This is my Review of the Book Bound: Living in the Globalized World, written by Scott Sernau, published in 2000 in the city of Bloomfield, Connecticut in the United States of America by Kumarian Press Inc.
Scott Sernau is associate professor of Sociology at the University of Indiana South Bend. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and he obtained his Master’s degree at Bethel. He received his doctorate in sociology with an emphasis in international development from Cornell University. He teaches courses on social inequality, family, race and ethnic relations, and urban society as well as a senior seminar on “Internal Inequalities and Development.” He has also served as resident director of the Indiana University Summer in Mexico Program: Language, Culture and Society. His previous books include Economics of Exclusion: Underclass Poverty and Labor Market change in Mexico (1994) and Critical Choices: Applying Sociological Insight and Worlds Apart: Social Inequalities in a New Century (2001).
In the book Sernau explores the background to our present of interconnectedness, asking what trends and practices have brought us to this new global century. He relates world issues to our everyday local experiences in a way that will engross both students and the informed general reader. Globalization has become the descriptor of the turn of the century.
Globalization may seem to be a fairly new term, but its origins are much older. Sernau explains quite well that in order to understand our globalized world, one has to look back into the evolution of civilization. From England it was transplanted to the United States, where it has been centered ever since. (Sernau, 2)
The model of the global system offered here is based on the unfolding of the three ancient vacillating forces curiosity, commerce and control and three ancient but accelerating forces: technology, population, and the conquest of space. Along with these are two sets...