the spaces and times of globalization: place, scale, networks

The Spaces and Times of Globalization:Place, Scale, Networks, and Positionality*

Eric SheppardDepartment of Geography, University of Minnesota,

Minneapolis, MN [email protected]

Abstract: Discussions of the spatiality of globalization have largely focused on place-based attributes that fix globalization locally, on globalization as the construction ofscale, and on networks as a distinctive feature of contemporary globalization. Bycontrast, position within the global economy is frequently regarded as anachro-nistic in a shrinking, networked world. A critical review of how place, scale, andnetworks are used as metaphors for the spatiality of globalization suggests thatspace/time still matters. Positionality (position in relational space/time within theglobal economy) is conceptualized as both shaping and shaped by the trajectoriesof globalization and as influencing the conditions of possibility of places in a glob-alizing world. The wormhole is invoked as a way of describing the concrete geogra-phies of positionality and their non-Euclidean relationship to the Earth’s surface.The inclusion of positionality challenges the simplicity of pro- and antiglobalizationnarratives and can change how we think about globalization and devise strategiesto alter its trajectory.

Key words: globalization, place, scale, networks, positionality, space-time.

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places that had developed in separate socialuniverses.

These spatial dynamics have many simi-larities with those highlighted in accounts ofcontemporary globalization processes,such as the impact of free Internet access in1998 on the traditional hammock industryof the remote Guyanan village of Lethem,connecting weaving women to elitecustomers in global cities and triggering alosing gendered struggle for control over thenew wealth between the women and villageelders (Romero 2000). In both cases, the riftin space/time had asymmetric consequences.For example, it dramatically changed thetrajectory of Hawai’ian society, initiatingits enrollment into European colonialismand culminating in annexation by the UnitedStates (after Queen Liliuokalani’s attemptsto disengage from the United States werequashed by a coup led by Sanford Dole).Hawai’i’s impact on London was moremarginal and beneficial, reinforcingLondon’s growth as the preeminent polit-ical and financial center of an emergentworld system.

When Captain James Cook sailed theResolution into Waimea Bay, Hawai’i, on 19January 1778, the effect was to radicallyrestructure the space/time vectorsconnecting Hawai’i with London. This riftin global space/time instantiated what Iconceptualize here as a dramatic shift inpositionality, opening a wormhole in socialspace/time that qualitatively increased theconnectivity between the two places. The19-month voyage to Hawai’i seems desper-ately slow by contemporary standards, butit effectively connected for the first time two

* Stimulating discussions in a globalizationseminar at Minnesota, at the Atwood Lecture atClark University, at the Semple Lecture at theUniversity of Kentucky, and at the Leir confer-ence on Global Economic Change at ClarkUniversity influenced this article. I am particu-larly grateful to Neil Brenner, Vinay Gidwani,Jim Glassman, Susan Hanson, Helga Leitner,Bongman Seo, Daisaku Yamamoto, Jun Zhang,and three referees for their criticisms at variousstages. The usual disclaimers apply.

Marczak Business Services, Inc.

This article originally appeared in Economic Geography Volume 78, Number 3, July 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Clark University.

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Both are particular moments within muchbroader processes of capitalist globalization,shaped by political-economic processes,facilitated by technologies that transformspace/time, and framed by discursive under-standings of development and its humanconsequences. Thus, Cook was under secretorders from the British Crown to extendBritish dominion over the southern hemi-sphere and to report back on resourcesthat Britain could exploit. His expeditionrequired the development and assemblageof a network of geographic and other tech-nologies, including credit systems, ships,maps, and sextants. Local knowledge, freelyprovided by those who were eventually colo-nized, was vital to this process (Law 1996;Latour 1987). It also entailed a commodifi-cation of space and time, through theinterrelated technologies of clock makingand cartography. In all these ways, Cookparticipated in a close eighteenth-centuryalliance among European science, imperi-alism, and geography (Livingstone 1991).

Discursively, generations of Englishschoolboys, such as myself, learned ofCaptain Cook as a heroic white malepromoting science and civilizing the“natives.” In this discursive frame, dubbed“the white man’s burden” by RudyardKipling (penned when the United Statesoccupied the Philippines in 1899, just fiveyears after Dole’s Hawai’ian coup), colo-nialism was legitimized through a modernistand orientalist discourse that Euro-Americancapitalist development is good for you.Critics analyzed such space/time rifts asthe proximate cause of underdevelopmentand the destruction of indigenous lifeworldsin the global periphery that was created(Naoroji 1901/1962; Frank 1978).

Proponents of contemporary globaliza-tion, from Colin Powell to the mainstreambusiness press, still frame it as a process ofmodernization (Massey 1999a), wherebyeliminating barriers to the rational opera-tion of the free market will bring pros-perity for all who are prepared to adaptand work hard (except for the prisoners ofgeography; see Hausmann 2001). Critics stillstress the geographically differentiated

consequences of contemporary globaliza-tion, albeit less pessimistically. They demon-strate how places can stem the destructivetendencies of globalization through territo-rial governance structures that assemble localcapabilities for holding down the global(Amin and Thrift 1994). They argue thatcontemporary globalization is shifting thegeographic scales at which territorial regu-lation is most effective, challenging that ofthe nation-state. They also point to the anni-hilation of space by time, arguing thatalthough globalization does not mean theend of geography, it is being restructuredinto networked spaces (Castells 1996;Dicken, Kelly, Olds, and Yeung 2001).

In this paper, I wish to build on theseimportant contributions. I argue thatplace, scale, and networks have beendeployed, in turn, as geographic tropes fordiscussing globalization, sidelining a fourthtrope: positionality within the globaleconomy. I begin by suggesting that discus-sions of space, time, and globalization tendto suggest that time trumps space, neglectingways in which situation still matters, bothwithin the global economy in general and tothe trajectories of particular places. Hawai’i’strajectory was shaped not only by its abstractincorporation into globalization, modifiedby local conditions, but by its specificconnections to particular other places—notably the United States. I review researchon the role of place and scale, suggestingthat the focus on territories has attenuatedattention to the role of connections betweenterritories. The recent fascination withnetworks does stress horizontal spatialrelationships, but in my analysis tends toplace too much emphasis on the possibili-ties of, rather than the relational inequali-ties within, networked spaces. I advance theidea of positionality as a way of capturing theshifting, asymmetric, and path-dependentways in which the futures of places dependon their interdependencies with otherplaces, proposing the metaphor of worm-holes (from physics) as a way of representingthe highly non-Euclidean spatiality of theglobal economy since at least 1778. Finally,I discuss some implications of positionality

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for how we conceptualize the processesbehind, the differential livelihood possibil-ities enabled by, and the alternatives tocontemporary globalization. Althoughpositionality is presented here by stressingsome limitations of the other tropes, I do notintend that it should replace the others.Rather, I make a broader plea for a both/and,rather than an either/or, approach to our useof geographic concepts when theorizingspatial economic dynamics (cf. Brenner2001).

