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Governments across the world are thinking about their expatriate populations in new ways. These new understandings of expatriates emerged as the problem of ‘human capital’ became central to development strategies premised on increased participation in the globalising economy. The ‘expertise’ of expatriates has also been re-imagined through a series of interlinked ideas relating to knowledge, brokerage and leadership. This paper examines recent attempts to link expatriate experts to national economic development projects through a case study of the New Zealand diaspora strategy. Drawing on literature reviews, internet searches, key informant interviews and participation in London-based New Zealand expatriate initiatives, the paper shows how the interaction of governmental strategies and individual mobilities is bringing globalising spaces and subjects into being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of globalisation the ‘global’ is very much implicated in the ‘local’. Local events like conflicts therefore need to be understood in the context of the dynamics of globalisation. This paper argues that neoliberal globalisation undergoes a thorough grounding in accordance with the pre-existing socio-cultural and economic specificities of places, which impact upon inter-community alienation and conflict. Using four case studies from a Hindu–Muslim conflict in a neoliberalising city, Ahmedabad, India, this paper illustrates how open market policies are implicated in local industrial restructuring and urban renewal that simultaneously utilise place-specific ethnocentrism to exclude and fragment the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the New Zealand designer fashion industry as an analytical lens through which to examine the co-constitution of political projects in what we label ‘after-neoliberalism’. The paper begins by tracing the making of New Zealand designer fashion as an industry, and relates this process to four political projects in which designer fashion is understood to have different possibilities – globalisation, the knowledge economy, creative cities and social development. We examine two key sites of the constitution of the industry – the scoping reports that created it, and New Zealand Fashion Week, when designer fashion can be seen to mobilise the different political projects and to be harnessed to them. We show how ‘the designer fashion industry’ is expected to articulate diverse state aspirations. Our emphasis on the co-constitution of political projects highlights a new style of post-structural political economic analysis, as does our concern with industry as a space in which political projects become mobilised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the spatialities constructed through resistances to globalization. It focuses on the Inter-Continental Caravan, an ambitious project which united activists from the Indian New Farmers Movements with West European green activists in contesting neo-liberal institutions and biotechnology. The paper argues that these political activities constructed distinctive ‘maps of grievance’. This term is used to suggest that the construction of grievances has both a distinctive spatiality and is constitutive of political identities. The paper argues that the different maps of grievances generated through the project were both a condition of possibility for these transnational alliances and exerted pressure on the formation of solidarities. It concludes by arguing that the location of counter-globalization politics at the intersection of different routes of resistance can be integral to the formation of alternative political imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers grassroots globalization networks, which comprise a diversity of social movements working in association to engage in multi-scalar political action. Drawing upon David Harvey's notion of militant particularism (regarding the problems of effecting politics between different geographical scales), and recent research on networks and their relationship to places, the paper analyses People's Global Action, an international network of social movements opposing neoliberal globalization. From an analysis of the process geographies of People's Global Action, the paper proposes the notion of convergence space as a conceptual tool by which to understand and critique grassroots globalization networks. The paper argues that contested social relations emerge in such convergence spaces and considers the implications of these for theorizing such networks, and for political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Notwithstanding their remarkable recent growth, surprisingly little research has hitherto been conducted on the evolving geography of professional and business services in Britain. This paper analyses the results of a detailed survey of 300 small and medium-sized management and engineering consultancies, in investigating the forces underpinning both the striking clustering of such firms in central London and their growth in decentralized locations of East Anglia and South West England. Particular attention is paid to the notion of clustering, the role of demand-side influences, localized ‘collective learning’ processes, and increasing globalization in clustering, and to so-called ‘enterprising behaviour theory’ in explaining decentralization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ongoing globalisation poses a distinct challenge to how we understand what work 'is' in the contemporary world. Theoretical distinctions between the spatialities and temporalities of work as a practice have become blurred, along with understandings of work