ABSTRACT
In recent years, the concept of ‘globalization’ has become one of the most powerful characterizations of contemporary economic restructuring. Competing theses about globalization have arisen since the early 1980s and these contain within them different ways of conceptualizing relations between economy, society and place. Theories among those most influential in economic geography have pointed to the emergence of an international economy underpinned by information technology – a new ‘informational capitalism’ (Luke, 1994: 619) involving ‘space-time compression’ (Harvey, 1989a). According to these theories, economies have become organized increasingly around a genuinely global financial system, and have experienced rapid increases in the volume of both world trade and international flows of money and information. There have also been major changes in the behaviour of transnational corporations (TNCs), causing a thoroughly internationalized division of labour to emerge. This powerful representation of the global economy has been summarized recently by Barnet and Cavanagh (1995), who continue to portray ‘imperial corporations’ as using the lever of global competition between workers and national governments to retain their control over key sectors of world production and, increasingly, consumption.