Metaphors for Space/Time inGlobalization Research

It has been widely asserted that space hasbecome less important as a result of glob-alization. Examining international financialrelationships, Richard O’Brien (1992, 1–2)gained notoriety among geographers forasserting that “geographical location nolonger matters, or matters less than hitherto.. . . Money, being fungible, will continue totry and avoid, and will largely succeed inescaping, the confines of the existing geog-raphy.” Similarly, Frances Cairncross (1997,xi) of The Economist wrote: “Distance willno longer determine the cost of communi-cating electronically. . . . No longer will loca-tion be key to most business decisions.” Bothare deliberately provocative, restrict theircomments to activities that can be carriedout electronically, and describe their visionof the near future rather than the present.Nevertheless, they are consistent with thespace/time imaginary of many mainstreamneoliberal globalization theorists who arguethat globalization makes old territorial struc-tures irrelevant and equalizes developmentpossibilities everywhere. Some mainstreameconomists have recently highlighted animportant role for geography as a constraintto realizing full globalization (i.e., ubiqui-tous development) because of the constraintsimposed by tropical climes and distance fromthe sea (Gallup, Sachs, and Mellinger1999; Hausmann 2001). Yet all theseanalyses share what Doreen Massey (1999a,1999b) identified as an impoverished

space/time imaginary—one that eliminatesspatial difference in favor of a universalnarrative of change; a new modernizationtheory (Porter and Sheppard 1998, chap. 5).

While critical of this imaginary, geogra-phers have nevertheless collaborated inmobilizing metaphors that emphasize a“shrinking world” (Kirsch 1995), in whichspace is progressively dominated by time.This emphasis can be dated to Don Janelle’s(1969) writings as part of the “spatial science”tradition of the 1960s, resurrected morerecently within both this tradition and polit-ical economy. The phrases used to articu-late this include “time-space convergence”(Janelle 1969), “collapsing space and time”(Brunn and Leinbach 1991), and “time-spacecompression”—coined by David Harvey(1989) to express the foreboding that ourglobalizing world can be “characterized byspeed-up in the pace of life, while so over-coming spatial barriers that the world some-times seems to collapse inwards upon us” (p.242). These phrases have been applied to avariety of experiences of space, from thelived to the representational (Lefebvre1974/1991), but present a common imagi-nary—a simultaneous speeding up of timeand collapsing of space in absolute terms.

Harvey made much of the “annihilationof space by time,” originally expressed byKarl Marx (1857–8/1983) in Die Grundrisse.Mobilized in conjunction with space/timecompression, this phrase has come tomean that, while space is collapsing and timeis speeding up in absolute terms, under glob-alization time is becoming relatively morecritical than space (see also Jessop 2001).Indeed, speed has become a centralmetaphor for what is distinctive aboutcontemporary globalization. Nigel Thrift(1994) discussed the emergence of a “struc-ture of feeling,” a culture of mobility empha-sizing speed, light, and power. Paul Virilio(1995, 151; 1993, 10) referred to this “thirdinterval” as one in which “the computermotor” is bringing about a situation in which“the tyranny of distances” gives way to the“tyranny of real time.” Tim Luke andGearóid Ó Tuathail (1998, 90) described anera of postmodern fast geopolitics, in which



“global flowmations . . . are re-masteringglobal space.” Like many globalization theo-rists, Virilio and Luke and Ó Tuathailconcluded that the digital revolution isenabling time to trump space (Agnew 2000).

Others are more cautious about the domi-nance of time. Harvey’s use of the “annihi-lation of space by time” in his politicaleconomic theorizing is more nuanced thanthe term suggests. Harvey stressed howspace is continually restructured andproduced under capitalism, both in theabstract as a commodified space/time(Harvey 1996), and as a concrete spatial fixfor the crises of capitalism (Harvey 1982).It is less widely recognized, although Harveydoes discuss it, that Marx used the conceptalso to describe how speeding up the spatialcirculation of commodities enhances prof-itability, making investments to reshapespace (new means of transportation andcirculation) that are essential to capital accu-mulation. Thrift (1994, 221) argued thatmobility “takes up both space and time” andthat it is misguided to prioritize time orspace. Although Manuel Castells (1996)went further in some respects than anyonein arguing that time has changed under thedigital revolution, he insisted that the new“space of flows” determines a “timeless”time: “Space shapes time in our society, thusreversing a historical trend” (p. 465). Yet,while some geographers insist that spatialitystill matters, such analyses are posed at ahigh level of abstraction. There are, in fact,contrasting views on what aspects ofspatiality matter most.

Territorial Thinking: Place andScale

Discussing the end-of-geography thesis,Ron Martin (1999, 15–16) took a positionthat resonates with much recent work ineconomic geography: “Globalisation maywell have eliminated space . . . , but it hasby no means undermined the significanceof location, of place.” Places are usuallyrepresented as territorial spaces, and debatesabout place and globalization have focused

on how territories still matter in a space offlows. Two complementary approaches havebeen taken on this issue. Some, drawinginspiration from the literature on industrialclusters, have sought to understand howglobalization has been accompanied by thegrowing influence of certain localities,such as new industrial spaces or financialcenters. The economic dynamism of suchplaces is typically explained in terms ofcertain place-based attributes that can fixglobalization locally. By contrast, others havelooked at how globalization is associated withthe construction of scale, noting theenhanced importance of supra- and subna-tional scales since the crisis of First WorldFordism. In this view, local trajectoriesdepend on how places are embedded in arange of territorial scales, from the local tothe global. In both cases, the conceptual-ization of space/time can be characterizedas territorial. The prospects of localitiesdepend on place-based processes and bothshape and are shaped by the regional,national, and global territories in which theyare embedded.

