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ANALYSING GLOBALIZATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Globalization and the new economy encapsulate the transformation of economic and social relations across the globe. People and places are increasingly interlinked through the organization of work, the flows of goods and services and the exchange of ideas. Even so the contemporary world is characterized by difference rather than uniformity and widening rather than narrowing inequality but the spatial pattern is complex; while some people and places are involved in highly interactive global networks others are largely excluded, creating new and reinforcing old patterns of uneven development. Despite the enormous advances in human ingenuity and technology that have created unparalleled wealth and an economically more integrated world, social and spatial divisions are widening. This book illustrates and explains some of the divisions between countries, between regions and within cities, emphasizing how they provide quite different opportunities within which people live their lives, even though they are increasingly linked within the global economy.
Globalization was a term first used towards the end of the last century. It became the subject of academic conferences, TV programmes, bestselling books, websites and papers in learned journals1 all around the globe such that it is a concept ‘with which one argues but about which one does not argue’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999: 41). Descriptively globalization refers to the growing interconnectedness and interdependencies between countries on a global scale as in the World Bank's definition: ‘Globalization can be summarized as the global circulation of goods, services and capital but also of information, ideas and people’ (World Bank 2000: 3). This definition implies that the world has become increasingly interconnected leading some writers, but few geographers, to suggest that geography has become irrelevant.2 Space has been compressed by fast modes of communication making it possible for money, ideas, goods and people to flow around the world ever more quickly with significant implications for the organization of economic activities and the security and stability of employment. Money can be transferred instantaneously from one part of the globe to another inducing financial crises with real effects on people's lives. Commodities are designed, made and marketed between a range of countries with correspondingly different job opportunities in the different locations. People have also become increasingly mobile; international travel is commonplace for people in wealthier countries and both legal and illegal migration are significant.3 Similarly ideas, news, films and music flow instantaneously from one place to another creating world audiences for events such as film premieres, pop concerts and football matches.4 Furthermore, following the transformations in Eastern Europe, the vast majority of countries currently subscribe to some version of political democracy and market economics.
In some ways these global flows have generated a certain homogenization of ideas, cultures, political and economic systems, and the vision of the global village — ‘where tribes people in remote rain forests tap away on lap top computers, Sicilian grandmothers conduct e-business, and global teens share a world wide style culture’ (Klein 1999: xvii) has a certain resonance even though such iconic instances of globalization are realized only by a minority. Important differences remain between places so geography does matter as these differences are often built upon to increase corporate profitability reinforcing and creating new patterns of uneven development. International trade has always built upon world climate differences to increase the range of goods available in particular locations but the development of global supply chains has led to complex patterns of production and distribution to ensure the continual year round stocking of particular commodities such as seedless grapes in UK supermarkets.5Different wage zones have been used to lower the costs of manufactured goods and now different time and wage zones are drawn upon to lower costs in the service sector through the re-routeing of phone calls for airline reservations, credit card inquiries and fast transcription so overall the interconnections between places are becoming more complex. Despite this fluidity, however, all activities, even virtual ones, have to take place somewhere and many activities gain from geographical proximity, leading to clusters of activity in some locations as others are bypassed.
Technical developments in transportation and the rapid diffusion of information and communication technologies, especially the Internet, have facilitated these flows but the causes of increased integration are found in economic, social and political changes, in particular the growing dominance of capitalism as a system of social and economic regulation. The World Bank for example argues that in addition to technology, a second factor promoting globalization is the ‘shift in policy orientation as governments everywhere have reduced barriers that had curbed the development of domestic markets and their links to the international economy’ (World Bank 2000: 1). Effectively the Bank is referring to the prevalence of neo-liberal ideology without indicating how it has itself been instrumental in this process by making increased openness a condition for financial assistance. Such political and economic harmonization is also a precondition for realizing Castells's (1996: 92) definition of globalization as ‘an economy with the capacity to work as a unit in real time on a planetary scale’. For firms, individuals and organizations to be interconnected in a ‘network society’ that stretches across national borders and within which people engage in communications and transactions in real time, they must have accepted broadly the same economic and social institutions and ways of working.
Just as some writers have suggested that increasing interconnectedness has ended geography others have suggested that increasing openness has effectively ended politics or at least undermined the power of nation states to exercise their economic and political autonomy (Ohmae 1995), while others (Castells 1997; Hirst and Thompson 1996, 2002) are more sceptical. As development is uneven so too is the power of nation states with some states, such as the United States, having unprecedented power, while the powers of others are constrained by supra national institutions. Whatever the level and wherever power lies, however, it is crucial to recognize the significance of economic, social and political processes in shaping the contemporary world and to highlight the fact that globalization is a product of political decision making or choice and correspondingly open to change and modification through human decision making. By so doing the use of globalization as a noun, that is, as a seemingly unstoppable process, almost independent of human will, can be challenged, and a space is created for thinking about the ways in which globalization can and indeed is being developed differently in different countries sometimes to create more inclusive outcomes.
