The Blackwell Companion to Globalization

Chapter 9

The End of Globalization? The Implications of Migration for State, Society and Economy

SUBHRAJIT GUHATHAKURTA, DAVID JACOBSON AND NICHOLAS C. DELSORDI

GLOBALIZATION AND MIGRATION

Globalization is now a pervasive word that seems to underpin most discussions of cross-national flows of goods, services, capital, people, technology, ideas and culture. The term often alludes to an elusive superstructure that ties together far-flung regions of the world through a web of regulated as well as unregulated exchanges. The wide use and application of the term led to the warning by Held et al. (1999: 1): ‘globalization is in danger of becoming, if it has not already become, the cliché of our times: the big idea which encompasses everything from global financial markets to the internet but which delivers little substantive insight into the contemporary human condition’. The processes and structures of globalization rest on a theoretically contested sphere, but there are enough common elements to enable meaningful dialogue. In other words, the neoclassical economist examining convergence or divergence of costs and prices across the globe, the sociologist interested in extra-territorially based social networks and the political scientist who is concerned about the changing nature of citizenship and human rights are all addressing globalization as a process where the increasing speed and volume of cross-national flows have more tightly integrated the social and economic fortunes in the ...