The Significance of Place

A major intervention by geographers intodebates on globalization has been to demon-strate the importance of territorialeconomies and governance structures.Geographers have been critical of priori-tizing the nation-state scale in such analyses(Agnew 1994; Taylor 1996), highlightingsmaller-scale territories or places: industrialdistricts and city-regions, located within butoccasionally seen as crossing, nationalboundaries. There is widespread agreementthat globalization has increased the impor-tance and influence of such subnational terri-torial economies and polities. Marxist geog-raphers have long argued that capitalismsuccessively creates agglomerations ofeconomic activity as spatial fixes to facilitateaccumulation, only for these spatial fixes laterto become barriers to further accumulation.Spatial fixes require investments by bothfirms and the state in the built environmentand social infrastructure in places that



become problematic as growth sectors,production technologies, and locational pref-erences shift. Thus, space adds an importantextra complication to the instabilities of capi-talism (Harvey 1982; N. Smith 1984; Storperand Walker 1989).

Under conditions of space-time compres-sion, relative locational advantage is arguedto have become less important, and place-based characteristics more important, indetermining the relative attractiveness ofplaces for capital (Leitner and Sheppard1998). Places aggressively seek to differen-tiate themselves in the competition forinvestment, and geographically mobilecapital becomes both responsive to smalldifferences between places and able tomanipulate localities to create favorableconditions (Leitner 1990). A real differen-tiation has thus accompanied globalization:as the global economy shrinks, differencesand inequalities between places are growing.

The observation that the end of Fordismbrought with it the rise of new industrialspaces (Scott 1988) catalyzed a place-based spatial imaginary.1 Economic geog-raphy shifted from a paradigm dominatedby ideas of uneven development, industrialrestructuring, and dependency theory, inwhich the economic prospects of a placewere argued to be driven by external forces,to one dominated by industrial districts,whose economic prospects were argued tobe driven by local, place-bound character-istics. Over time, the list of these charac-teristics has broadened from the transac-tional advantages of industrialagglomerations, particularly when charac-terized by the emergent characteristics offlexible specialization, to embrace the localpolitical, social, and cultural milieu within

which economic activities are embedded andthrough which they may be catalyzed(Storper and Scott 1993). Yet the logic ofargument has not shifted and, indeed, hasbeen embraced across the ideologicalspectrum of economic geography (Sheppard2000).

This logic has two components. First,globalization after Fordism is seen aspromoting a regime of accumulation, a flex-ible capitalism, which has catalyzed thegrowth of subnational industrial and tech-nological districts that are becoming increas-ingly influential, relative to nation-state terri-tories. Scott (2000, 87) argued that currenteconomic conditions involve two kinds oftransactions: those requiring close physicalproximity because “the spatial costs of trans-acting are . . . extremely high” and thosefor which these costs are “extremely low.”These conditions are ideal for the formationof “new urban superclusters” in which firmsin those economic sectors characterized bythe former kinds of transactions agglomerate.Second, and following from this point,successful places are seen as possessingkey relational assets that create competi-tive advantage. This competitive advantageenables them to channel the uncertaintiesof globalization to their advantage becausethey offer attractive conditions for globallymobile investment capital. As a conse-quence, territorial economies can stillflourish and local livelihoods can prosperwithin the space of flows (Amin and Thrift1994; Storper 1997; Leyshon and Thrift1997). Considerable theoretical and empir-ical effort has been devoted to determiningwhich place-bound characteristics supportthe kind of local market-oriented coopera-tion that breeds success when localitiescompete with one another (Jessop 1999)through a close examination of the attrib-utes of successful agglomerations (Signorini1994; Markusen 1996; Malmberg, Sölvell,and Zander 1996).2


1 A place-based geographic imaginary hasbecome remarkably popular in and beyond geog-raphy. It can be traced to Andrew Sayer (1984);for critique, see Sheppard (1996). By the end ofthe 1990s, Dirlik (1999b) had identified a general“irruption of place consciousness into socialand political analysis,” now also diffusing intomainstream science (Kates et al. 2001).

2 We still lack systematic parallel analyses offailed places, which makes it difficult to deter-mine definitively the causes of success.


In focusing on territorial economies, thisliterature does not conceive of such placesas bounded. What happens within a terri-tory depends heavily on its interdependencewith the broader political economy, the loca-tions in which such clusters emerge are seento depend on the locational conditionsfavoring an emergent industrial cluster, andthe very existence of industrial districtsdepends on the importance of proximity asa locational factor. At times, it is alsoacknowledged that such territories need notbe geographically contiguous places. Atthe same time, the burden of analysis is onthe coherence and functional effectivenessof the territory as the key to its economicprosperity. Transactions whose spatialcosts are extremely high take place withina territory and are key to building the bundleof relational assets that make successpossible. By contrast, for transactions whosespatial costs are extremely low, relative loca-tion does not matter. The broader situationof these places within the global economy isnot seen as important to their success. Theseplaces tend to be seen as fixing themselveswithin an undifferentiated space of flowswhose structural logic is “placeless” (Castells1996, 413), a “pure flow economy” (Storper1997, 28), or a field of transactions of “unlim-ited geographical range” (Scott 2000, 88).Global space thus has become so small, fluid,and interdependent that relative locationmatters much less than territorial conditions.As a consequence, the residents of a placeare held primarily responsible for its success(Sheppard 2000).

Scott argued that this conceptualizationof territorial economies has dramaticimplications for the geography of global-ization, in ways reminiscent of KenichiOhmae’s (1995) arguments. Global city-regions now “constitute a mosaic that isbeginning to override the core-peripheryrelationships that have hitherto character-ized much of the macrogeography of capi-talist development” (Scott 2000, 87). Theyalso may play an important normative role—facing distinctive governance challenges that,if resolved successfully, may catalyze an alter-native governance structure and a more

socially beneficial kind of globalization thanthe neoliberal model. Their success is basedon their possessing certain economic,political, and cultural characteristics,rather than their location in global cores orperipheries. Scott struggled to make goodon this vision, however, when he notedthat 24 of the world’s potential city-regions,all located in the global south, do not yetqualify as such. Perhaps situation stillmatters.

