UNCERTAINTIES OF GLOBALIZATION

The end of the twentieth century has brought with it troubling and uncertain times. The market triumphalism of the 1990s seemed to offer new certainties to replace those of the earlier period of the “Golden Age” of postwar Western capitalism and global “development.” If the victory of global capitalist “market society” brought the depressing project of global exploitation, it also offered the prospect of new movements of resistance and antiglobalization. New political certainties were emerging – clear dividing lines that would be the basis of new struggles for and against corporate globalization. Globalization from above met globalization from below in dramatic struggles in the streets, each offering a different moral and political vision of the global capitalist order.

But as these grand political struggles are fought out at Seattle, Davos, and around the world, they are also fought out daily in the more mundane, everyday political economies of the new era. “Global markets” rely on a wide variety of institutional and social supports and are increasingly dominated by the central position of the leading transnational corporations. These corporations, powerful as they are, are themselves rooted in their intersection with workplaces, households, business networks, state strategies, regional industrial cultures, global cities, and elsewhere. Globalization is a grounded process, which is contested at the micro and meso levels, as well as at the macro level of transnational capital and the social movements that have emerged in such exciting fashion to challenge it (Burawoy et al., 2000).