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Delocalization

Delocalization is the belief that there is an ongoing process whereby the process of making things local is being reversed. For example, it is the view that the goods and services associated with consumption are becoming less local and are increasingly externally sourced. The delocalization process, however, can refer to economic, financial, cultural, or political matters. In recent decades, globalization as a term

has perhaps begun to replace the concept of delocalization. However, the scaling up of economic, financial, cultural, or political processes from the local is not always to the global level. Delocalization, therefore, is a wider concept than globalization, and this captures how delocalization might also involve regionalization, at both the intranational and global regional levels.

In recent decades, the thesis of delocalization has received widespread support. With the recent and rapid intensification of interregional and international trade and investment (economic delocalization) and the emergence of hypermobile and homeless capital (financial delocalization), a seamless and borderless world is asserted to be coming to fruition in which there is a diminution of the sovereignty of local, regional, and national states and their ability to regulate either national or international capital (political delocalization). The outcome is a loss of local cultures (cultural delocalization) due to the advent of a homogenous global culture founded on “Westernized” or “Americanized” cultural values. However, this rhetoric of economic, financial, political, and cultural delocalization has perhaps run ahead of the lived practice.

Economic Delocalization

It is often assumed that the rapid and recent intensification of trade and investment and the advent of global corporations have led to a delocalization of economies. Whether this is occurring to the extent often supposed, however, is open to question. Not only do the vast majority of businesses conduct most of their trade locally rather than interregionally or internationally, but even among the world's one hundred largest transnational corporations, few have abandoned their country of origin and are now transnational, placeless, and boundaryless organizations operating in a worldwide space freed from the old national hurdles and restrictions. Most, according to Peter Dicken, retain the overwhelming majority of their assets and employment, as well as control, within their home country. The extent of economic delocalization, in consequence, is perhaps greatly exaggerated.

Financial Delocalization

The near-total delocalization of finance is widely believed. With an ever-greater share of the equity market in funds managed by large financial institutions such as pension funds, life insurance, hedge funds, and open- and closed-ended mutual funds, fund-manager capitalism is widely viewed as having led to a near-total delocalization of finance with hypermobile and homeless capital circulating a borderless globe in search of investment. However, even if some funds operate globally and there is greater rapid-fire trading, faster fund switching, and the disembedding of capital ownership from place and individuals, fund-manager capitalism is not operating in a seamless world with hypermobile and homeless capital. Most funds are geographically ring-fenced, assets are not and cannot be speedily moved around the world, and this money concretely belongs to specific individuals living in particular places. There is thus little evidence that the apogee of financial delocalization—a seamless world of hypermobile and homeless capital—has been achieved. Cultures resistant to financial delocalization, moreover, are spreading and expressed in moves to relocalize money, ranging from community-development finance initiatives such as credit unions to experiments with local currency systems such as local exchange and trading schemes, time banks, and hours systems.

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