In many ways, such territorial economiesinvoke a global sense of place:

Instead, then, of thinking of places as areaswith boundaries around, they can be imaginedas articulated moments in networks of socialrelations and understandings, but where a largeproportion of those relations, experiences andunderstandings are constructed on a far largerscale. . . . And this in turn allows a sense ofplace which is extroverted . . . which integratesin a positive way the global and the local.(Massey 1994, 5, 154–5)

Industrial geographers share many aspectsof this vision and that of other feminist andpostcolonial scholars, which emphasizes thatresistance to globalization will come frombelow—formed within the local placeswhose importance to globalization has beenunderestimated. Phil Cooke (1989) stressedthe proactive nature of localities. Arif Dirlik(1999a) contended that place-based politicsare the key to resisting and challenging capi-talist globalization from below. In his view,negative local experiences of globalizationstimulate people to question the universaland placeless narrative of globalization thatdominates discourse and to recover theimportance of distinctive local understand-ings, norms, and narratives of social change.Carla Freeman (2001, 1012) argued thatfeminizing globalization theory requires chal-lenging “the portrayal of the local ascontained within, and thus defined funda-mentally by, the global” (see also, Nagar,Lawson, McDowell, and Hanson 2002), andCindy Katz (2001) called for a topographicanalysis of how places are affected by, butalso find ways of resisting, reworking, andsurviving, globalization.



There remain important differencesbetween an industrial geographic and a femi-nist perspective, however. Industrial geog-raphers stress the coherence and capabilityof territories as political economic units,whereas Massey (1994) emphasized differ-ence within and the openness of globalplaces. In particular, feminists have arguedthat local alternatives to globalization arepart of this difference—heterogeneousrealms of local life, such as noncommodi-tized social reproduction or local noncapi-talist production systems, that others over-look (Katz 2001; Gibson-Graham 1996).Feminists have also stressed that collabo-ration, rather than competition, betweenplaces is the key to successful resistance,articulated variously by Gillian Rose (1993)as paradoxical spaces and by Katz as coun-tertopographies (see also Leitner andSheppard 1999 for a similar argument inpolitical economy). It is only in this last topic,however, that the positionality of placeswithin the global economy receives muchattention—focusing on positionality as aresistance strategy, rather than the role ofpositionality in shaping local trajectories ofglobalization.

The Construction of Scale

Any discussion of place and globalization,and thus of the local-global nexus, invokes aconcept of geographic scale, but scale hasrecently become an influential theoreticalframework for thinking about the spatialdynamics of globalization. Theorists of scalebuild on research on place by asking howchange in any one territorial unit is affectedby change at other geographic scales. Theexistence of a vertical hierarchy of scalesfrom the body to the globe is generally takenfor granted, and certain kinds of activitiesare often associated with particular scales(trade with the global, trade unions with thenational, and caring work with the home).Scale theorists have argued, however, thatthese are not necessary relations but arti-facts of how scales are constituted undercertain conditions. Emphasizing that allscales are socially constituted in relation to

one another, scale theorists have sought toconceptualize how scales come into existenceand articulate with one another and howevents at a particular scale are shaped bytheir relationships with different scales(Smith 1992; Delaney and Leitner 1997).

This approach has been applied to analyzeglobalization. Stimulated by Neil Smith’sreflections on the production of scale (1992,1996), and Bob Jessop’s speculations on thehollowing out of the nation-state (1994), ErikSwyngedouw (1997b) and Neil Brenner(1999) pioneered a scalar theory of global-ization. In this view, between 1945 and theearly 1970s, when First World industrialcapitalist nations were dominated by aFordist regulatory regime, the nation-statewas the dominant geographic scale at whicheconomic relations were organized andgoverned. Buoyed by strong national regu-lation of international economic flows andunequal international exchange with ThirdWorld nations (Jessop 1999) and in a geopo-litical era that saw the dissolution of supra-national colonial-scale empires under theBretton Woods agreement (Porter andSheppard 1998), the national scale wasproduced as the dominant arbiter ofeconomic fortunes. New scales haveemerged as important, however, sinceFordism entered a crisis triggered bydeclining national productivity (particu-larly in the United States and Britain), byorganized labor’s ability to demand moreof the surplus, and by intensified interna-tional competition that has undermined keyFordist industries in the First World.

Most often discussed, of course, is therising importance of the global scale. Yet theargument developed by scale theorists ismore complex. Observers of transnationalcorporations, typically seen as the vanguardof globalization, have concluded that theirglobal reach has not resulted in a loss ofeither national identity or attachment tolocalities (cf. Ruigrok and van Tulder 1995).Instead, transnational corporations engagein a strategy of global localization, wherebyglobal competitiveness is rooted in closerelationships with particular localities,including headquarter locations, low-cost



production sites, industrial districts, anddemand nodes (Mair 1997). Since Fordism,nation-states have also actively participatedin supranational organizations and agree-ments (harmonizing market regulation anddismantling national barriers to commodityand capital flows), while simultaneouslypromoting their own local, particularlymetropolitan, economies as vital to nationaleconomic competitiveness and as respon-sible for their own success or failure (Jessop2001). Thus, political and economicprocesses are both globalizing and local-izing—dubbed glocalization by Swyngedouw(1997b). As Brenner (1999, 52–3) put it:

the contemporary round of globalization hasradically reconfigured the scalar organizationof territorialization processes under capitalism,relativizing the significance of the nationalscale while simultaneously intensifying the roleof both sub- and supra-national forms of terri-torial organization. . . . Processes of territori-alization remain endemic to capitalism, buttoday they are jumping at once above, below,and around the national scale upon which theyhad converged throughout much of the lastcentury.

Brenner insisted that the result is not a zero-sum game, in which local-scale processes aregaining at the expense of national-scaleprocesses, arguing that nation-states areactive participants in (rather than victims of)globalization. Nation-states encourage local-ization, and metropolitan economies stilldepend on nation-states to champion themand their products in global markets. Stateterritorial power no longer maps neatly intothe boundaries of the nation-state. “Theglobalization of urbanization and the glocal-ization of state territorial power are twodeeply intertwined moments of a singleprocess of global restructuring . . . sincethe early 1970s. . . . From this point of view,globalization must be understood as a re-scaling of global social space, not the subjec-tion of localities to the deterritorializing,placeless dynamics of the ‘space of flows’”(Brenner 1998, 27). In this view, phase shiftsin the dynamics of global capitalism are seen

as precipitating scalar shifts in its territorialorganization. Jessop (1999, 35) offered asomewhat different analysis, placing moreemphasis on the conflicts with the nationalstate that result from cities orienting them-selves beyond the national space, a processhe called glurbanization.

