by Ms Ruchi Sinha
Most of us have heard the word "globalization" become an increasingly familiar part of the descriptive lexicon of the present-day world. We even believe that we understand the term while privately hiding from public exposure certain insecurities about the term and its implications on our own field study. For some, it primarily means the emergence of supranational institutions whose decisions shape and constrain the policy options for any particular nation-state; for others it means the overwhelming impact of global economic processes, including processes of production, consumption, trade, capital flow, and monetary interdependence. Similarly for others it primarily means the rise of neoliberalism as a hegemonic policy discourse where as for others it primarily means the emergence of new global cultural forms, media, and technologies of communication, which shape the relations of affiliation, identity, and interaction within and across local cultural settings; for still others, "globalization" is primarily a perceived set of changes, a construction used by state policy makers to inspire support for and suppress opposition to changes because "greater forces" (global competition, responses to IMF or World Bank demands, obligations to regional alliances, and so on) leave the nation-state "no choice" but to play by a set of global rules not of its own making. And, of course, there is a complex interplay of all these various factors, with different weights and in different relations when one finally defines globalization.

Concepts central to understanding the particular impact of globalization on educational policy and practice "neoliberalism," "the state," "restructuring," "reform," "management," "feminism," "identity," "citizenship," "community," "multiculturalism," "new social movements," "popular culture," and the "local”. These reflect not only changing concepts, but changing relations, practices, and institutional arrangements.

The patterns of global economic restructuring, which emerged in the late seventies, went hand in hand with the implementation of neoliberal policies in many nations. At that time, capitalist management was caught in a profit squeeze, with labor fighting to keep wages high, and foreign competitors pressing them to keep prices down. As the economy slowed, state revenues failed to keep pace with social expenditures, and taxpayers began to express resentment toward those who benefited the most from state revenues (the state bureaucracy, welfare recipients, institutions receiving state subsidies, and so on.). This led to a breakdown of consensus around the viability and value of the welfare state. The state withdrew from its role as an arbiter between labor and capital, allying itself with capital, and pushing labor into a defensive position. Economic restructuring reflected a world trend characterized by at least the following elements: the globalization of the economy in the context of a new international division of labor and economic integration of national economies the emergence of new exchange relations and arrangements among nations, and among classes and social sectors within each country, and the emergence of new areas, especially in developed countries, where information and services were becoming more important than manufacturing;
(3) the increasing internationalization of trade, reflected in the increasing capacity to connect markets on an immediate basis and to move capital across national frontiers (currently, 600 major multinational corporations (MNCs) control 25% of the world economy and 80% of world trade);
(4) the restructuring of the labor market, with the hourly wage being replaced in many settings by piece-work remuneration, and the power of unions undermined by a relaxation or non-enforcement of labor legislation;
(5) the decrease in capital-labor conflict, mainly due to such factors as the increase of surplus workers (unemployed or underemployed), the intensification of competition and the decrease of profit margins, less protective labor contracts, and the institutionalization of "team concept" strategies;
(6) the shift from a rigid Fordist model of production to a model based upon increased flexibility in the use of the labor force, inventories, labor processes, and labor markets, and upon the declining costs and increasing speed of moving products and information from one location of the globe to another;
(7) the rise of new forces of production, with industry shifting from an industrial-mechanical model to one governed by the microchip, robotics, and automatic, self-regulating machines, which in turn has led to the emergence of a high-tech information society based on the computer;
(8) the growing importance of capital-intensive production, which results in the deskilling or redundancy of large sections of the workforce, a situation that leads to a polarized labor market composed of a small, highly skilled, and well-paid sector on the one hand, and a large, low-skilled, and low-paid sector on the other;
(9) the increase in the proportion of part-time and female workers, many of them now working out of their homes;
(10) the increase in the size and importance of the service sector, at the expense of primary and secondary ones; and
(11) the ever-increasing financial, technological, and cultural gap between more-
developed and less-developed countries, with the only exception being the "newly industrialized countries" (NICs).

Economic restructuring also has reflected a deep fiscal crisis and budget reductions affecting the public sector, resulting in the reduction of the welfare state and increased privatization of social services, health, housing, and education. There has been a restructuring of the state/worker relationship in such a way that the social salary (public expenditure distributed in the form of social benefits) diminishes at the expense of individual salaries. As a result of this, society has been segmented into two sectors: one protected or included by the state, and the other unprotected and excluded. Economic restructuring has led to a model of exclusion that leaves out large sectors of the population, particularly women, children and elderly living in poverty in both developed and developing countries. These elements of economic restructuring have been concomitant with the trend toward globalization. Contrary to Marx and Engels' prediction, the globalization of the economy has produced a unification of capital on a world scale, while workers and other subordinate groups have become more fragmented and divided. In fact, neoliberal restructuring is operating through the impersonal dynamic of capitalist competition in a progressively deregulated common market, enhancing the local impact of global trends. Nation-states have become increasingly internationalized, in the sense that their agencies and policies become adjusted to the rhythms of the new world order.

