Summary

Going beyond the narrow economic focus common to most books about globalization, All Together Now describes four kinds of global change - economic, political, cultural, biological - all of which are now accelerating, driven by the increasing mobility of symbols, goods, people, and non-human life forms. Anderson describes how we are entering an "age of open systems" as systems of all kinds - organizations, nations, ecosystems - change in similar ways. Boundaries around systems are penetrated, challenged, renegotiated, relocated. Systems that were once relatively isolated develop new connections and linkages to other systems. Anderson argues that this globalizing world is radically "uncentralized" even though people and societies are richly interconnected. All Together Now shows how globalization is advanced even by anti-globalization movements, while global-scale problems such as climate change draw us together into the first global civilization.