purely as an economic rather than a socio-cultural phenomenon. Building on theoretical approaches within geography and the 'new sociology of work', this paper argues that the transformation of work produced by contemporary globalisation requires a more sophisticated and geographically informed understanding of the spatiality of work as a practice. It develops this contention by presenting research into a specific kind of (unconventional) work - international youth volunteering. It argues that this form of work has a complex spatiality, whose constitution and impacts exceed the specific material location of workers in both space and time. Furthermore, it examines how this 'multiplex mode' of work practice destabilises the relationship between work and non-work, and facilitates the development of cultural capital, self-identity and skills in young people. It also contends that this form of voluntary work is embedded in the emerging needs of global labour markets. These arguments are elaborated through the presentation of research from a longitudinal project on the impacts of international youth volunteering. This research consists of data from interviews and focus groups with young people who undertook a range of different types of overseas voluntary work placement, and interviews with corporate recruiters in leading transnational firms concerning their understanding of the value (or otherwise) of international volunteering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unfurling of global capitalism – and its attendant effects – has long been fertile intellectual terrain for geographers. But whilst studies of the processes and mechanisms of globalisation undoubtedly assume a talismanic importance in the discipline, geographers, with few exceptions, have left examinations of early economic liberalism to historians. One such critically important episode in the evolution of the liberal economic project was the repeal of the so-called ‘Corn Laws’ in 1846. Whilst the precise impact of the Manchester-based Anti-Corn Law League (ACLL) continues to be a matter of conjecture, Eric Sheppard has asserted that their particular take on political economy managed to assume a ‘truth-like status’ and worldwide universality. But the ACLL’s campaign represents only one, albeit decisive, stage in the long intellectual and practical struggle between ‘protectionists’ and the disciples of free trade. Studies of the non-’Manchester’ components have tended to focus squarely upon national politics. This paper examines a pivotal attempt in 1838 by Lord Melbourne’s Government to experiment with the effective elimination of import duties on fresh fruit. Unlike most agricultural commodities, table fruit was produced in a tightly defined area, thus allowing the Government’s experiment to play out, in theory, without national political fallout. Whilst the Government’s clandestine actions left little time for a concerted opposition to develop, Kentish fruit growers soon organised. A formidable lobby was forged that drew wide local support yet also evolved beyond the original ‘epistemic community’. Whilst the coalition failed in their efforts to reintroduce protective duties, their actions allow us to see how protectionist ideologies and policies were vivified through practices at many different spatial scales and to better understand the complex spatiality of protectionist takes on political economy. Their campaign also changed – at least in the short term – the course of British mercantile policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalisation represents a set of transformations in the contemporary world that are having profound impacts on the nature of labour markets and work. However, most social scientific analysis in this area has focused on changes to labour markets as emerging consequences of the developing global economy. This paper argues that an analysis of what is happening to work itself as a consequence of globalisation has been neglected. It further contends that the nature of work as a practice in the contemporary world can be better understood through a new conceptual framework, centred on the concept of ‘global work’. It goes on to lay out a theoretical framework for conceptualising the emergence of ‘global work’, based around an analysis of the increasingly distanciated social relations that constitute what work ‘is’ in today's world. In this respect it contends that working practices, the experience of work, the nature of workplaces and the power relations in which people's working lives are entangled require a theoretical understanding of global-scale interrelationships if they are to be properly understood. This ‘global work thesis’ is grounded in research into two contrasting forms of work in the contemporary world: transnational legal services in developed post-industrial economies and overseas voluntary work in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between gentrification and globalisation has recently become a significant concern for gentrification scholars. This has involved developing an understanding of how gentrification has become a place-based strategy of class (re)formation during an era in which globalisation has changed sociological structures and challenged previously established indicators of social distinction. This paper offers an alternative reading of the relationship between gentrification and globalisation through examining the results of a mixed method research project which looked at new-build gentrification along the River Thames, London, UK. This research finds gentrification not to be distinguished by the gentrifer-performed practice of habitus within a ‘global context’. Rather, the responsibility for gentrification, and