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The currently globalising society is characterised by a tension between increasingly intensive transnational mobility of people and continuous territorial regulation of these flows. This situation has led to the increasingly selective opening and closing of borders, providing territorial access to some while keeping out others. In this paper, I reflect on how such management of people's (in)ability to cross borders has become a geopolitical instrument. I particularly focus on how mobility inequalities are confirmed within the European Union (EU) to protect the geopolitical and political‐economic status quo of the EU itself, but also how this EU‐level process regarding people's (im)mobility fuelled internal discussions regarding the relation between nation‐state sovereignty and EU‐level decision‐making. I first reflect on the citizenship of people and the cultural political economy framework for explaining this (re‐)constructed selectivity of borders and border‐crossings. Subsequently, I apply these perspectives to the geopolitical construction of two types of border‐crossings in the EU, namely irregular(ised) migration and tourism, to reflect on how EU‐level and national actors selectively utilise structural‐institutional arrangements and semiotic strategies to position themselves within the European framework. By doing so, the paper illustrates the contradictions engrained in the neoliberal system along two lines: (1) generally, the continued territorial logic in the regulation of space in a world increasingly characterised by global economic and human flows, resulting in the blocking of the mobility of some while stimulating the mobility of others in what are supposedly "open" economies; (2) specifically, the explicit (cf. irregular migration) and implicit (cf. tourism) competition between places as to what is the "right," "legitimate," or "sovereign" spatial unit to regulate these flows, resulting in the mobilisation of competing political‐economic imaginaries to institutionalise one over the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introducing a special commentary section focused on geoeconomics, this paper reviews why such commentary is especially timely given current world events and the break‐down in neoliberal globalisation. It thereby points to the geo‐historical importance of the call for critical geoeconomics made by Mallin and Sidaway (2023a), and also introduces the backgrounds of the five commentators on their article's key contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relational perspectives have become pre‐eminent in geographical analysis of globalisation and its impacts in reshaping places, yet arguably leave unanswered questions about precisely how globalisation is reproduced through local places in practice. This paper seeks to extend and enhance the relational approach to globalisation and place by drawing on theoretical insights from assemblage thinking to articulate a methodological framework for empirical research. It draws on DeLanda's iteration of Deleuzoguattarian assemblage thinking to explore how the concepts of the exteriority of relations, territorialisation, coding, and multiplicity provide insights into the dynamics through which interactions between places and translocal assemblages affect changes in the properties and capacities of places and of their component parts, the internal adjustment of places to changes in components, and the possible future forms that a place may take following specific interactions. As such, the framework outlined advances relational analysis by permitting deeper analysis of the mechanics through which individual places endure and change in the context of globalisation and how these produce uneven geographies of globalisation. The discussion is illustrated by examples from empirical research on globalisation and rural localities. The paper develops an assemblage framework for studying the transformation of places in globalisation. Drawing on DeLanda, it directs attention to interactions between places and translocal assemblages, processes of (de)territorialisation and (de)coding, and how certain outcomes prevail over others. Guidelines are outlined for empirical application of the framework in case study research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of neoliberal globalisation on the nation-state has been extensively studied in terms of politico-economic restructuring and forms of governmentality and securitisation. While the former speaks of a process of de-nationalisation, the latter brings about a re-nationalisation process. In both cases, though, the focus has only been on one component of the nation-state, that is, the state. The nation has either been treated as a given backdrop or merely ignored. This paper aims to bring the nation back as a way to better contextualise practices of socio-spatial exclusion associated with one particular aspect of neoliberal globalisation, namely international migration. By analysing parliamentary debates in Italy between 1986 and 2014, the paper explores the intersections between neoliberalism and cultural essentialism as they conflate in what I call the 'neoliberal culturalist nation'. This construct sheds light on the roles that a national culturalist imaginary plays in prompting and justifying governmental practices of securitisation, which in turn are implicated in the production of a vulnerable and expendable labour force. Moreover, it reveals how a neoliberal workfarist and individualised logic is functional to the 'normalisation' of the foreign immigrant, and the reproduction of the national titular group. My argument is that a national culturalist imaginary exists in a mutually reinforcing relation with, rather than in opposition to, neoliberalism. Far from keeping nation and state as ontologically distinct or theorising their decoupling, the paper points to a renewed spatial isomorphism between nation and state, which comes to epitomise the very process of current re-nationalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

While recent work on financialisation of everyday life has elucidated the reshaping of everyday consumers as risk-taking investors, the role of financial advisors (FAs) has been overlooked, even though they are key intermediaries in articulating households and individuals into circuits of global finance. Through a financial ecologies approach, this paper focuses on FAs to reveal the ambiguities and inconsistencies inherent in their professional practice as varied modes of corporate management and organisational practices lead to differentiated encounters that shape the financial knowledge and investment decisions of clients. Empirical analysis is based on industry reports, regulatory documents, personal interviews and ethnographic fieldwork at professional training and networking events. The findings demonstrate how professional intermediaries like FAs are vital in explaining the shifting and uneven configuration of investor subjects. A critical analysis of FAs reveals how the decision making process and investment practices of consumers are fraught with knowledge asymmetries and embedded in distinctive financial ecologies with variegated outcomes. The ecologies concept is mobilised to explain the resilience or fragility of relational formations, the entanglement of diverse elements and motivations in the variegated formation of investor subjects, and the operation of constitutive ecologies within the financial system. [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]

