Geography Reference
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rather sceptical about its importance in quantitative terms (Ruigrok and
van Tulder 1995; Michie and Grieve Smith 1995; Hirst and Thompson
1996). Another major controversy has opened up on the value-judgements
attributable to globalization, such as whether a 'global' society is a good or
a bad thing. Contrary to what has happened in popular debates whereby
the nature of the issues at stake is left largely undetermined and vague -
answers to this type of question could (and should) only be provided by
clarifying the actors of reference. For example, for many people globaliza-
tion immediately conjures up images of a form of international capitalist
exploitation (Klein 2000, 2002), mediated by rapacious multinational
companies greedily acquiring the resource base of poor communities.
According to this largely negative view, globalization is therefore seen pri-
marily in terms of the extent to which such communities are increasingly
disadvantaged by the globalizing nature of capitalism. For other people,
globalization immediately points to issues of global branding (Levitt 1983;
Douglas and Wind 1987; Day and Reibstein 1997), whereby dominant
corporations increasingly embed themselves in the cultural life of het-
erogeneous communities and identities, therefore encouraging a form of
global cultural homogeneity dominated mainly by Western values. Once
again, this view of globalization tends to be largely negative. For others,
globalization conjures up images of the 'rise of Asia', and a gradual shift-
ing of political and economic hegemony eastwards (Ferguson 2008). In
terms of value-judgements, this view is based on an understanding of
historical and political processes and is not bound to any particular nor-
mative assessment of those processes and their outcomes. Meanwhile, for
those who enjoy or earn a living from travelling and tourism, globaliza-
tion means cheap airfares and easy access to places that would have been
unimaginable three decades earlier. This view tends to see globalization as
being positive. Finally, for others, globalization immediately implies the
communication possibilities afforded by information technologies such
as e-mail, phone-text, Google, YouTube and Facebook, in which access
to people, information and news sources across all locations around the
globe can be instantly facilitated by electronic media. This view of the
world converging to something akin to a 'global village' tends also to see
globalization in largely positive terms, merging together the power of new
technologies and the enlargement of markets and the intensification of all
types of exchanges. The pace of globalization and that of technological
change have indeed been strictly interrelated and, from a long-term per-
spective, it appears less important to establish which one should be consid-
ered responsible for triggering the other rather than to establish that they
mutually enforced each other. For many decades there has been a circular
process in which new technologies act as a 'lubricant' for economic and