Both Swyngedouw and Brenner see thespatial dynamics of capitalism as the centraldriving force in this rescaling, reworking aMarxian analysis of the production ofspace through the lens of scale. WhereasBrenner is more concerned with theeconomics of this process, Swyngedouw(1997a, 173, 176) argued that the politicsof scale is also crucial to these shifts and tochallenging antidemocratic tendencies asso-ciated with them:

[T]he “glocalization” or rescaling of institu-tional forms leads to more autocratic, unde-mocratic and authoritarian (quasi-)state appa-ratuses. . . . These new institutional formsare riven with all manner of conflict andtension. First, this . . . is highly contested,particularly by those who become marginal-ized in or excluded from these new institu-tions. Second, the new alliances . . . accentuatethe need from the part of boosters to try andcreate a new hegemony of vision. . . . The poli-tics of scale are surely messy, but ought to takecenter-stage in any successful emancipatorypolitical strategy.

Helga Leitner (1997, 125) emphasized thatthe politics of scale is not just driven byeconomic dynamics, but is politicallyconstructed, using the term construction ofscale to bring attention to political structuresand to the importance of agency in the poli-tics of scale (Leitner forthcoming). SallieMarston (forthcoming) adds an importantthird element—social reproduction and thegendering of scale—although she does notaddress its implications for globalization.

In short, contemporary scale theoristsshare with those who focus on place acommon emphasis on the territorial natureof societal organization and its implicationsfor globalization. Their important additionis stressing the need to consider how the



fortunes of territories of a particular scaleare shaped by the social construction of scalein coevolution with globalization. Changesin places of a particular scale thus dependon how they articulate with changes at otherscales, implying that globalization and local-ization are not independent processes butneed to be considered in relation to oneanother (Brenner 2001). Scales themselvesmay shift in importance as a result of suchprocesses, giving globalization a far morecomplex geography than the commonlyaccepted narratives of global homogeniza-tion or the disappearance of the nation-state.As a consequence, political resistance toglobalization cannot just occur in localplaces, even when local negative experiencesmotivate resistance. Local resistance mustbe complemented by scale jumping (N.Smith 1992; Harvey 2000).

Scale theorists certainly examine howsocial processes stretch horizontally throughspace, as well as vertically across scales. Mostanalyses of scale work with received cate-gories, a hierarchy of embedded territorialunits (body, neighborhood, city, region,nation-state, supranational bloc, globe).3

When globalization makes scales of greatergeographic scope more important, smallerplaces that are separated from one anotherat one scale become connected through theircommon association with a higher scale. Inthis sense, the analysis splays outward as itmoves to higher scales.4 Yet, as Brenner(2001) argued, it does not follow that scaleis sufficient to capture all aspects of thespatiality of globalization. He suggested, first,that scale theory is not necessary if analysisis restricted to changes at a single scalebecause these are really studies of a certainkind of place. Second, the scales that areconventionally invoked, in a relational

analysis of already-existing scales, arecontiguous geographic territories often withfairly well-defined boundaries, where smallerscale units nest within larger scale units.There are attempts to imagine new scalarforms, such as territories that do not nestwithin larger units or the fuzzy and noncon-tiguous spaces of geographic networks, butit is far from obvious that such phenomenacan comfortably be incorporated into scaletheory (Leitner, Pavlik, and Sheppard forth-coming). Finally, scale theory only connectsgeographically distant localities indirectly,moving up to a larger scale and then downagain to the locality, without examiningdirect interconnections. A focus on territo-ries, even when modified through thevertically splayed approach of scale theory,is not sufficient to capture such horizontalgeographic relations.

Unpacking Space/TimeEquating the significance of geography

with territoriality, at and across differentscales, has offered an important correctiveto end-of-geography narratives. Otherways of conceptualizing space and timeshould be part of our toolkit, however, if weare to analyze adequately the ways inwhich distant places have directly shapedone another’s fortunes throughout the longhistory of globalization. Castells’s focus onthe global networks that constitute the spaceof flows suggests that networks, stretchedhorizontally across space, are remaking thegeography of globalization. Bruno Latourwent one step further, using actor-networktheory to challenge all conventional thinkingabout spatiality. I argue, however, thatspatiality paradoxically tends to drop out oftheir analyses and that a full analysis ofconnectivity across space/time requiresattention to an additional issue: positionality.

Networks

Networks have recently risen to challengescale as a way of conceptualizing geographies


3 An irony of social theorists’ emphasis on terri-toriality is that these theorists frequently explic-itly reject Newtonian views of space, but adopta Newtonian definition of territories—ascontiguous regions.

4 I am grateful to a referee for this analogy.


of globalization.5 They are generally invokedat one of two extreme scales. At one extreme,local, place-based networks are seen as thekey to the formation of economic clustersand to the success of places within the spaceof flows (Amin and Thrift 1994). At the otherextreme, global networks of trade, finan-cial transactions, commodity chains, andmigrants are seen as a defining character-istic of contemporary globalization (cf. Held,McGrew, Goldblatt, and Perraton 1999).Castells (1996, 61) made the latter pointparticularly forcefully, arguing that the digitalrevolution has made possible the globaldevelopment of a networking logic. “[T]hemorphology of the network seems to be welladapted to increasing complexity of inter-action and to unpredictable patterns ofdevelopment arising from the creative powerof such interaction.” The pervasiveness ofthis mode of interaction, in contradistinc-tion to those of hierarchies and markets, isrestructuring the spatiality of global capi-talism. The organization of time-sharingsocial practices through networks is creatinga space of flows in which the “logic andmeaning [of places] becomes absorbedinto the network” (p. 412); nodes and hubsare “hierarchically organized according totheir relative weight within the network” (p.413); and managerial elites create for them-selves a network of locally secluded and glob-ally interconnected defensible spaces.

Actor-networks were originally posed tosolve a philosophical problem in socialtheory. The actor-network is “intentionallyoxymoronic” (Law 1999, 5), designed tobypass the structure/agency distinction insocial theory: actors derive their intention-ality, identity, and morality from thenetwork, rather than as independent agents.Yet the network is not a structure shapingaction but simply a “summing up” of inter-

actions (Latour 1999, 17). Actor-networktheory also challenges the distinctionbetween scientist and object of study,seeking to find out how “actors negotiatetheir ways through one another’s world-building activities” (p. 21) rather than toexplain behavior. A successful actor-networkbrings together animate and inanimateobjects and resources into a complex, ever-changing resilient heterogeneous network.Humans, animals, resources, and machinesare all “actants” within the network, whoseparticipation is essential to its success. Onceactor-networks are “successfully established,if all the elements act in concert, then theywill take on the properties of actors”(Murdoch 1997, 361). Successful actor-networks become stable and persistentfeatures of society. Actor-network theoristshave argued, however, that their stability andstructure are more apparent than real.