Globalization is sometimes used to explain contemporary events but it is a summary term for processes that require explanation not an analytical concept. In this book globalization is taken as a given6 and used descriptively to reflect the increasingly interconnected nature of the contemporary world and correspondingly the need to contextualize analyses of people and places within the economic, social, political and cultural processes currently shaping the global economy. This chapter provides a framework for analysing these processes and for connecting theories of economic and social change at different levels. In some ways the framework could be construed as a new meta-narrative, but it is neither singular nor deterministic but rather provides an intellectual space for thinking about the connectedness of processes shaping contemporary change and within which to situate events affecting people in different places. If as Anthony Giddens argues ‘distant events, whether economic or not, affect everyone more directly and immediately than ever before’ (Giddens 1999:31), then it is important to situate specific analyses within a framework which recognizes this degree of interconnectedness. This rather daunting task is not intended to impose any singular interpretation of events but reflects a genuine desire to understand and articulate the nature of contemporary connections between people and places. Why for example does a nurse leave her family in South Africa to work in a local Brighton hospital, why are jobs being transferred from a major employer in the same city to new call centres in India, why do 53 per cent of children in inner London, one of the richest cities in the world, live in poverty, why is there a Starbucks inside the Forbidden City in Beijing, why do western governments subsidize their agricultural producers while urging open markets on other countries, why do some people pay large sums of money and risk their lives to travel illegally to other countries, only to find themselves in jobs which barely cover their survival needs, why in every country do women on average fare less well than men, why do children suffer from undernourishment in some countries and obesity in others, and more generally why in the context of growing opulence, does inequality appear to be increasing at every spatial scale? In order to answer these questions different theoretical perspectives are drawn upon, because theories identify general processes and therefore help to understand the context within which people ranging from corporate managers to economic migrants make choices, but theories are not substitutes for explanation; each event will always have a unique justification, so the framework needs to be applied in specific contexts. The book draws upon this framework to illustrate and illuminate aspects of globalization and social change at a world, regional and city scale, and considers some of the responses made by people trying to influence the trajectory of development in different ways.
THEORIZING PEOPLE AND PLACES IN THE NEW ECONOMY
Beginnings are always difficult but given the complexity and interdependency of the contemporary world and its rapidly evolving nature the problem here is immense because it is almost as if in order to understand anything it is necessary to understand everything. The framework outlined in Figure 1.1 is designed to provide a way of breaking through this complexity in order to understand the contemporary world and in particular the growing social and spatial divisions. Figure 1.1 contains different elements that are central to understanding and specifies interactions between them. In any specific context the elements are mutually constitutive or interdependent so each and every outcome will in some ways always be unique. Thus the framework itself is not an explanation but provides a set of tools that can be applied in specific contexts to produce an understanding or at least insights towards an understanding of specific events. It goes beyond the common sense view that everything affects everything because it specifies a directional logic, albeit with feedback loops, which helps provide a starting point for analysis.
The starting point lies with the economy and so reflects a historical materialist perspective, but not a deterministic one (see Box 1.1 for a brief summary of the different theoretical perspectives referred to in the book). There are two reasons for this starting point. First, the material reproduction of everyday life, or how people obtain their needs and wants on a day to day basis,7 irrespective of whether they are physical necessities or cultural preferences, is fundamental to human life and existence on this planet. Second, the ways in which people do this are increasingly shaped by capitalism, which is a dynamic system. Understanding this dynamic helps to explain change, both the apparently ceaseless search for new markets and correspondingly the spread of this system across the globe, as well as the constant tendency for change in terms of the range of goods and services produced, the way they are produced, where they are produced and so on and these changes profoundly shape the context in which people live their daily lives. This privileging of the economy may seem rather
Figure 1.1 People and places: a framework for analysis.
old-fashioned in comparison to contemporary perspectives that have privileged individuals and identities but my concern is to explain continuing social and spatial inequalities. To begin analyses with individuals and their identities, with diversity rather than commonalities, is to overlook the origins of inequality, that is, it focuses too much attention on finding out who people are rather than on how they came to be located in the socially hierarchical, gendered and racialized space where they reside (Mirza 1997). Correspondingly solutions are sought more in terms of changing personal behaviour, recognizing diversity and widening participation, rather than challenging the wider structures that promote and intensify social and spatial divisions. Knowledge or knowledges of these processes is crucial in order to challenge globalization in its contemporary unequal form.8
This materialist approach however does not in any way overlook the significance of human agency. Social change results from the interaction of two types of causal mechanism: ideal and material causality. Ideal causality refers to the way that people conceptualize their future or elements of their future and either individually or collectively seek to bring their ideas into being. People are not however entirely free agents because their choices are made in existing
Box 1.1 Theoretical perspectives
Historical materialism
Historical materialism is associated with Karl Marx (1973b) and is a perspective that foregrounds the reproduction of everyday life. Economic and social analyses begin by explaining how material needs and wants have been and continue to be produced and distributed in any given society. It focuses on how people obtain their daily survival, in terms of what and how things are produced and consumed, that is with the material and social relations of reproduction and in class societies how a surplus is produced and appropriated. Understanding how life is reproduced on a day to day basis is regarded as the key to a wider understanding of how any given society works. Within this perspective people's ideas and social institutions are shaped by the material circumstances and social relations within which they live...
