Book Review Essay: A Not-So-Flat World? Dominant and Alternative Accounts of Globalization
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thomas Friedman’s (2007) The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century has become seen as an authoritative text on globalization within some academic circles and a bestseller. In critically reviewing the book I put its framework, underlying ideas and assumptions into a dialogue with arguments in three recent scholarly books (Boron, 2005; Mathew, 2005; and McNally, 2002), which provide critical insights into the phenomena and debates associated with capitalist globalization. Further, I argue that The World is Flat reproduces a dominant narrative of American supremacy and anxiety in an era of rapid global change which obscures the historical, political and economic roots of capitalist globalization, ignores or dimisses its social costs, and views much of the world and its peoples through a deeply colonial and orientalist lens.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it