ABSTRACT
Globalization has been described as ‘a fallible attempt to capture something fundamental that is happening across the globe, much of which we can only understand in a partial and incomplete manner’ (Allen, 1995: 58). The ‘something fundamental’ referred to here is usually taken to be what Dicken (1992) describes as a ‘global shift’ of economic activity, whereby an international economy has increasingly given way to one which is global in scope. Globalization is a product of the second half of the twentieth century, so that whereas economic activity has been international in scope for at least three hundred years, only relatively recently has economic activity interrelated and interconnected on a ‘global’ scale. Economic globalization, then, is seen to involve ‘an interpenetration of economic activities: that is, an ever-tightening mesh of networks which strengthens the interdependencies between different parts of the globe and, in so doing, helps to undermine the ability of nation-states to manage their own economic affairs’ (Allen, 1995: 60–1).
