Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The end of geography?
The nature of this new embeddedness gives part of the answer to the
fundamental question set at the beginning of this section. There is still room for
geographical variation, since the global firm is unable and perhaps unwilling to
standardize its operations across the globe. One vision of standardization came
from such writers as Toffler (1970), who wrote about the “demise of geography”
in his topic
Future shock,
but such a vision gives too much credence to the
power of modern technology and high mobility to change ways of living in all
regions. Technology does not have total power to change cultures and social
structures that have been firmly established for centuries, and it is culture,
instead, that is likely to force an adaptation of technology to local circumstances.
McLuhan (1964) embraced a similar idea about the power of technology, in
writing on the global village, and divided world history into three stages which
were dependent on communications technology. In his first great stage, people
communicated directly in speech, at a local level, in “the village”. A second
stage came with the arrival of mass written communications, dependent upon the
invention of the printing press. This technology, allowing mass communication
but susceptible to tight control over its forms and its targets, allowed a strong
control and censorship of information between social groups and places.
Hierarchic structuring of society and the nation state as a political device were
the norm. Finally, for McLuhan we are now in the phase of the “global village”,
because of modern technology, using electronic means for instant worldwide
communications. In the global village, as in the primitive village, society is again
destructured because all information is instantly available everywhere.
Although McLuhan's predictions with regard to the technology itself are
startlingly accurate, the globalization of society has not been the result, because
of the prevailing enormous differences in access to communications, and the
continued isolation of large groups of humanity. The model based simply on
technology is inadequate because it is too simple, and from the evidence, there is
a constantly shifting interplay between the local and the global.
This argument can be made more formally. McLuhan's argument is one for a
determinism that runs from technology, through economy to society. By
contrast, neo-classical economics assumed that the economy was independent,
and that economic decisions were taken on their own. However, there has always
been an undercurrent of doubt. Writers, particularly within the substantivist
school of anthropology, as exemplified by the work of Karl Polanyi, regarded the
economy as a whole “embedded” within a social integument (Polanyi 1957a,
Peck 1994), and such views have gained recent support, as in the work of
Granovetter (1985). Polanyi argued for the embedded nature of the economy in
ancient societies, and thought that modern life had tended to divorce the
economy from society. Granovetter makes the case that, in fact, modern
economies are also embedded, and that institutions, whether firms, groups of
firms in industrial districts, labour unions, or other economic groupings, all form