As pointed out, economic restructuring has led to an increasing proletarianization and deskilling of jobs. Although high technology is presented as the solution to many economic problems, it has not contributed to raising the standard of living of most people. Even if some jobs are being created in high-tech industries, these jobs are mostly in clerical and assembly work, which pay below-average wages and do not require high skills, or in personal services jobs. Another evident change is that, with the implementation of neoliberal policies, the state has withdrawn from its responsibility to administer public resources to promote social justice. This is being replaced by a blind faith in the market (for example, it calls for increased school privatization, "choice," and vouchers) and the hope that economic growth will generate a spillover to help the poor, or that private charity will pick up what state programs leave out. Despite calls from the Right to dismantle or reduce the size of the state, skeptical observers of state reduction argue that the main issue is not the state's size, or its expenditures, but the type of its interventions and investments, whether promoting welfare and equality on the one hand, or subsidizing corporate growth, through tax incentives or through the rubric of "military spending" on the other. The neoliberal state, particularly in the more developed societies, and in the developing countries striving to emulate them, is characterized by drastic cutbacks in social spending, rampant environmental destruction, regressive revisions of the tax system, loosened constraints on corporate growth, widespread attacks on organized labor, and increased spending on military "infrastructure."

Corporations are becoming so powerful that many are creating their own postsecondary and vocational education programs. Burger King has opened "Academies" in fourteen U.S. cities, and IBM and Apple are contemplating the idea of opening schools for profit. Whittle Communications (a corporation largely owned by Time Warner and the British Associated Newspapers) not only provides satellite dishes and TV sets in exchange for advertisement to more than 10,000 schools (the "Channel One" project), but is planning to open 1,000 profit-making schools serving two million children within the next ten years. Moreover, U.S. corporations are spending upwards of $40 billion each year, approaching the total annual expenditures of all America's four-year and graduate colleges and universities, to train and educate their current employees.

This process of privatizing education is occurring in the context of new relations and arrangements among nations, characterized by a new global division of labor, an economic integration of national economies (common markets, free trade, and so forth), the increasing concentration of power in supranational organizations (such as the World Bank, IMF, UN, EU, and G-7), and what we have called the "internationalization" of nation-states.The mobility of capital gives capitalists, particularly financial speculators, a great deal of leverage over the nation-state, itself a product of the industrial revolution, and one unequipped in many ways to cope with the basic demands of the postindustrial world. Speculation in national currencies and the self-fulfilling prophecy of international "credit" legitimacy have contributed to an ever-shifting terrain for countries attempting to get their economic houses in order.

Corporate influence over the nation-state is exercised indirectly, through intellectual leadership, instilling in policy makers a new set of values and setting limits on the nation-state's range of options, which is a more effective strategy in changing policy priorities than the explicit threat of punitive sanctions. These new values, aptly reflected in the neoconservative and neoliberal agendas, promote less state intervention and greater reliance on the free market, and more appeal to individual self-interest than to collective rights. It is progressively seen that "the internationalization of production, finance and other economic resources is unquestionably eroding the capacity of any individual state to control its own economic future...multinational corporations may have a clear national base, but their interest is above all in global profitability. Country of origin is of little consequence for corporate strategy." Clearly, the growing integration of the economy is pushing toward a borderless world, and provides considerable evidence for the reduced ability of national governments to control their own economies or to define their own national economic aims. In summary, there are changes at the economic, political, and cultural levels of society that tend to promote and reinforce a more global perspective on social policy.

At an economic level, these factors include changes in trade relations (groups such as GATT, or G-7, that promote the reduction of import taxes, tariffs, and regulations; and the formation of "free trade" regions such as NAFTA or the E.U.); changes in banking and credit processes (world credit systems such as Visa, ATM's, currency exchange, and capital flow and financial markets that are truly globalized); the presence of international lending agencies (such as the IMF and World Bank); changes in the factors of production that have led to the rise of new "Post-Fordist" industries (the knowledge economy, the service sector, tourism, and culture industries); the presence of global corporations not tied to (or loyal to) any national base or boundary; the mobility of labor and the mobility of companies, which have thrown labor unions on the defensive; new technologies (for the transmission of data, capital, and advertising); and new patterns of consumption (sometimes termed the "McDonaldization" of taste -- fast, standardized, and oriented to convenience over quality), along with new advertising and marketing strategies that promote what George Ritzer calls the "means of consumption" (shopping malls, television buying channels, on-line purchasing, and easy credit).