Successful actor-networks are built byenrolling the heterogeneous actants as activeparticipants in a common project. Centralto this conceptualization is translation: “allthe negotiations, intrigues, calculations, actsof persuasion and violence, thanks towhich an actor or force takes, or causes tobe conferred on itself, authority to speakor act on behalf of another” (Callon andLatour 1981, 279). Centers of calculationthen form within actor-networks: placeswhere norms are established and routinizedand from which the network is “made toact as one” (Latour 1987, 235). Latour (1987,219) argued that action at a distance is neces-sary to hold actor-networks together and thatthe construction of space and time is centralto this process. His examples included thecollection of local cartographic knowledgefrom around the world during the “age ofexploration” and its synthesis in Europeancenters of calculation prior to and duringcolonialism. Yet such centers of calculationand the hierarchical binary distinctions theycreate between cores and peripheries,science and emotion, humans and non-humans, and so forth, are inherentlyunstable: “the bits and pieces assembled . . .into an order are constantly liable to break


5 Rather than review the voluminous literatureon networks (Leitner, Pavlik, and Sheppard forth-coming), I focus on two influential accounts ingeography: those of Castells (1996) and Latour(1987, 1993, 1999).


down, or make off on their own. . . .[S]truggle is central to actor-network theory”(Law 1992, 386). Actor-network theoristsseek to understand how such contestedsystems hold together, in a way that makesthem seem natural, immutable, and author-itative.

Suspicious of explanations and categories,Latour was agnostic about actor-networks—seeking to account for, rather than judge,the actor-networks that are created(Haraway 1997). Yet there is a tendency tocategorize actor-network theory as a newunifying theory that is capable of privi-leged insights in comparison with reduc-tionist and structural approaches. Actor-network theorists also cast judgment on goodand bad kinds of network theory. Theyignore the long-standing tradition of socialnetwork analysis in sociology because of thelatter’s focus on structures of inequality insocial networks and on how network posi-tion creates inequalities between socialactors (cf. Hargittai and Centeno 2001)and its neglect of change, struggle, andagency (but see Emirbayer and Goodwin1994).

Latour and Castells both exemplify anetwork discourse that has become broadlyinfluential over the past 20 years. Thisdiscourse presents networks as an emergentor neglected form of social organization, withdistinctive characteristics making them supe-rior to markets and hierarchies. Networksare represented as self-organizing, collabo-rative, nonhierarchical, and flexible, with adistinctive topological spatiality. Thisnetwork ideal (Leitner and Sheppardforthcoming) constructs networks as socialspaces that behave like complex systems,in which all participants potentially havesignificant influence over the collectiveoutcome. As they stretch over the globe,networks also usher in a new spatiality.Latour (1993, 117–9) was explicit as heskewered another dualism:

Is a railroad local or global? Neither. It is localat all points, since you always find sleepers andrailroad workers, and you have stations and

automatic ticket machines scattered along theway. Yet it is global, since it takes you from . . .Brest to Vladivostok. However, it is notuniversal enough to take you just anywhere.There are continuous paths that lead from thelocal to the global, . . . so long as the branchlines are paid for. . . . Networks, as the nameindicates, are nets thrown over spaces. . . . Theyare connected lines, not surfaces. . . . [They]can be extended almost everywhere; [they] canbe spread out in time as well as in space, yetwithout filling time and space. . . . Now, asconcepts, “local” and global” work well forsurfaces and geometry, but very badly fornetworks and topology. . . . One branch ofmathematics has been confused with another!

Network thinking, then, is associated witha distinctive kind of geometry—one thatstretches horizontally across the map andthat questions the very categories of globaland local (and thereby place and scale).Dicken, Kelly, Olds, and Yeung (2001, 89),echoing Latour’s skepticism about scale (butdisagreeing with his view that all can besubsumed within networks), argued thatnetworks are a “foundational unit of analysisfor our understanding of the globaleconomy.”

Currently, dominant discourses aboutnetworks are so concerned to presentthem as flexible and nonhierarchical thatthere is a tendency to neglect their internalspatial differentiation in both social andgeographic space. Laurier and Philo (1999)commented on the “flattened spatiality” ofLatour’s theory, and the same applies to themajority of recent writings on networks(Leitner, Pavlik, and Sheppard forthcoming).As I noted earlier, this neglect implies thatthe connections between places in ourcurrent global society are so complex thatno broad spatial structures exist anymore.Position within the space of flows matters,but largely in a binary way. Much attentionis paid to the networks a place participatesin, but much less to how it is positionedwithin the spaces of those networks. Sassen(2001), for example, suggested that theprospects for cities as intermediariesbetween national economies and global



networks depend on which networks theyparticipate in. Dicken, Kelly, Olds, andYeung (2001, 95) similarly stressed thepower of, rather than power differentialswithin, networks: “If the global economy isto be understood as a set of interlocking[networks] of economic activity, then wemust be prepared to ask who is excludedfrom such networks, and why.”

Castells and Latour recognized thatnetworks have emergent hierarchies andinequalities, pointing respectively to elitespaces and centers of calculation, but theystressed the emergent and contingent natureof the internal spatiality of networks. Theinternal spatiality of really existing networksdoes shift as the networks evolve in responseto internal dissent and external threats, butit also demonstrates a great deal of persis-tence. As Stephen Graham (1998) and othershave argued, even the telecommunicationsnetworks that Castells envisioned ascatalyzing the novel space of flows retain astrong internal sociospatial differentiationreminiscent of those associated with preex-isting methods of communication and trans-portation. More attention needs to be paid,therefore, to the internal spatial structure ofand power hierarchies within networks andto their considerable resilience and pathdependence, despite internal contestations.

Positionality and Space/Time

Geographers use a variety of terms todescribe how places are connected acrossspace, the most common of which aredistance, relative location, accessibility,and situation. None of these terms isadequate for my purposes. Distance andrelative location often connote a Euclideangeometry or some transformation of it, inwhich the connectedness of two places isapproximated by a continuous mathematicalfunction of their Cartesian coordinates.Accessibility and situation envisage morecomplex ways of measuring connectivity orcloseness, but the former suggests a quan-titative measurement system and bothtend to be seen as fairly static spatialattributes of a place, with less attention to

time (but see Janelle and Hodge 2000). Ipropose the term positionality to describehow different entities are positioned withrespect to one another in space/time.