the relationship between globalisation and gentrification, is found to originate with capital actors working within the context of a neoliberal global city. In order to critically conceptualise this form of gentrification, and understand the role of globalisation within the process, the urban theory of Lefebvre is drawn upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assertion of collective rights over land has been noted as a key form of resistance to the enclosing propensities of globalisation. However, insufficient attention is paid to the everyday practices of property enactment that shape the ability to exercise, and benefit from, rights within particular collective arrangements. This paper uses the example of crofting common grazings to demonstrate how struggles are invoked over the legibility and priority of legally equivalent common property claims, and how such property relations can be reworked as rural space is (re)produced. It highlights how demographic change and shifting de/re-valorisation frontiers problematise established material and moral grounds upon which property rights are enacted, producing varying dynamics of intra-collective (dis)enfranchisement. Such complexities preclude an assumption that common property will be inherently ‘good’ or ‘just’, and instead impel us to examine in more detail how processes at the nexus of property, morality and materiality shape how ‘justice’ is practised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that a process of super-gentrification, similar to that first identified by Lees (2003 Urban Studies 40 2487–509) in Brooklyn Heights, New York City, is occurring in the already gentrified, inner London neighbourhood of Barnsbury. A new group of super wealthy professionals working in the City of London is slowly imposing its mark on this inner London housing market in a way that differentiates it and them both from traditional gentrifiers and from the traditional urban upper classes. We suggest that there is a close interaction between work in the newly globalizing industries of the financial services economy, elite forms of education, particularly Oxbridge, and residence in Barnsbury which is very different from other areas of gentrified inner London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a critique of a dominant strand of the literature on globalization– that which suggests it can be understood as deterritorialization. It argues that suggestions that we have moved away from territorial understandings of politics fail to conceptually elaborate the notion of territory itself. Drawing parallels between mathematics and politics in the seventeenth century, the paper claims that the notion of territory is dependent on a particular way of grasping space as calculable. This way of understanding space makes bounded territories possible, but also underlies new global configurations. In other words globalization is a reconfiguration of existing understandings rather than the radical break some suggest. The article concludes by making some comments on this reconfiguration, and suggesting that further historical and conceptual work on territory is necessary before it can be thought to be superseded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the Indonesia–Malaysia–Singapore Growth Triangle makes manifest the complex geographies of power that subvert efforts to read cross-border regionalization as a straightforward geographical corollary of‘globalization’. As such, the region needs to be examined not simply as a complementary transborder assemblage of land, labour and capital, but rather as a palimpsest in which the imagined geographies of cross-border development and the economic geographies of their uneven spatial fixing on the ground are mediated by complex cultural and political geographies. We seek to unpack these by triangulating how the geographies of capital (including its uneven development and its links to the geo-economics of intra-regional competition), land (including post-colonial relations across the region, the geopolitics of land reclamation and the enclaved landscapes of tourism) and labour (including the divergent itineraries of migrant workers) overlay and complicate one another in the region. By charting these complex triangulations of space and place, we seek to problematize narratives of the Growth Triangle as an exemplary embodiment of the‘borderless world’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent literature concerning regional development has placed significant emphasis on local institutional structures and their capacity to‘hold down’ the global. Conversely, work on inter-firm networks– such as the global commodity chain approach– has highlighted the significance of the organizational structures of global firms’ production systems and their relation to industrial upgrading. In this paper, drawing upon a global production networks perspective, we conceptualize the connections between‘globalizing’ processes, as embodied in the production networks of transnational corporations, and regional development in specific territorial formations. We delimit the‘strategic coupling’ of the global production networks of firms and regional economies which ultimately drives regional development through the processes of value creation, enhancement and capture. In doing so, we stress the multi-scalarity of the forces and processes underlying regional development, and thus do not privilege one particular geographical scale. By way of illustration, we introduce an example drawn from recent research into global production networks in East Asia and Europe. The example profiles the investments of car manufacturer BMW in Eastern Bavaria, Germany and Rayong, Thailand, and