Mácha, Přemysl, and Tomáš Drobík, eds. “Introduction: The Scales of Globalizations.”
In The Scale of Globalization. Think Globally, Act Locally, Change Individually in the 21st Century, 6-10. Ostrava: University of Ostrava, 2011.
ISBN 978-80-7368-963-6 http://conference.osu.eu/globalization/publ2011/6-10_Macha-Drobik.pdf.
Introduction: The Scales of Globalizations
Přemysl Mácha, Tomáš Drobík
Přemysl Mácha
University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic
E-mail: [email protected]
Tomáš Drobík
University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic
E-mail: [email protected]
The Conference...
These proceedings present scientific papers given at the international conference on
globalization called The Scale of Globalization: Global, Local, Individual, that took place at
the University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic, on September 8-9, 2011
(http://conference.osu.eu/globalization/). This conference was the fifth in a series of
conferences on globalization organized biannually by the Department of Human Geography at
the University of Ostrava since 2003. The general goal of these conferences was to bring
together scholars from various social science disciplines and stimulate an interdisciplinary
critical discussion about globalization and the diverse processes commonly associated with it.
Over the years some two hundred scholars from almost thirty different countries from almost
all continents have given very provocative perspectives on globalization and presented the
results of their fieldwork and research.
Each conference had a special focus or a theme. The previous conference on globalization
organized by the Department of Human Geography, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic,
in September 2009, was called Beyond Globalization: Exploring the Limits of Globalization
in the Regional Context. Its main goal was to problematize the concept of globalization and
explore its potential utility in describing and analyzing the diverse processes occurring in the
world and often summarily referred to as "globalization". On the one hand, the papers
presented during this conference showed that the concept of globalization continued to bear a
high degree of relevance and academic currency. On the other hand, several presenters
approached the concept very critically and suggested that if we were to continue fruitfully in
our research on globalization, we had to study the phenomenon in other ways than we had
predominantly done thus far.
One paper in particular gave us the central idea for this year's conference The Scale of
Globalization, drawing our attention to the problem of scale in social science research of
globalization and the related phenomena. On face value, globalization is by definition a global
process. However, this process necessarily takes place in specific localities and concrete
individuals are involved in it. Above all, this paradox begs the question of scale. For this
year's conference we therefore wanted to invite and challenge academics and professionals
from around the world to reflect upon globalization as a multi-scalar phenomenon determined
not so much by the area of its impact (economy, politics, society) but rather by the scale at
which it is (seen as) occurring.
There are two principal reasons for this critical perspective. First, we wanted to explore
how globalization as a process and as a powerful imagination arises, operates, and becomes
contested and reappropriated depending on the scale of action and observation - global, local,
6
Mácha, Přemysl, and Tomáš Drobík, eds. “Introduction: The Scales of Globalizations.”
In The Scale of Globalization. Think Globally, Act Locally, Change Individually in the 21st Century, 6-10. Ostrava: University of Ostrava, 2011.
ISBN 978-80-7368-963-6 http://conference.osu.eu/globalization/publ2011/6-10_Macha-Drobik.pdf.
and individual. Is globalization the same phenomenon at all of these spatial scales or levels of
social reality? How does the character of the process and imagination differ at these scales
and what theories are best suited to account for the dynamics of the phenomenon? Do we
need scale-specific theories of globalization?
And second, globalization is most commonly perceived as a structural process and
individuals and communities are seen as mostly passive and powerless victims. In our view,
the question of agency in debates on globalization has not been sufficiently appreciated. By
refocusing our attention to scale, we hoped to stimulate discussion about the possibilities of
individual action in a world which is often described as spinning out of control. We do not
share this pessimistic view and there we encouraged the participants to explore the
possibilities for positive individual and community action at different scales of being.
Apparently, this conceptual framework resonated with the interests and research
approaches of a great number of social scientists. This year's conference drew more
participants from more disciplines and countries of residence than any of our previous
conferences. The diverse composition of participants created an exceptionally stimulating
intellectual environment in which the concept of globalization was submitted to critical
review in relation to scale. Over sixty papers were delivered, of which fifty appear in these
proceedings. The conference had three main sections. In addition to the theoretical section
focusing primarily on the question of scale in relation to globalization we also offered the
opportunity for regional specialists interested in the Caucasus to discuss the impacts of
globalization in this region. And we also organized a section on governance in relation to the
scale of globalization as a highly relevant topic for the contemporary world.
The conference was organized under the auspices of Václav Havel, the former president
of the Czech Republic and a great advocate of human rights and social justice world-wide.