My use of positionality is influenced byfeminist theory, in which positionality wascoined to describe the situated positionsfrom which subjects come to know theworld. In feminist theory, the positionalityof researchers or teachers is emphasizedboth to challenge the proposition that thereis objective knowledge and to sensitize inves-tigators to how analysis is shaped byresearchers’ and teachers’ “social situated-ness . . . in terms of gender, race, class, sexu-ality and other axes of social difference”(Nagar and Geiger 2000, 2). Geographicsituatedness is missing from this list, and thatis the aspect of positionality that I empha-size here (I could use geopositionality, butthat term seems excessive). Feminist theo-rizations of positionality emphasize a numberof aspects of connectivity that are essentialto my conceptualization. First, position-ality is a relational construct; the condi-tions of possibility for an agent depend onher or his position with respect to others—as in network theory.6 Second, positionalityinvolves power relations, both in the sensethat some positions tend to be more influ-ential than others and in the sense thatemphasizing the situated nature of all knowl-edge challenges the power of those whoclaim objectivity. Third, positionality iscontinually enacted in ways that both repro-duce and challenge its preexisting configu-rations. That is, it is both persistent, in thatmost enactments reproduce previous config-urations, and subject to unexpected change,because each repetition is imperfect (Rose1997; Valentine 2002).

Positionality and the societal and biophys-ical processes that influence it both shapeand are shaped by space/time. This idea isbest expressed through a dialectical and rela-tional conception of space/time (Soja 1980;Harvey 1996; Massey 1999b). As withbiophysical processes (Castree 1995), it


6 I use agent here in the broadest possiblesense—to refer to any entity with causal power.


would be a mistake to argue reductively,on the basis of the undeniable influence ofsociety over space/time, that there is no reci-procal effect. Space/time is a contingentoutcome of societal and biophysicalprocesses that create places and position-ality. As with all dialectical processes,concrete places and spaces emerge whosepersistence makes them seem immutable ornatural. It is important to deconstruct thissense of inevitability and to realize that theirpersistence cannot be taken for granted butreflects a constant struggle to hold thingstogether. At the same time, however, consid-erable persistence does exist, and themateriality of places and spaces has real andconcrete effects on future trajectories.

I do not propose positionality as analternative to the spatial metaphors currentlyin vogue—place, scale, and networks. Place,as Massey (1994) argued, cannot beadequately understood without consideringthe complex positionalities that link peopleand places with one another and thatcreate heterogeneity in a place becausedifferent residents are positioned differently.The construction of scale inevitably involvesshifts in positionality. Processes that connectdistant places more closely both reducedifferences in their positionality and enhancethe importance of more aggregate scales.Networks and positionality adopt a similarrelational approach, although much contem-porary thought on networks downplays posi-tional inequalities within networks. Ourunderstanding of the spatiality of globaliza-tion will be impoverished, however, if posi-tionality is neglected. First, attention to posi-tionality calls attention to how connectionsbetween places play a role in the emergenceof geographic inequalities within the globaleconomy; inequalities that show remarkablepersistence and path dependence, notwith-standing the new possibilities that global-ization supposedly creates for all. Second,attention to positionality has profound theo-retical consequences for understanding glob-alization; theories can mislead when they failto take account of positionality. Third,positionality stresses that the conditions ofpossibility in a place do not depend primarily

on local initiative or on embedded rela-tionships splayed across scales, but just asmuch on direct interactions with distantplaces. Fourth, it highlights the unequalpower relations that stem from such asym-metries. Fifth, positionality demandsattention to questions of scale.

(Re)producing positionality. Even intoday’s seemingly postgeographic world ofcyberspace, the broad contours of posi-tionality within the global economy showremarkable path dependence. The geog-raphy of telecommunications networks haschanged little in 50 years, and colonialeconomic interdependencies also persist(Porter and Sheppard 1998). Confiningattention to economic aspects of position-ality for the purposes of illustration, it isimportant to recall that an essential produc-tive activity in any capitalist space-economyis ensuring that commodities are deliveredto spatially separated markets, to recoupinvestments, in the shortest time possible.This activity requires the progressive devel-opment of space-transcending technologiesto accelerate the flow of commodities(including labor power) and informationbetween places (Harvey 1982; Sheppard1990). These technologies, in turn, shapespace/time and thereby positionality, makingsome places economically closer than othersby reducing transaction costs between them.

Any general increase in space-tran-scending technologies is unevenly appliedgeographically, however, enhancing the posi-tionality of some places relative to others.The steamship, airplane, and telegraphgenerally enhanced transoceanic mobility,but historically were applied first to theroutes along which large shares of commodi-ties and information already flowed—linkingmajor markets. Thus, the early efforts atintercontinental telegraphy were directedtoward linking Europe with the UnitedStates, connecting the New York andLondon stock markets soon after the firstsuccessful trans-Atlantic cable was laid in1851 (Hugill 1999; Mattelart 2000). Incontrast, direct telecommunication and airflights between major African cities can still



be difficult today. New York and Londonremain positioned close to one another incommunications space, compared to Cairoand Cape Town.

New communications technologies alsoalter experiences of and expectations abouttime, with complex consequences for posi-tionality. For example, differences in posi-tionality may be increasing even in ashrinking world. Expectations about whatconstitutes an adequate time for financialinformation to be transmitted from NewYork to London have fallen dramatically overthe past 200 years, from weeks to millisec-onds. If the speed of communication linkingtwo other places has fallen only fromweeks to minutes during this time frame,then, by comparison to New York andLondon, those places would be relativelyfarther away from one another now thanbefore.

Reassessing economic theories ofglobalization. Attention to the economicprocesses that shape positionality altersour ideas about the spatial dynamics of glob-alization. Much of the received wisdom ofhow markets work, both in neoclassicaland Marxist economic theory, was developedunder the assumption that economies haveno spatial extent. This received wisdomcan be questioned, however, because theproduction of positionality challengessome key theoretical claims emanating fromeconomics: the stability of market-basedequilibria, the possibility of regionaleconomic equality, the social benefits of freetrade or land markets, the likelihood thatrational choices lead to expected outcomes,the stability of class alliances, and the theoryof value (Harvey 1982; Sheppard and Barnes1990). It follows that the contrasting grandnarratives about globalization associated withthese two economic theories, of globaliza-tion as modernization and globalization aspolarization, respectively, are also ques-tionable. The global capitalist economy isbetter conceived of as an out-of-equilibrium,complex and contested spatiotemporalsystem whose long-term outcomes areunknowable.

