ABSTRACT
A major buzz-word today is “globalization.” Political leaders invoke it to justify opening markets or reducing taxes and welfare to make their economies attractive to foreign investors. Protestors invoke “globalization” to blame profit-centered MNCs for world poverty and ecological disaster (e.g. destruction of rainforests, global warming). Globalization leaves MNCs and capitalist elites free from accountability because states will not prosecute them: there is no global state to do so, and any country that tries to reign in business will find investment has fled for somewhere else. So, do we live in a “runaway world” of global capitalism (Giddens 2002), where local and global mesh into “glocal” (the enmeshing and interdependency, or perhaps obfuscation of local and global economic forces)? Or is this as much myth and hype over a return to an historically normal state?