considers their implications for regional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the resilience of distinctive local consumption cultures, this paper challenges some of the more sweeping claims that have been advanced in the name of ‘globalization’. Thinking about a ‘globalizing’ rather than a fully ‘globalized’ world encourages us to examine the deeply contested nature of the concept and to explore the geographically uneven nature of recent economic, political and cultural transformations. This paper approaches globalization as a site of struggle rather than as an established fact, emphasizing the need for empirically grounded studies of the impact of ‘globalization’ on consumer cultures in different geographical contexts. The paper examines the way that producers have ‘customized’ their products for different markets (drawing on evidence from China and South Africa). It then reviews case study evidence from three contrasting consumption cultures: consumption and ‘public culture’ in India, ‘consumer nationalism’ in China, and ‘artful consumption’ in Russia. The paper concludes by identifying some current debates and outlining some directions for future research, including a re-emphasis on consumption and material culture; an exploration of consumption as social practice; the delineation of commodity-specific consumption cultures; and some reflections on the political, ethical and methodological issues that are being raised in contemporary consumption research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely accepted that the rising gap in recent years between the global rich and the global poor can be linked to globalization in one way or another, although the strength and causality of the link is debated. Against the backcloth of the havoc wreaked by neo-liberalism and the Washington Consensus, new meta-narratives of global order are emerging to suggest ways of reducing global poverty and inequality. This paper examines two ‘Olympian’ visions of re-regulation along social democratic lines that propose new scalar arrangements. It evaluates these meta-narratives against another spatial ontology of regulation thrown up by the economy of global flows and networks – an unfolding regime of heterarchical order that is topological, hybrid, decentred and coalitional in its workings. The paper argues that these new ‘micro-worlds’ of regulation are as significant as, and equivalent to, so-called macro-orders of regulation in influencing global poverty and inequality, that they throw into doubt assumptions of control and reach held by the meta-narratives, and that their rise amounts to a situation of global regulatory excess, rather than, as some have argued, a condition of regulatory deficit or global disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent geographical discussions of postcolonialism have highlighted its emphasis on texts and discourses, its neglect of more material aspects of (post)imperial/colonial domination and the need for detailed empirical research articulating postcolonialism and global capitalism. This paper addresses these issues by reporting on research based in a recent debate in the UK trade press over the 'failure' of Caribbean food to 'cross over' into the UK 'mainstream'. It outlines the contrasting manufacturing and marketing practices of two Jamaican food companies whose accounts of (not) attempting this 'cross-over' illustrate postcolonialism's hybrid, resistant, ambivalent, scale-jumping, boundary-crossing, material cultural politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current period of welfare reform in British politics is taking place within a discourse of modernization described in terms of a ‘third way’. The ideas which constitute this discourse resonate with recent developments within human geography, namely a movement to theorizing ‘in-between’ spaces, a turn to culture and to issues of globalization. This paper suggests that welfare reform is a restructuring project which allows the nature of thinking and acting ‘in thirds’ to be questioned. It problematizes the ‘third way’ approach to cultural modernization and economic globalization as a de-politicized discourse, and argues for the cultural politics and political economics which underpin welfare reform to be foregrounded. As a form of political discourse analysis, it points to the developing need for a welfare geography that is attuned to the languages and practices through which dominant systems of social and economic distribution are constituted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, geographers have developed a disturbing – even dysfunctional – habit of missing out on important intellectual and politically significant debates, even those in which geographers would seem to have a major role to play. The syndrome of processes currently bundled together within the term ‘globalization’ is intrinsically geographical, as are the outcomes of such processes. Yet, once again, it seems, we are not, as a discipline, centrally involved in what are clearly very ‘big issues’ indeed. The purpose of this paper is to explore, in the context of ongoing globalization debates, the bases of this undesirable situation and to consider what might be done to redress it in ways that could both enhance intra- and interdisciplinarity and also make a contribution towards building a better world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the issue about globalizing the geohistory of city/state relations. It examines the ways that city/state relations have been conceptualized and provides a new historical interpretation of city/state relations through six vignettes which ranges broadly across time from the thirteenth to the twenty-first century.

