ABSTRACT
Globalization is a complex, chaotic, multiscalar, multitemporal and multicentric set of processes operating in specific structural and spatial contexts (Friedman 1994; Jessop 1999), affecting everything from communication to office relocation and, of course, food. Globalization is not just a fashionable idea, it is ‘a concept with consequences’ (Hirst 1997: 424). Contemporary globalization ‘refers both to the compression of the world and to the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole’ (Robertson 1992: 8). Globalization 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). However, globalization 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, globalization 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’. The idea that concepts of the local, national and the global should be treated as separate spheres of social, economic and political organization and action therefore does not hold, and should not be treated as such. Rather, each should be understood in relational terms in which each is a nexus of multiple and asymmetric interdependencies involving both local and wider fields of influence and interest. As Amin (1997) observes:
It is the resulting interconnectedness, multiplexity and hybridization of social life at every level – spatial and organizational – that [is] perhaps the most distinctive aspect of contemporary globalization. Viewed in this way, to think of the global as flows of dominance and transformation and the local as fixities of tradition and continuity is to miss the point, because it denies the interaction between the two as well as the evolutionary logics of both.
