Glocalization

Definition

Glocalization is the composite term — "with all its immediate awkwardness" (Soja 2000, p. 199) — for the recombinant view that globalization and localization are not separate or opposing processes but mutually constitutive ones. The word entered The Oxford Dictionary of New Words (1991) as "a telescopic blending of the global and the local," drawing on the Japanese business strategy dochakuka (a global outlook adapted to local conditions); Roland Robertson and Erik Swyngedouw extended it into social theory. Soja's reading gives it a precise epistemological job: it is a critical thirding of the internalist–externalist, micro–macro, global–local binarisms that had split the development literature. Rethinking localization shows that "we always act (and think) locally, but our actions and thoughts are also simultaneously urban, regional, national, and global in scope"; rethinking globalization shows it is "not a process that operates exclusively at a planetary scale, but is constantly being localized in various ways and with different intensities at every scale of human life" (p. 200). Every locality "is globalized – and also simultaneously urbanized, regionalized, and nationalized, albeit with very different intensities."

The concept's deeper yield is the politics of scale: "the nested hierarchy of scales… is not naively given but is socially constructed" — hence scales can be "changed through human action." Swyngedouw's formula: "Scale becomes the arena and moment, both discursively and materially, where sociospatial power relations are contested and compromises are negotiated and regulated" (quoted p. 200). Glocalization is thus the initial spark for rethinking "the entire fabric of relations that define the spatiality of contemporary social life" — and, for Soja, the spark that reopens the question of the city-region (Storper's "dialectical dynamic of globalization and territorialization" resolving at the meso-level). Its paired reading runs through Appadurai's five disjunctive -scapes (ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes) and the deterritorialization–reterritorialization dialectic.

Key Thinkers

• Erik Swyngedouw (referenced, not paged — see log) — the term's first theoretical user: "glocalisation" and the politics of scale; also "one of the most insightful interpreters of Lefebvre's work" (p. 200, n. 11).
• Roland Robertson (referenced, not paged — see log) — the sociological formulation: Globalization (1992); "Glocalization: Time–Space and Homogeneity–Heterogeneity."
• Edward W. Soja — the concept's epistemological registration: glocalization as critical thirding, scale as produced, and the city-region as incipient postmetropolitan polity.
• Michael Storper (referenced, not paged — see log) — the territorialization counterweight: "a dialectical dynamic of globalization and territorialization at work in the construction of city economies."
• Arjun Appadurai (referenced, not paged — see log) — the scapes: the disjunctive global cultural economy the glocal lens orders.

Related Concepts

• global-city — the command-hierarchy reading glocalization corrects.
• postmetropolis — the glocal condition of the contemporary city-region.
• deterritorialisation — the de-re pairing glocalization's re-territorialization leg supplies.
• space-of-flows — the network form glocalization grounds in places.
• scalar-promiscuity — the wiki's Keil-side register of the same scale-politics (multiscalar movements).
• planetary-suburbanization — the process whose local expressions glocalization names.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the concept's wiki source: the definition and genealogy (pp. 199–201), the politics of scale (Swyngedouw quoted, p. 200), the territorialization dialectic (Storper quoted, p. 201), and the application to Los Angeles's "glocalized ethnoscapes" (p. 226) and Lennox's peso-devaluation immiseration (p. 258).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

Open Questions

• Is glocalization still a live concept, or has its corporate provenance (dochakuka as marketing strategy) permanently tinged it — Soja notes its use "has not yet entered very deeply into the globalization discourse" as of 2000; did it enter and degenerate into business rhetoric?
• Soja reads glocalization as an initial spark for the politics of scale — does the concept survive the planetary-urbanization critique of the local/global pair itself?
• What is the glocal interior — Lennox's binational households sustained by the peso's devaluation are the concept's human face; does the interior cluster (transbodied-space, global-constructs) already hold its room-scale case?