TEMPUS CORINTHIAM

Part I : Quality of Internationalisation 21or, in the very widest context, space inherent in the existing artificial schisms betweeninternationalisation and globalisation still adequately describe or are even in looseconnection with reality.This then raises questions about how we might best understand processes such asglobalisation, what its relation to internationalisation is, and what this might mean forthe higher education sector, which has historically had a wider international visionand mission.In bringing globalisation to view, we can begin with the work of Mittelman, whoargues that:Globalization encompasses an historical transformation in the interactionsamong market forces, political authority, and the lifeways embodied in society,as they encounter and join with local conditions.(Mittelman 2004, 220)Possibly the most comprehensive view on the development of globalisation is currentlypresented by Held/McGrew, who argue that globalisation has to be taken seriouslyin two contrasting ways: (1) as a description of what is happening and (2) as anexplanation why the global conditions are the way they are. They do so not from aneoliberal perspective seeing globalisation as the ultimate chance for profit maximisation,but rather the opposite. They claim that these trends can be used to establisha sort of cosmopolitan social democracy and thus globalisation can act in favour ofcooperation instead of being of a purely competitive nature (Held & McGrew, 2007,2nd ed.). Most recently, Robertson has also published on the issue of globalisation inthe context of research on global education policy, arguing that the traditional “wayof seeing reinforces a view of the global as abstract, homogeneous, structural, andwithout agents or agency, whilst the local is concrete, diverse, agentic and imbuedwith democratic notions of bottom-up legitimacy, however tenuous or thin in reality”(Robertson, forthcoming , p. 2). She argues that the global can be regarded asdiscourse, project, scale or reach and in fact it permeates into education policies intime, space and relations.Origins of globalisationEtymologically, “globalisation” was created in the mid-1940s, but it only becamesignificant for HE research, when Levitt used it in an economic setting in 1983 (Levitt1983) and at the same time “it became a key analytical tool within the academy fromthe early 1980s onwards following Roland Robertson’s essay Interpreting Globalitywhich was published in 1983” (Robertson, Novelli, et al. 2007, 6). This signifies thedawn of globalisation as a description and explanation of economic developments,while also marking the point in time, when pressure started to be applied to HE institutionsto act under the paradigm of globalisation.