At the political level, the nation-state survives as a medial institution, far from powerless, but constrained by trying to balance four imperatives: (1) responses to transnational capital; (2) responses to global political structures (for example, the United Nations) and other nongovernmental organizations; (3) responses to domestic pressures and demands, in order to maintain its own political legitimacy; and (4) responses to its own internal needs and self-interests. Most policy initiatives, including educational policies, are formed in the matrix of these four pressures, centered on the nation-state conceived no longer as a sovereign agent, but as an arbiter attempting to balance a range of internal and external pressures and constraints. Economic factors, such as external debt, the fiscal crisis of the state, or the creation of regional entities such as the European Union are having profound political-economic implications. In this context, the pressures on the nation-state have sharpened a long-standing question of political theory: Is the state a pluralist sphere for the contest of competing interest groups, or is it a non-neutral terrain, reflecting a set of constraints and preoccupations that give special weight to the demands of specific social interests? It is clear to us that there has been a pronounced shift in the terms of such a question, moving beyond purely statistviews of politics to include a focus on new terrains of political contestation, new political actors, such as global social movements (what Falk calls "globalization from below"), and the constitution of what are, in effect, transnational civil societies.

In cultural terms, changes in global media (cable, satellite, CNN, the Internet); commercial culture (McDonalds, Nike, the colors of Benneton); increased mobility, with vastly enlarged travel and tourism sectors; changes in communications technologies; worldwide distribution of film, television, and music products; an increased presence and visibility of global religions that change local rituals into transnational ones; or the global world of sports, both in terms of competitive events (and spectacles) like the Olympics or World Cup, but also, and non-trivially, in terms of sports marketing (apparel, footwear, equipment), sponsorhip/advertising, and global betting and gambling, all show the challenges that confront societies attempting to reconcile their own local and traditional values with the growing globalization of cultures not of their making.

This new global order shows the end of the sovereignty of the nation-state, this situation nevertheless has differential impacts on states according to their position in the world order: states unified in regional alliances, such as NAFTA or the E.U.; emerging or intermediate states, such as Brazil, Korea, India, and China; less developed states, such as Argentina, Hungary, Chile, and South Africa; developing states, including many in Latin America, Asia, and Africa; and underdeveloped states mired in an extreme state of dependency, such as Haiti, some Central American states, Mozambique, Angola, and Albania. Not only is the meaning and impact of "globalization" unsettled, it may operate differently in different parts of the world, and in some contexts have little impact at all. Here, again, globalization is not itself a unified, global phenomenon.

Hence while globalization may reflect a set of very definite technological, economic, and cultural changes, the shape of its significance and its future trends are far from determined.

Certain dualities recur on this subject. In one widely influential distinction, there are two primary forces at work in the rise of globalization: globalization from above, a process that primarily affects the elites within and across national contexts, and globalization from below, a popular process that primarily draws from the rank-and-file in civil society. This contrast highlights an important political dynamic (and it makes for a handy, hopeful picture of struggle and resistance on a world scale) but its widespread use obscures the ways in which these two trends are not entirely independent of one another. For example, the groups from "above" and "below" tend to merge in certain nongovernmental organizations; and the popular movements "from below" may still be perceived in certain local contexts as an imposition "from above."

Still other dualities prevail: of tensions between the global and the local; between economic and cultural dimensions of globalization; between globalization viewed as a trend toward homogenization around Western (or, even more narrowly, around American) norms and culture, and globalization viewed as an era of increased contact between diverse cultures, leading to an increase in hybridization and novelty; and between the material and rhetorical effects of globalization -- or, as it might be put, between globalization and "globalization."

Globalization and the State-Education Relationship
In educational terms, there is a growing understanding that the neoliberal version of globalization, particularly as implemented (and ideologically defended) by bilateral, multilateral, and international organizations, is reflected in an educational agenda that privileges, if not directly imposes, particular policies for evaluation, financing, assessment, standards, teacher training, curriculum, instruction, and testing. In the face of such pressures, more study is needed about local responses to defend public education against the introduction of pure market mechanisms to regulate educational exchanges and other policies that seek to reduce state sponsorship and financing and to impose management and efficiency models borrowed from the business sector as a framework for educational decisionmaking. These educational responses are mostly carried out by teacher unions, new social movements, and critical intellectuals, often expressed as opposition to initiatives in education such as vouchers or subsidizing private and parochial schools.
This poses a peculiar problem for analysis, as the relationships between state and education vary so dramatically according to historical evolutions, geographical areas, modes of governance, and forms of political representation, and between the differential demands of varied educational levels (elementary, secondary, higher education, adult, continuing, and nonformal education), any drastic alteration of modes of governance (for instance, the installation of a military dictatorship that may rule for several years before yielding back to democracy), can have multiple, complex, and unpredictable effects on education. This situation calls for a more nuanced analysis of the state-education relationship. This problem is made more difficult by the trend we have discussed above: the erosion in the autonomy of the nation-state in all matters, including educational policy matters.

