“[G]lobalization” is not a self-evident phenomenon, and the debates to which it gives rise in American studies, cultural studies, and elsewhere mark it as a problem of knowledge. For economists, political scientists, sociologists, historians, and cultural critics, globalization is a phenomenon that exceeds existing means of explanation and representation. It involves processes and transformations that bring pressure upon the paradigms formerly used to study their privileged objects—whether society, the sovereign nation-state, national economy, history, or culture—the meanings of which have shifted and changed. Globalization is both celebrated by free-market advocates as fulfilling the promises of neoliberalism and free trade, and criticized by scholars, policymakers, and activists as a world economic program aggressively commanded by the United States, enacted directly through U.S. foreign policies and indirectly through institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, exacerbating economic divides with devastating effects for the poor in “developing” countries and in systematically “underdeveloped” ones (Amin 1997; Stiglitz 2002; Pollin 2003).

This is an excerpt from Lisa Lowe's entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (pp. 120-121).