Where there was a settled political geography of state power and responsibilities, the remarkable growth of global finance has put enormous pressure on national economic, political and social institutions. Furthermore, the looming crisis facing many continental European social security systems has raised many doubts about the long-term viability of the German model compared to its Anglo-American rivals. In this context, large German corporations have sought ways of sustaining their global competitiveness by, in part, restructuring their national and regional commitments. To illustrate, in this paper we concentrate on the nature and organization of German employer-sponsored pension institutions in relation to Anglo-American management practice. Two issues drive the analysis. One has to do with an emerging coalition between corporate management and shareholders with respect to the market value of the firm. The second issue has to do with the allocation of risk and uncertainty between the social partners when negotiating the financing and final value of promised retirement income. The institutional framework of collective decision-making common to many of Germany’s largest firms is under pressure; three models of investment decision making relevant to pension assets and liabilities are used to illustrate this point. In doing so, we suggest that the German model is more fragile than commonly realized. We also suggest that Anglo-American management practices have penetrated and affected German corporate (national and regional) institutions and regulations. The social market lauded by advocates of stakeholder capitalism is changing rapidly, at least in the sphere of large firms and global finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the contention that to understand contemporary globalization it is necessary to problematize city/state relations. Since the relation is unproblematized in modernity – cities are just parts of states – a transhistorical approach is adopted based upon Jacobs’ identification of contrary ‘moral syndromes’, commercial and guardian. The practices guided by these syndromes create different social spaces, spaces of flows and spaces of places respectively. Thus cities are interpreted as constellations of commercial practices, and states as constellations of guardian practices. Salient theories of cities and states are found in Jacobs’ description of cities as complex entities that expand economic life and Scott's description of states’ simplifying social relations in order to better control them. This abstract discussion is concretized through the specificities of modern cities and modern states. Six vignettes of city/state relations are sketched straddling the whole modern temporality. The conclusion rules out the popular ‘city-state’ scenario as a globalization outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors comment on the thoughts of Sallie Marston, John Paul Jones II, and Keith Woodward on human geography without scale. They affirmed the tenet of Marston on the tendency of human geography to privilege scale over other spatialities like networks, place, region and mobility, and place. They stated that scalar discourses of globalization might contribute to the spread of global scale and the suppression of resistance.

The author presents the place and opinion of scalar theorists in human geography. Scalar principles do not limit but rather widen the understanding of world economy in a scientific way. Scalar methods help in building and disseminating the knowledge of human geography. These methods represent the basic built-up of the heirarchical society. It is concluded that the vision of human geography is limited without a scale theory.

Nation-states employ visa restrictions to manage the complex trade-off between facilitating the entrance to their territory by passport holders from certain countries for economic and political reasons and deterring individuals from other countries for reasons of perceived security and immigration control. The resulting system is one of highly unequal access to foreign spaces, reinforcing existing inequalities. Trans-national mobility is encouraged for passport holders from privileged nations, particularly rich Western countries, at the expense of severe restrictions for others. Visa restrictions manifest states’ unfaltering willingness to monitor, regulate and control entrance to their territory in a globalized world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A striking characteristic of contemporary capitalism is the increasing importance (in terms of growth, employment, revenue, etc.) of sectors whose outputs are imbued with significant cultural or symbolic content. Sectors of these sorts are predominantly, though not exclusively, located in large cities. I describe how these cities function as creative fields generating streams of both cultural and technological innovations. Post-Fordist cities are shown to be especially fertile terrains of commodified cultural production. A number of these cities have become major centres of image-producing industries such as film, music recording, or fashion clothing, and this phenomenon is also often associated with profound transformations of their physical landscapes. I argue that the economic foundations of these trends reside, in part, in the structural characteristics of image-producing industries, marked as they frequently are by modularized, network structures of production and a strong proclivity to geographic agglomeration. At the same time, the main centres of the contemporary cultural economy are caught up in insistent processes of globalization. I suggest that after an initial phase of product standardization and concentrated development in only a few major centres, the cultural economy of capitalism now appears to be entering a new phase marked by increasingly high levels of product differentiation and polycentric production sites. I also submit that the contemporary cultural economy of capitalism constitutes a historical shift beyond consumer society as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]