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. How, to what extent, and to what possible future these globalizing processes manifest themselves, however, depends on local socioeconomic characteristics and trends.

This is a vision of spatial hybridity that sees the global and local as mutually formative. Unlike commentators who suggest that globalization is inevitably leading to a flatter, more homogeneous economic, political, and cultural world, glocalization scholars argue that, in fact, so-called globalizing processes are not only spread quite unevenly across the world, they also serve less to homogenize than to diversify this world as a result of hybrid glocal formations. The key is to observe each glocal context more closely to determine what globalization really entails. Cultural geographers thus consider globalization not as a convergence of global cultures but as the creation of new, heterogeneous, hybrid glocal cultures and individual identities. Political and economic geographers place more emphasis on the capacity of differential social power to create certain types of glocal hybridities as opposed to others as well as on the overall decline in the power of the nation-state to regulate global processes.

With respect to the latter, financial capital as well as some forms of productive capital clearly have transcended nation-state boundaries in terms of markets and investments. To conduct such business has necessitated the emergence of supranational governance institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Union, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, which necessarily reduces the sovereign decision-making powers of member states. At the same time, growing supranational economic activity has increased the competition among nations, regions, and localities to capture this activity, which is no longer regulated at the national level. To be successful at this process necessitates, in turn, the restructuring of internal social and economic governance to make it more conducive to the “free market” business practices of footloose supranational capital.

Indian youths queue at the opening of the first McDonald's family restaurant in New Delhi, October 13, 1996. Officials of the giant U.S.-based chain announced that this is the only McDonald's restaurant in the world with no beef on the menu, as most of the people of India do not eat beef.

Source: AP Photo/Ajit Kumar.

This idea is the source of the currently hegemonic neoliberal ideology of governance. Of interest is that the increasing deregulation of national spaces as well as the growing power of supranational governing institutions and transnational corporations have entailed the rising importance of governance at the subnational level of regions and metropolitan areas. As the free market nation-state relinquished its spatially “uncompetitive” role of equalizing development over the whole national territory, such subnational entities [Page 1348]were increasingly left to their own devices in terms of successful economic development and social reproduction. Not surprisingly, subnational elites largely follow the neoliberal recipes for success adopted at the national level, thereby increasing place competition and social inequality at the subnational level. Viewed glocally, this is a direct result of the growing discursive and real hegemony of national and subnational agents of increasingly powerful supranational processes. The weakening of nation-state regulation is thus consciously enacted by glocal agents and is not something forced by an inexorable, somehow external pressure of globalization.

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