Held & McGrew (2003), in their comprehensive book, mention about different approaches regarding the concept:

Globalization has been variously conceived as action at a distance (whereby the actions of social agents in one locale can come to have significant consequences for ‘distant others’); time-space compression (referring to the way in which instantaneous electronic communication erodes the constraints of distance and time on social organization and interaction); accelerating interdependence (understood as the intensification of enmeshment among national economies and societies such that events in one country impact directly on others); a shrinking world (the erosion of borders and geographical barriers to socio-economic activity) ; and, among other concepts, global integration, the reordering of interregional power relations, consciousness of the global condition and the intensification of interregional interconnectedness.