ABSTRACT
This chapter illuminates the complex ways in which global processes are interpreted and transformed by institutions and actors operating within more circumscribed scales of influence; or put simply, how the global is made in the local. It examines the changing institutional role of the state, and the state as an instrument of restructuring, through the example of the provincial government of New Brunswick during the leadership of former Premier Frank McKenna. It was the interaction between these localized struggles of workers, restructuring strategies of firms, and economic development efforts of government that collectively functioned to produce and reproduce the call centre industry in New Brunswick. It illustrates the uneasy accommodation in a particular locality of a number of strands of the current transformation, the implications of new telecommunications technologies, firm level restructuring; the changing role of government at all levels and the accommodations and resistances of the local labour force, without ascribing any of them a determining role.
