ABSTRACT
Globalisation is not just a fashionable idea, it is ‘a concept with consequences’ (Hirst 1997: 424). Globalisation has had the effect of changing the ‘rules of the game’ in the struggle for competitive advantage among firms, destinations and places within, as well as between, countries and regions (Hall 1997; Higgott 1999). Globalisation is a complex, chaotic, multiscalar, multitemporal and multicentric series of processes operating in specific structural and spatial contexts (Jessop 1999). It should be seen as an emergent, evolutionary phenomenon which results from economic, political, socio-cultural and technological processes on many scales rather than a distinctive causal mechanism in its own right. It is both a structural and a structuring phenomenon the nature of which depends critically on sub-global processes. According to Jessop (1999: 21) ‘structurally, globalisation would exist in so far as co-variation of relevant activities becomes more global in extent and/or the speed of that covariation on a global scale increases’. Therefore, global interdependence typically results from processes which operate at various spatial scales, in different functional sub-systems, and involve complex and tangled causal hierarchies rather than being a simple, unilinear, bottom-up or top-down movement (Jessop 1999). Such an observation clearly suggests that globalisation is developing unevenly across space and time. Indeed, ‘a key element in contemporary processes of globalisation is not the impact of “global” processes upon another clearly defined scale, but instead the relativisation of scale’ (Kelly and Olds 1999: 2). Such relativities occur in relation to both ‘space-time distantiation’ and ‘space-time compression’. The former refers to the stretching of social relations over time and space, e.g. through the utilisation of new technology such as the Internet, so that they can be coordinated or controlled over longer periods of time, greater distances, larger areas, and on more scales of activity. The latter involves the intensification of ‘discrete’ events in real time and/or increased velocity of material and non-material flows over a given distance; again this is related to technological change, including communication technologies and social technologies (Jessop 1999).