There is no single way in which these institutions are associated, and so no single way in which they will be affected by the conditions of globalization. Economically, the pressures of externally imposed austerity conditions (for example, as a condition of IMF loans) may lead to savage reductions in expenditures on education; in other contexts, the desire for increased economic competitiveness and productivity may lead to increased expenditures on education. Politically, some national contexts will organize education around a revitalized conception of nationalism and citizen loyalty (perhaps in reaction to tribal or other fractious loyalties); in other contexts, a notion of cosmopolitan citizenship may prevail, one encouraging travel, foreign language study, and multicultural tolerance. Culturally, some nations will accept, even encourage, an increased reliance on the media, popular culture, or new communication and information technology, as a window through which to understand one's place in a global world; in other contexts these same trends will give rise to an increase in insularism, suspicion, and resistance to external influences. This paper can only begin the process of exploring the diversity of such responses to globalization, across varied national contexts, and the diversity of state-education relationships that generate educational principles, policies, and practices in light of these new conditions.

Impacting on Society
The most obvious "evils" of globalization are structural unemployment, the erosion of organized labor as a political and economic force, social exclusion, and an increase in the gap between rich and poor within nations and, especially, worldwide. Some people associate globalization with an increase in urban insecurity due to growing urban violence; with the growing presence of extra-territorial, extra-state movements that thwart international development and may pose serious threats to security, peace, stability, and development (such as drug trafficking, mafias, merchants of weapons of mass destruction, or terrorist organizations).

From both below and beyond the national level, there are clearly regional and traditional movements for whom globalization is something to be resisted vigorously. The rise of some new social movements and the role of local and international nongovernmental organizations exert an influence that may be termed "counterglobalization." In some instances these groups are equally "global" in character (international human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International; environmental organizations, such as Greenpeace; or labor organizations such as the ILO). In other cases they are anti-globalization, profoundly resistant to the economic, political, and cultural interpenetration of different societies and cultures (for example, regionalist and fundamentalist groups of various types). While globalization is clearly happening, its form and shape are being determined by patterns of resistance, some with more progressive intentions than others.

There can be no single answer as to how globalization is affecting educational policy and practice worldwide as it is impacted by national and local economic,political, and cultural changes. Indeed, because education is one of the central arenas in which these adaptations and responses occur, it will be one of the most myriad of institutional contexts. Hence, the answers developed will require a careful analysis of trends in education, including:
the currently popular policy "buzz words" (privatization, choice, and decentralization of educational systems) that drive policy formation in education and prevailing research agendas based in rational organization and management theories need to be tempered the role of national and international organizations in education, including teacher unions, parent organizations, and social movements are to be highlighted the new scholarship on race, class, gender, and the state in education (and hence concerns about multiculturalism and the question of identity in education, critical race theory, feminism, postcolonialism, diasporic communities, and new social movements need to be questioned

Questions about the role of participatory action research, popular education, and multicultural democratic struggle emerge as central in these debates. From these critical perspectives might emerge and new educational models to confront the winds of change such as:
Including education in the context of new popular cultures and nontraditional social movements (and hence the role of cultural studies to understand them);
new models of rural education for marginalized areas and the education of the poor; new models for migrant education, for the education of street children, for the education of girls and women in general, but particularly in the context of traditional societies and cultures that have suppressed women's educational aspirations; new models of partnerships for education (between state, NGO, third sector, and in some instances religious or private organizations); new models for adult literacy and nonformal education; new models of university/business relationships; and new models for educational financing and school organization (for instance, charter schools).
Some reform initiatives have been actively supported by UNESCO and other UN agencies. These include, for instance, reforms toward universal literacy and universal access to education; educational quality as a key component of equity; education as lifelong education; education as a human right; education for peace, tolerance, and democracy; eco-pedagogy, or how education can contribute to sustainable ecological development (and hence to an eco-economy); and educational access and new technologies of information and communication
Thus, the influence of globalization upon educational policies and practices can be seen to have multiple, and conflicting, effects. Not all of these can be classified simply as beneficial or not, and some are being shaped by active tensions and struggles.

Conclusion
This paper first attempts, to identify, characterize, and clarify some of the debates surrounding the phenomenon of globalization; and second, to try to understand some of the multiple and complex effects of globalization on educational policy and policy formation.
At the economic level, because globalization is affecting employment it touches upon one of the primary traditional goals of education, preparation for work. Schools will need to reconsider this mission in light of changing job markets in a Post-Fordist work environment; new skills and the flexibility to adapt to changing job demands and, for that matter, changing jobs over a lifetime; and dealing with an increasingly competitive international labor pool.