ABSTRACT
This chapter critically addresses globalisation in four ways: (a) contesting the often unstated assumption that globalisation comprises a coherent causal mechanism—or set of causal mechanisms—rather than a complex, chaotic, and overdetermined outcome of a multiscalar, multitemporal, and multicentric series of processes operating in specific structural contexts; (b) questioning the intellectual and practical search for ‘the’ primary scalewhether global, triadic, national, regional, or urban—around which the world economy is currently organised as if this would somehow be directly analogous to the primacy of the national scale in the thirty years of postwar growth in the circuits of Atlantic Fordism; (c) relating the resulting ‘relativisation of scale’, i.e. the absence of a dominant nodal point in managing interscalar relations, to some basic contradictions and dilemmas of capitalism, the changing bases of accumulation, the changing relation between the economic and political and the increased competitive importance of the social embeddedness of economic activities; and (d) noting how these problems are being addressed through economic and political projects oriented to different scales—with little consensus as yet on how these projects and scales might be reconciled.