This paper reports a new type of world regionalisation based upon the location strategies of leading advanced producer service firms. To generate these 'global practice' regions, a principal components analysis of the office networks of 175 service firms across 138 cities is used to identify 10 common location strategies. These are interpreted as fuzzy (overlapping) and porous regional formations each consisting of two parts: a home-region and a global-outreach. The results indicate five overlapping pairs of regions: (i) intensive and extensive globalisations based upon the USA plus London (USAL); (ii) Americas and Latin America regions; (iii) Pacific Asia and China regions; (iv) Europe and Scandinavia regions; and (v) Australasian and Canadian 'Commonwealth' regions. All regions have worldwide global-outreaches but they differ significantly in their respective sizes and importance. Discussion of these findings elaborates upon two key points: first, globalisation is not a 'blanket' process creating a homogeneous world, and second, the resulting fuzzy and porous regionalisation counters the traditional 'territorialist' regional geographies that can provide a framework for global conflict with a more complex geography of multiple global integrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nation-states are increasingly sharing sovereignty, both with other states and with supranational and non-governmental institutions. This is partly due to a long period of economic and financial globalisation, which has undercut territorial notions of sovereignty and varieties of capitalism. In trying to understand this phenomenon, we are drawn to sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), as they offer a unique lens into the changing dynamics of contemporary capitalism, global economic integration and state sovereignty. Indeed, the SWF provides governments with a tool for both engaging with new spatial forms as well as resisting them. While politicians may conceptualise the objective of such funds in the most practical terms, they serve an under-appreciated role in maintaining state sovereignty in a globalised world. In this paper, we build on emerging interdisciplinary scholarship concerning the rise of SWFs by broadening the interpretation of the utility of SWFs for the sponsoring government in relation to the practice and constitution of sovereignty, explicitly bridging political and economic geography. To this end, we offer an innovative, stylised typology of SWFs in relation to the state and sovereignty. The objective is to better understand the potential long-term significance of SWFs and the factors that might underpin further development of new SWFs in different countries in the future. Moreover, we believe SWFs can be differentiated according to the role they play in sovereignty and what underlies their claims to legitimacy within their respective nation-state. By understanding the rise and purpose of SWFs, we hope to better understand the sovereign in SWFs. [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]

London and New York are the leading cities in the world of corporate globalisation: their financial, professional, and creative services are at the centre of the commercial connections that constitute the world city network. The relations between the two cities are more complementary than competitive, commonly indicated by the concept of NY‐LON as a trans‐oceanic service conglomerate for facilitating economic globalisation. However, world city network analysis shows London growing its overall servicing connectivity more than New York. This change in the inter‐city relation is investigated through focus on the service connectivity and agglomeration capacities of the two cities. It is found that they share a very similar connectivity regional profile while simultaneously showing stark differences in their service agglomeration sector profiles. This is shown to be the result of London gaining the rapidly growing super‐rich servicing market. Thus while New York continues its long‐term production of financial innovations, London has grown an offshore platform for global capital specifically in the form of the world's money management centre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do transnational education and international student mobilities intersect? Drawing on geographical literatures on knowledge mobilities and migration infrastructures, offshore campuses are conceptualised as infrastructures of im/mobilities, which are simultaneously embedded within global networks and situated within regional migration regimes. Based on qualitative research on offshore campuses in Southeast Asia, I presents a systematic typology of how offshore campuses and international student mobilities intersect. It is shown how mobile universities play a complex and situated role in reconfiguring international student mobilities and how their material and discursive spaces are sites of circulation and containment. By developing an infrastructures perspective that takes universities as brokers and campuses as the sites of brokerage into consideration, the study advances geographical knowledge on globalising education and mobilities. [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]

There is an enormous gap in our understanding of the state's role in the construction of international markets. Specifically, diplomacy's position in the contemporary entanglement of state and markets has been overlooked. Increasingly, diplomacy's on-going adaptation to support neoliberalism has led to diplomats operating in a "twilight world" between diplomacy and business. Using assemblage thinking, we investigate the codings, capacities and tendencies emerging in the social spaces of diplomatic possibility in this "twilight world". Drawing on comprehensive empirical materials on the UK-India diplomatic relationship, we show how the material and expressive components of the UK Foreign Office assemblage are being deployed to champion state goals in global markets. We illustrate the ways in which diplomacy struggles in the name of the state's international competitiveness. In particular, we argue that these social spaces of possibility are structured by both diplomatic and business calculations that have the capacity to create new and unpredictable courses that render both an uncertainty and fuzziness to the agential interactions between assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]