment

Causal explanation: Choose one claim such as trade causes wage decline or migration causes growth and build a causal diagram identifying mechanisms confounders alternative explanations and evidence needed to test the claim.
Distributional analysis: Evaluate a globalisation policy by separating effects on consumers workers firms regions taxpayers and future generations rather than reporting only a national average.
Theory comparison: Apply dependency theory and a network approach to the same global industry, then explain which relationships each theory highlights and which it overlooks.
Source critique: Select one map and one video from this aiMOOC, evaluate their date source measurement choices framing and limitations, and propose one additional source that would improve the analysis.
Policy transfer: Design a policy package that aims to retain benefits from global economic integration while reducing one labour social or environmental harm, and justify how institutions would implement it.
Synthesis essay: Defend or reject the statement globalisation weakens the state by comparing at least three domains such as trade migration digital regulation climate policy or public health and by specifying the conditions under which your argument holds.

Evidence of Learning

Evidence of learning should show more than recall. Strong work demonstrates four connected forms of achievement.

Knowledge: You can explain major dimensions of globalisation, distinguish stocks from flows, identify actors in global value chains and global governance, and accurately use concepts such as interdependence, transnationalism, glocalisation, social upgrading, sovereignty, and climate justice.

Skills: You can compare theories, interpret maps and indicators, trace causal mechanisms, distinguish aggregate from distributional outcomes, evaluate source quality, construct a counterfactual, and communicate uncertainty.

Products: Your portfolio can include a supply-chain map, data brief, photo essay, interview design, policy memo, podcast, video, research poster, or simulation record that makes sources and analytical choices visible.

Transfer: You can apply the course framework to an unfamiliar case, identify which scale and actors matter, recognise hidden externalities, and propose a defensible policy response while acknowledging trade-offs.