Glocalization

Glocalization is a rather awkward neologism of indeterminate origin, coined to describe the interaction between global and local forces in the modern world. The term is most often used to describe how the process of (economic) globalization is subject to the countervailing tendencies of (cultural) localization, with an emphasis on social agency and indeterminacy. The precise origins of the word are uncertain. Some, such as sociologist Roland Robertson (1994), have suggested that the term was conceived in Japan in the 1980s, translated from the word dochakuka, referring to specific forms of business practice whereby globalized production systems were adapted to suit particular local conditions. Others suggest that the term was first used at a Global Change Exhibition in Bonn in 1990, becoming a marketing buzzword and entering the Oxford Dictionary of New Words in 1991. One of the first academics to refer to glocalization was Robertson (1992), who used the term to counter the assumption that the global expansion of capitalism led inevitably to the commodification of local culture and the homogenization of difference. Rather than seeing globalization as working in opposition to the forces of localization, Robertson referred to glocalization to describe the linking of [Page 679]locales across the globe through the process of time-space compression.

Whatever the term's origins, the debate about glocalization is central to the argument that globalization is an incomplete and contested process, countering the charge that local differences are being subsumed within a more uniform global culture. Debating various terms, Roberston (1994) presents glocalization as a refinement of the concept of globalization, designed to highlight the heterogenizing aspects of globalization as well as its homogenizing tendencies and emphasizing its spatial as much as its temporal aspects. Robertson's emphasis on the spatial has appealed to geographers like Erik Swyngedouw, who has also debated the relative merits of the terms globalization and glocalization. Specifically, Swyngedouw suggests that glocalization refers to a situation in which economic activities and interfirm networks are becoming simultaneously more transnational and in which institutional and regulatory arrangements switch from the national scale both upward to supranational or global scales and downward to the scale of the individual body or to local, urban, or regional configurations. Here, too, adoption of the term glocalization is used to challenge the tendency within studies of globalization to obscure, marginalize, and silence the intense and ongoing sociospatial struggles that have accompanied globalization, demonstrating how the geographical rescaling of economic activity has important ramifications in terms of sociospatial asymmetries of power.

Doreen Massey has also argued against the inevitability of globalization, claiming instead that it is a specific political project associated with the growth of neoliberal capitalism. Massey argues that places all have their own particular histories and trajectories that cannot be understood simply in terms of an anonymous process of globalization, emanating from somewhere else. Instead, she insists that globalizations are always locally produced (whether they originate from London or New York or Tokyo, for example). Massey also makes an important distinction between space and place, resisting the tendency to contrast (global) space and (local) place, the former seen as active and the latter as passive. Instead of seeing the local as a product of the global and local places as the inevitable victim of globalization, Massey argues for a more relational view of space and place involving the mutual constitution of the global and the local. So, for example, she sees places as the moments through which the global is constituted, invested, coordinated, and produced, with different places occupying distinct positions within the wider power geometries of the global. Even the most global phenomena such as the international financial system are grounded in specific places (including the City of London, Wall Street, and various offshore tax havens), and the forces of globalization are experienced differently in different places because of their particular histories and accumulated layers of meaning. If globalization can be grounded and located in this way, then the future no longer appears inevitable or incontestable, as recent anticapitalist protest movements have sought to demonstrate.

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