ABSTRACT
Following the advent of the global economic order, it has become fashionable to predict that globalization will bring with it a shift away from territoriality towards the establishment of larger integrated communities. As nation states have been forced to adopt neo-liberal reforms, their institutional capacities “have been reconstituted and partly displaced onto other institutional arenas outside the state and outside the framework of nationalized territory” (Sassen 1996: 29). As a result, MNCs have established a presence in the social arena and private sources of regulation are expected to supplant traditional jurisdictions. However, this predicted “end of the nation state” and “the borderless world” that globalization entails (Ohmae 1995; 1990) suggest that more attention should be paid to the issue of the social in economic relationships, since the time and space frames matter a great deal for our understanding of globalization (J. L. Campbell 2004). As a corrective to the corporate solution rhetoric, this chapter addresses the “Polanyi problem”, that is “how the current tendency towards the creation of a global free-market economy can be reconciled with a degree of stability and social cohesion in society” (Munck 2004: 251). It does so from the perspective of two potentially confl ictive territorial spaces, that of an MNC and that of a local community. The corporate norm is explored in terms of how a private liberal regulatory mechanism relates to the social environment and, if it is embedded, the type of structures it is embedded in and the degree of territorial cohesion it achieves. Polanyi (1966) has argued that a pre-colonial society can offer a model for the auxiliary role the economy should play in society. Does this social embeddedness still matter in a postcolonial context?
