On Nov 20, 2007, at 5:17 PM, MICHAEL YATES wrote:
> BTW, I have come to hate the word "globalization." What does it mean?
Excellent question, and one I've been asking for more than 10 years. Quoting myself from After the New Economy:
"Globalization" has been on so many lips over the last few years that it's easy to forget how recently it entered daily speech. Shown on page 146 is a graph of the word's appearances in the New York Times and Washington Post since 1980. While not as instant a star as the phrase "New Economy" (graphed on page 4), its trajectory is remarkably similar, flatlining its way through the 1980s and early 1990s, then showing a near-vertical ascent in the late 1990s—though "globalization" saw its point of inflection around 1995, three years before the New Economy, and it's shown more staying power.
"Globalization," both in elite and common speech, is a pretty spongy concept. Like many deeply ideological words, it's rarely defined explicitly; everyone is expected to know what it means. Elites mean something like the internationalization of economic, political, and cultural life, as if these haven't long been internationalized. Nonelites, including quite a few antiglobalization activists, seem to mean everything bad that's happened over the last decade or two. That's hardly an exaggeration; writing in The American Prospect, Mark Greif (2001) reported on a focus group, held for corporate clients worried about the antiglobalization backlash. Thirty ordinary Americans were gathered together in a hotel in the rather unglamorous locale of Secaucus, New Jersey, by a Jungian market researcher with the Pynchonesque name G. Clothaire Rapaille, and asked what globalization meant to them. After a slow start, the answers started coming: "Nothing's personal." "No more privacy." "It's all machines." "The world is getting too small. There's no more mystery anymore...." Pressed for more detail, respondents complained about speedup, the "fight for the dollar," atomization, alienation, powerlessness, growing gaps between haves and have-nots and workers and bosses, the deterioration in health care. An impressive array of complaints, but it's not clear how "globalization" is their cause. They sound more like venerable complaints about capitalism in general—surprising in their breadth and intensity in these supposedly conservative times— and not particularly its internationalizing aspects. The shrinkage of space and the acceleration of time, which seem like particularly modern or even postmodern concerns, actually entered Western thought in the sixteenth century (Douglas 1997). But that's the problem with the word—it serves as a kind of wastebasket taxon, a term biologists use to describe a catch-all category, a repository for critters you don't really know how to classify. Let's look at a couple more attempts from the experts. The French international relations analyst Dominique Moïsi (2001) defined globalization as "complexity, interaction and simultunaneity," a phrase that could also describe a crowd of tipsy customers chatting flirtatiously at a bar.
The British sociologist Bob Jessop (2001), for another example, avers that "'globalization'" (quotes in the original) "is best used to denote a multicentric, multiscalar, multitemporal, multiform, and multicausal process"—one of scales "no longer...in a neat hierarchy but as co-existing and interpenetrating in a tangled and confused manner," one that is "multicausal because it results from the complex, contingent interaction of many different causal processes...the complex, emergent product of many different forces operating on many scales." Isn't that clarifying? Jessop further avers that the globalized economy is the "fast economy," and that the fast economy requires fast policy, which "privileges the executive over the legislature and the judiciary, finance over industrial capital, consumption over long-term investment." But consideration of how the U.S. Congress denied President Clinton fast-track trade negotiating authority, how the U.S. Supreme Court chose the winner of the 2000 election, how multinational corporations (largely industrial, not financial, entities) and their long-term investments play a starring role in "globalization," you have to wonder exactly what Jessop is looking at.
Closely related to the confused attempts to define globalization are the sentimental evocations of "place" that often serve as globalization's opposite. Not surprisingly, given his propensity for important-sounding but empty turns of phrase, Manuel Castells (1996, p. 423) declares that "A place is a locale whose form, function and meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of physical contiguity" (boldface in original). As an example of place, he cited the Belleville neighborhood of Paris. In 1962, as a political exile from Spain, Castells was given shelter there by an exiled Spanish construction worker and anarchist union leader. Exile, anarchism, and organized labor are hardly meanings self-contained within Belleville, and no doubt a ruralist would find the urban neighborhood itself hopelessly fallen from nonalienated grace.
Whatever place is, we're told that it matters less in these globalized days. But is it true? So-called industrial districts still matter a great deal, from Silicon Valley to the Silicon Alley to Bangalore. In fact, greater regional inequalities in attracting desirable "knowledge" work suggests that "location has actually become more rather than less important" (Huws 1999).