The choice of our key-note speakers corresponded with the structure of the conference
sections. Our principal key-note speaker was dr. Paul Routledge from the University of
Glasgow, UK, a world-renowned political geographer, who delivered a paper on resistance
movements in Bangladesh as an example of a network-based action, a scale-specific
phenomena which shows an aspect of globalization which does not become readily apparent
in the "grand narrative" approaches to globalization. Professor Vladimíra Dvořáková, from
the Economics University in Prague, the Czech Republic, gave a paper on governance in
relation to globalization and democracy in which she reflected rather critically the growing
popularity of the concept of governance. Our third key-note speaker, dr. Emil Souleimanov
from Charles University in Prague, the Czech Republic, a specialist on the Caucasus,
acquainted the participants with the regional experience of globalization (however it may be
conceptualized) in the Caucasus and Central Asia and provided thus the framework for other
participants with papers in this section. The conference was supported financially by the
government of the Moravian-Silesian Region.
... And the Reasoning behind It
Globalization has proven to be a particularly difficult concept to define. Consequently,
many authors prefer to leave it undefined or offer only very general, all-encompassing and
thus totally useless definitions. In this understanding, globalization is almost just about
anything happening in this world. Among those who do try to offer a more specific definition
of the concept, we may find two principal approaches. The first group of researchers
considers globalization as an actually occurring process variously involving a range of
economic, political or cultural factors (Boyer and Drache 1996, Dicken 2003). In this
introductory passage we call this approach "objectivist" without necessarily implying a
simplistic mechanistic understanding of complex social phenomena. The uniting theme in the
background of these approaches is that globalization is conceived as the result of longue
7
Mácha, Přemysl, and Tomáš Drobík, eds. “Introduction: The Scales of Globalizations.”
In The Scale of Globalization. Think Globally, Act Locally, Change Individually in the 21st Century, 6-10. Ostrava: University of Ostrava, 2011.
ISBN 978-80-7368-963-6 http://conference.osu.eu/globalization/publ2011/6-10_Macha-Drobik.pdf.
durée trends such as the expansion of foreign direct investment, the intensified deployment of
information technologies, and, in the cultural realm, the newly emergent forms of collective
identity, political consciousness, as well as new forms of technologically mediated
sociocultural interaction.
The other principal approach sees globalization to be more abstract, as a powerful
imagination or a grand narrative, making interdependencies of places and culture more
intensive and extended, allowing the global political economy to be more smoothly produced
and reproduced. Deriving from the "production-based nature of space", together with Massey
(2007) we might say that globalization must be approached as an "entangled phenomenon": it
is driven by particular (although universalist) capitalist economy and society, and
simultaneously produces specific the "space of globalization". It reproduces itself inside this
space and thus it ensures the perpetual validity and the survival of capitalism. Massey also
argues that although the imaginations and expectations of globalization bring rather an aspatial picture of the world since they promise geographically, socially and politically
absolutely interconnected and borderless world (see e.g. Ohmae 1995; 2005), the
globalizational reality places serious limits on the lower strata of the vertical political and
economic scale. In fact, globalization has created spaces not limited by impediments, but
these are not present equally over the world, many of them possess rather virtual and networkbased character and the regime of "freedom" is newly limited by class, race, gender or
nationality. We have witnessed a new international division of labor which is yet to be
delimited by interstate borders facilitating relatively efficient control over migration and the
management of labor force.
What has been said about the spatial paradoxes of globalization is also true for its cultural
aspects. Considering the close relationship between culture and space we have to presume that
as there is no a-spatial culture, there also is no a-cultural space. Yet the common imagination
of globalization does not say anything about its cultural dimensions. The imagination of a
borderless world appears to propose the existence of individuals who are free of all thinkable
limitations, be they cultural or spatial. Who are the global actors culturally speaking? Is there
a global culture? Who are its bearers?
The common critique of globalization points out the cultural particularity of the
globalizing actors and forces and speaks of a Westernization or, even more radically, of a new
cultural imperialism (e. g. Brecher and Costello 1994; Hamm and Smandych 2005). Some
consider this process a good thing (see e. g. Rothkopf 1997), most, however, condemn it as
unacceptable. What these authors have in common, however, is the persuasion that this
process is occurring and influencing somehow global and local space and global and local
cultures. The relationship between local culture and global culture may be of competition,
compartmentalization or hybridization. At any rate, global cultures spread rapidly and
transform local societies at an increasingly more fundamental level.
