Geography Reference
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political purposes. During one of my conversations with government
managers a newcomer to the room announced that the Minister wanted to
meet with a successful business immigrant for promotional media purposes.
This request diverted attention from our ongoing conversation and sent the
officials into something of a tizzy. 'Oh, no, we can't use the same old one.
Does anybody know of any successful recent cases?'
When a manager told me 'Our data miss the street level', he was reporting
a truth that has several ramifications. First, he was acknowledging the capacity
constraint on government that precludes anything but rudimentary pro-
gramme monitoring. He was also acknowledging that there is an uncontrolled
space, 'the street', filled with knowledgeable agents with their own purposes
and practices, a space that was largely removed from the monitoring of a
stretched, centralized authority. In this space of relative freedom other strate-
gies could prevail, even those that subverted the intents of the state. There is
also a deeper level to consider here. We have shown the BIP to be the outcome
of a protracted neo-liberal political strategy to access the wealth of Asia Pacific
and draw it within Canadian borders. Neo-liberalism generally has been dis-
cussed less as a policy than as an ideology and technology, a set of ideas and
procedures that encourage a Foucauldian language of surveillance, (self) dis-
cipline and (self) control. But from that lofty theoretical prospect of the over-
achieving state, the street level may be lost from view. The oft-discussed
governmentality of the neo-liberal state has significant points of rupture and
failures of implementation when we move from theory to practice, from ideol-
ogy to the hard work of implementing policy (Ong 2003). Indeed while atten-
tion to governmentality is helpful, its theoretical commitments may lead to
foreclosure in interpretation. This seems to be Wendy Larner's conclusion in
her examination of the New Zealand government's global search for the Kiwi
diaspora, another international outreach to highly performing individuals by
a neo-liberal state. Larner (2007: 343) helpfully concludes, taking a lead from
Sharma and Gupta's (2006) anthropology of the state, that rather than risking
the over-emphases of the governmentality literature,
What is really needed - and to some extent the theoretical starting-point may
be irrelevant - are more theoretically informed, empirically grounded research
projects that examine the geographies and sociologies of apparently mundane
and taken-for-granted aspects of governing in the effort to understand how
the world has come to be understood as global.
Conclusion: Roughing up the Isotropic Plain
In what ways has the world come to be understood as global? One trope
most certainly is the theme of the end of geography. The idea of migrant
transnationalism is predicated on the falling real cost of communication
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