In this volume, scholars from a variety of disciplines not only question the exorbitant popular hype around “globalization,” but also seek to build upon the pioneering global theorizing of the 1990s (represented by David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, Arjun Appadurai, Manuel Castells, and Anthony Giddens, among numerous others). Much of that theoretical work has focused on epistemic shifts of recent decades, shifts described in terms of a causal relation between globalization phenomena and the “postmodern condition.”

This is marked by a new economy made possible by its “informational mode of production” that has created a new global “space of flows” (Castells...

This essay presents some aspects of a bigger project investigating transnational corporate spatial practices within the context of the problematique of globalization. Specifically, the focus is on ways in which the ideal types oftheglobal corporation and the subject oftheglobal manager are made up or constructed in the discourse of global management. Source material is drawn from the Anglo-American field of management: management textbooks, management theory books and articles, popular and how-to management books, and business school materials (course descriptions, publicity material, etc.). I am not claiming that representations oftheglobal corporation ortheglobal manager...

I have used the concept of “flexible citizenship” to describe the practices of refugees and business migrants who conduct businesses in one location while their families are lodged in “safe havens” elsewhere. Leading up to and beyond the reunification with China, Hong Kong Chinese, for instance, prepared escape pods by sending businesses abroad and accumulating foreign passports, second homes, and overseas bank accounts. The strategies of mobility and relocation are constrained, however, by the cultural regimes and the market conditions in host countries (Ong 1998, 134–62). In this essay, I turn the question around, and look at how the...

Recent discussions of globalization are founded on an assumption about the movement of capital, goods, people, and images—that movement generates change, and that movement is a self-evident phenomenon. Cultural approaches to globalization, such as Appadurai’s (1996) and Hannerz’s (1996), tend to posit thatincreasingmobility characterizes the contemporary era. Critics of these approaches note that capital, goods, labor, and ideas have been moving from place to place ever since the rise of capitalism, if not before, through trading routes and ancient empires (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1989; Friedman 1995). Within political science, “international political economy” (IPE) scholars, while not dipping quite...

On July 1, 1985, Spain enacted its first comprehensive immigration law, the Alien Law (Ley Orgánica de Extranjería, LOE), which spelled out the rights and duties of noncitizens living in Spain.¹ With this law, Spain for the first time made clear distinctions between types of aliens and their corresponding rights, with particularly sharp lines being drawn between European Community members and citizens of third-world countries, with most of this latter group now having to carry visas to enter the country.

Within days of enacting the LOE, Spain signed the treaty for entry into the European Community (Boletín Official del Estado...

Even children’s books in South Asia now assume familiarity with the experience of expatriates working in the Persian Gulf. ThusThe Case of the Shady Sheikh and Other Stories(Singh 1993) features an Indian labor contractor and a Gulf sheikh who cheats poor men, taking money from them and promising passports, visas, and work permits for jobs in the Middle East. The criminals are foiled by a band of children who become detectives and expose their shady dealings.¹ That a children’s book should deal with such themes is quite appropriate, for some of the most highly publicized South Asian workers...

At a time when national boundaries seem increasingly insignificant and the rationales for ethnic, gender, and other divisions have come under attack, scholars have begun to examine “borderlands” as sites that transcend boundaries and that may generate new cultural forms. Borderlands have been celebrated for their bricolage, innovation, and interstitiality. Gupta and Ferguson (1997, 48) note that borderlands are not “a fixed topographical site between two other fixed locales (nations, societies, cultures) but an interstitial zone of deterritorialization and hybridization.” Borderlands are spaces that defy categories and paradigms, that “don’t fit,” and that therefore reveal the criteria that determine fittedness,...

Racialized identities depend on etching sharp lines through the continuities and ambiguities of social personhood. Essentialized centers are centrifugally spun from national, cultural, class, and physical variation. Endless struggle is required to create the marks of difference and to hold them firm as populations themselves blend and change. Although it is clear that racial identities are social constructs developed over time, this essay describes how they are created and regulated in one social setting. It examines the institutional factors that gave shape and meaning to identities in Hawai‘i during the Americanization of the sovereign kingdom in the nineteenth century and...

In 1989, the first “all-nude” strip club opened its doors in the city of Portland, Oregon.¹ The conversion of ten area topless bars to all-nude strip clubs following a Supreme Court ruling that legalized full nudity in business establishments took place so quietly as to seem mundane, unremarkable. Three years later, the number of all-nude dance clubs in Portland had grown to fifty, neighborhood taverns had converted to strip clubs, pornography stores were advertising “live nude models,” and escort services were on the rise. In addition, new forms of adult entertainment, such as “lingerie clubs” and

“gentleman’s tanning salons,” surfaced...

When giving this paper orally, I always began with a proverbial apologia, that uniquely superior form of special pleading that characterizes the disclaimer that one’s presentation is “a work in progress.” What does it mean, I asked, to represent one’s efforts as a “work” that can be situated in some temporal process designated as “progress”? What forms of authority do we appeal to and what mediums of legitimation do we evoke when we so casually adopt such phases? In contemporary fields of power and knowledge, it appears, particular values are indeed bestowed upon individual and collective labors to the extent...

This essay was first written more than two years before September 11, 2001. Given the time lag, this essay’s skeptical, and playfully ironic, perspective on the interwoven themes of apocalypse and redemption in globalization theorizing current at that moment should not be taken to reflect a disregard for the events of 9/11, nor a disrespect for the thousands who died then and the thousands more who continue to die in the “global war on terror” that has followed that date. Indeed, after 9/11, it is even more the case that anxieties of apocalypse, as well as various visions of redemption...