Globalization is one of today's most powerful and pervasive ideas – for some a welcome dream, for others a nightmare. The term is used in the popular press as a sort of shorthand for the notion that all parts of the world are becoming more alike. It is also used as a marketing concept to sell goods, commodities and services. "Going global" has become the mantra for a whole range of companies, business gurus and institutions.John Rennie Short disagrees with this interpretation, arguing that the world today actually thrives on local differences and that a global polity tends to reinforce – not repress – the power of individual nation-states. He insists that globalization is not so much replacing difference with sameness as providing opportunities for new interactions between spaces and locations, new connections between the global and the local, new social landscapes and more diversity rather than less.
Author(s): John Rennie Short
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 192
Imprint page......Page 6
Contents......Page 7
1 The Dialectics of Globalization......Page 9
2 What Time is this Place?......Page 23
3 Does a Global Polity Mean the End of the Nation–State?......Page 53
4 A Global Economy?......Page 89
5 Global Cultures......Page 117
6 Border Spaces......Page 137
7 The Annihilation of Space, the Tyranny of Time......Page 161
8 Democratizing Globalization......Page 181
References......Page 187
Select Bibliography......Page 189
Acknowledgements......Page 191
List of Illustrations......Page 192
