That would be Saskia Sassen. Almost identical to her opening in "Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization" in Public Culture 12(1) Winter 2000.
>And can anyone tells me if this passage
>means anything?
(perhaps:) "Contemporary social processes are too impossibly complex to generalize, save for my own Ptolemaic abstractions."
I haven't read the article (have the Public Culture special "Globalization" volume that it's in), but ouch all those mutual imbrications and evincings and structurations rung a weary bell from having skimmed the intro.
Still, my impression is that Sassen is on your page, Doug. Like you she;s against globalization accounts that embrace "flows" etc. cut loose from their conditions of production. For instance elsewhere she's observed:
"...the emphasis on hypermobility, global communiciations, and the neutralization of place and distance in the mainstream account about economic globalization needs to be balanced with a focus on the _work_ behind command functions, on the actual _production process_ in the leading information industries, finance and specialized services, and on global maket_places_. This has the effect of incorporating the material facilities underlying globalization and the whole infrastructure of jobs typically not marked as belonging to the global economy. It overcomes the tendency in the mainstream account to take the existence of a global economic system as a given, a function of the power of transnational corporations and global communications." (Sassen, n.d.)
imbricatingly evincing, Maureen