Glocalization

At its most superficial level, glocalization connotes the combination of global and local, two spatial terms of great importance to geographers. While the term apparently derives from a traditional Japanese word now used to describe the spatial niche marketing of commodities in the business literature, in more scholarly literature, glocalization has come to mean something more complex: that globalizing processes only manifest [Page 1347]themselves in various ways in local contexts. That is, the global and the local are not separate spatial phenomena somehow interacting with each other, but rather, what is considered a “global” process is always already enacted variously in local settings. In this view, all cities in the world are global cities in that they all include globalizing economic, political, and cultural processes. ...