Global Dimensions: Space, Place and the Contemporary World

 "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, magazines and news reports as a sort of shorthand for saying that the world is becoming more alike. The business press, in particular, insists that we are moving toward a fully integrated global economy. 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. Globalization is supposed to be bringing everyone closer together and making everywhere the same, but John Rennie Short disagrees, arguing that the world culture of today actually thrives on local differences, that a global polity tends to reinforce - not repress - the power of individual nation states and that the global economy is based in reality on countless localized places scattered throughout the world. The author shows that the concept of globalization as a process that is creating a standardized, more homogenous world is hopelessly unsophisticated, and goes on to suggest that globalization does not so much replace difference with sameness as provide opportunities for new interactions between spaces and locations, new connections between the global and the local, new social landscapes and more diversity around the world rather than less.