This is what we find interesting in the process of globalization - the scaling of the process
of globalization. In our perspective globalization is not a flat process occurring only on the
global scale but is driven, accelerated, opposed and reformulated in the lower strata of the
world – in localities (streets, shops, schools, factories etc.), regions, or states. We are inclined
to claim that there would not be a sole global dimension without localities, regions and states.
This is exactly the reason why globalization still wields such an allure for scientists –space
and culture continue to change and the political, social, economic and environmental
relevance of these changes remains high. The fundamental instability of globalization-as-aprocess leads us to think about globalization not exclusively in terms of the international
division of labor, the changing forms of industrial organization, or the processes of urbanregional restructuring but also in terms of the transformations in the nature of state power,
8
Mácha, Přemysl, and Tomáš Drobík, eds. “Introduction: The Scales of Globalizations.”
In The Scale of Globalization. Think Globally, Act Locally, Change Individually in the 21st Century, 6-10. Ostrava: University of Ostrava, 2011.
ISBN 978-80-7368-963-6 http://conference.osu.eu/globalization/publ2011/6-10_Macha-Drobik.pdf.
civil society, citizenship, democracy, public spheres, nationalism, politico-cultural identities,
localities, and architectural forms, among many others (see Brenner 1999: 39).
As human geographers we interested in what many scholars claimed vis-á-vis
globalization and space. It is the fact that globalization has caused vast changes in the scalar
division of space and culture. As Brenner (1999: 53) wrote, "this re-scaling of territoriality
does not entail the state's erosion but rather its reterritorialization onto both sub- and supranational scales. States continue to operate as essential sites of territorialization for social,
political, and economic relations, even if the political geography of this territorialization
process no longer converges predominantly or exclusively upon any single, self-enclosed
geographical scale". And similarly, we can also identify newly scalar forms of culture
connected to territories. Reconfiguration of identities, hybridization of values, unification of
imaginations or global consciousness are parts of the same processes of globalization.
In this regard, it is worth to describe the papers of two of our key-note speakers,
Vladimira Dvorakova and Paul Routledge, in a greater detail. The key argument of
Dvorakova's paper is the need to rethink the concept of good governance promoted by
democratic regimes as one of the positive modes of government in non-democratic states. Her
article shows how the external use of power might cause the political-administrative
hybridization of the originally Western concepts in the space of non-democratic regimes and
how it might actually contribute to the stabilization of such regimes. This evokes one of the
examples given by Peter Taylor (1999) when talking about his typology of globalization.
Among other things, he talks about geographical globalization as a way of reordering space
through trans-state practices in a 'borderless world', which will follow and emulate different
organizational principles, especially modes of governance in big cities. Dvorakova's example
makes his assumption more problematic, however, and corresponds better with a multiscalar
view of the world in which culture, space, and politics are intimately intertwined and their
connection produces unexpected outcomes.
Paul Routledge fit exactly into the topic of the conference when talking about
translocalism. He deployed this concept for the description of connections made between
localities in different spaces that are not necessarily limited to the connections between
nations but many spatial actors. In his paper connections are made between localities not only
geographically through global scale of transportation networks, technological devices
(immutable mobiles), shared energy systems and flows of capital and division of labor, but
also abstractly, through global scale media, shared identities of resistance, shared feelings of
injustice, shared imaginations and shared hopes of a better life. Furthermore he spoke about
power which is generated in such networks. On the one side it can serve as a basis for
resistance to oppression globalization apparatuses, but also on the other side it enables people
to act, unite, and also contribute to some aspects of globalization. Paul Routledge's paper was
also important in that it discussed possibilities for action, showing that much can be done with
very little.
The multiplicity of other papers included in these proceedings makes it impossible to deal
with them individually and to provide a short summary and a critical reflection of each of
them. We leave it upon the reader to carry out this reflection in the framework set by the
conference and this brief introductory chapter. Paying attention to the scale of globalization,
in our opinion, remains a key to the disentangling of the aforementioned "entangled
phenomenon" and to the resolution of many of the paradoxes of globalization. One last
question, though, forces itself into our thoughts and with it we end this introduction: how do
we, the scientists, fit into the problem of scale?
9
Mácha, Přemysl, and Tomáš Drobík, eds. “Introduction: The Scales of Globalizations.”
In The Scale of Globalization. Think Globally, Act Locally, Change Individually in the 21st Century, 6-10. Ostrava: University of Ostrava, 2011.
ISBN 978-80-7368-963-6 http://conference.osu.eu/globalization/publ2011/6-10_Macha-Drobik.pdf.
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