Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local

The "globalization of economic relations" hypothesis is becoming more prominent in everyday social science and public affairs. As multinational and transnational corporations continue to grow, goods, services and money become increasingly mobile. Advocates of the hypothesis claim that this mobility creates forms of competition beyond the current nationally organized forms of a worker representation and state representation. Defined in this manner, globalization can be seen as a threat to welfare states, policies of full employment and national living standards.; examining the underlying assumptions of the globalization arguments, the authors investigate the changing relationships between the local and the global, the territorialization of economic life and the organization of labour.