Positionality and territorial evolution.It has been common to argue that changinglocal conditions is the key to development.Attention to positionality highlights theincompleteness of such accounts, however.Jim Blaut (1993) argued that proximity toNew World resources, because of physicaldistance modified by prevailing winds,gave Europe a decisive advantage in thestruggle over where capitalism prosperedwithin the Old World. Positionality withrespect to untapped biophysical and humanresources, and not the Protestant work ethic,underwrote Europe’s emergent position asthe center of political and economic power.Access to these resources also acceleratedthe development of colonial empiresthroughout the Old World, reinforcing thepositional advantage of European nation-states during and after colonialism (cf. Frank1978). In this view, recognition of position-ality challenges those who would ascribesuccess, Eurocentrically, to place-boundattributes of Europe (Blaut 2000).

Contemporary arguments promotingneoliberal globalization, as articulatedthrough structural adjustment and theWashington Consensus, also maintain thatcreating appropriate domestic conditions isthe key to development, irrespective of posi-tionality. As I discussed earlier, similar argu-ments underlie many accounts of industrialdistricts and city-regions. Such argumentsdepend on the assumption, challenged here,that positionality no longer matters.

The evolution and influence of any placedepend on the details of its positionality.British colonialism differed greatly from thatof other colonial powers, shaping theeconomies, political systems, and culturalnorms of British colonies in particular ways.To equate all such influences simply withcolonialism is to fail to understand itscomplex spatiotemporal evolution. It stillmakes a great deal of difference to localexperiences of globalization whether thenorms of globalization are shaped inWashington, Berlin, or Tokyo, as illus-trated by the ability of the World Bank tomarginalize distinctive East Asian



approaches to state-economy relations(Wade 1996).

Positionality and power. Social networktheory has long stressed how power is rela-tionally constructed, and this is certainly truefor positionality within the global economy.Agents occupy powerful positions inspace/time when they find themselves at thecenter of, and in control over, networks ofrelationships that simultaneously positionothers in a present and possibly futurestate of compliance or dependence (VanTulder and Ruigrok 1997). Unequal posi-tionality can also be central to the repro-duction of power hierarchies, as JohanGaltung (1971) explained. Nation-states thatare willing to use their positional advan-tage as core territories to promote global-ization, under terms that enhance their well-being and geopolitical power, reinforce theirpositional advantage and significance. By the1890s, for example, Britain had successfullytaken advantage of its position at thecenter of a colonial empire of global reachto make itself the indispensable node inglobal cable and telecommunicationsnetworks, giving it a significant geopoliticaladvantage during World War I (Hugill 1999).It was also able to take advantage of its hege-monic position to promote discourses on freetrade, even as it consistently violated theseprinciples, whenever expedient, in itsinteractions with such colonies as Indiaand Ireland.

More recently, the United States has beenable to reinforce its influence over contem-porary globalization even as nation-states arelosing their powers of self-determination,through the Washington Consensus that hasenrolled other nation-states and suprana-tional organizations into a common under-standing of the benefits of neoliberal glob-alization. In turn, more peripheralnation-states’ willingness to bend to theWashington Consensus reflects their moremarginal positionality. Drawing a distinctionbetween core and peripheral states,Glassman (1999, 691) explained why periph-eral nation-states participate in globalprocesses that reinforce their marginal posi-

tionality and diminish their power. Key tothis participation, in his view, are the inter-national agendas of national elites in periph-eral states, whose interests are supported byneoliberal open-border policies, as well asthe ideas of expatriate and domestic policyadvisors who have been trained in the acad-emic institutions of core countries (Nesseth2001).

Although this symbiotic relationshipbetween positionality and power may suggesta global economy with persistent core-periphery relations, reminiscent of depen-dency and world-system theory, positionalitydemands a more nuanced account. Drawingon Deleuze, Judith Butler (1993; see alsoThomas 2002) noted that all attempts torepeat power/positionality relations areimperfect, creating instability and agencyeven within power. This creates room foroccasional dramatic and unexpected rework-ings of positionality and power. Examplesabound, from the emergence of Germany,Japan, and the United States to success-fully challenge Britain during the twen-tieth century, to the more recent successesof a select few newly industrializing coun-tries and the rise to prominence of placeslike California, Seoul, and now perhaps thePudong district in Shanghai. Initiativefrom within the territory was important ineach case, but the transformation has alsorequired reconfiguring the positionality ofthat place within the global system. Attemptsat transformation often founder on the diffi-culties of overcoming a disadvantagedpositionality. Yet such positionality createsconditions for resistance and struggle, andit is remarkable to see seemingly unassail-able positional hierarchies sometimescollapse overnight, as in Eastern Europe inand after 1989.

Meanings and discourses closely articu-late with, but certainly are not reducibleto, the positional dynamics of political power.Orientalist discourses, through tropes of raceand gender, became globally powerful toolsfor marginalizing non-European populations,justifying colonialism at home and enrollingsupport in the colonies—where local elitesadopted European norms and the remaining



population was criticized for, and came tobelieve in, their own backwardness. Suchdiscourses, periodically restructured,continue to play an important normative rolein development-as-modernization discourses(Escobar 1994; Doty 1996). Globalizationhas reinvigorated these discourses (Porterand Sheppard 1998; Massey 1999a). As localunderstandings, norms, and practices inmarginally positioned places are abandoned,to be replaced by shared norms of compet-itiveness, democracy, and sound governancethat diffuse in from powerful places (termed“colonization of the lifeworld by the system”by Habermas (1989)), places come toshare a common positionality in the spaceof discourse.

Yet discourses from the margins have alsoshaped ideas in positionally advantagedplaces. Judith Carney (2001) showed howAfrican knowledge about the production ofrice that slaves brought with themcontributed to the competitiveness ofsouthern U.S. plantation agriculture.Contemporary migration patterns challengeestablished norms in places of in-migration,as previously distant cultures become copre-sent in global cities (Ong 1999). In addition,when the shared belief that structural adjust-ment should guarantee prosperity comesinto conflict with experiences of impover-ishment, space is opened for consideringalternative discourses that may empowerthose in the periphery. Attempts to resus-citate local approaches to social change inpositionally marginalized places both fightthe idea of neoliberal globalization and seekto distance peripheral peoples and placesfrom globalization and its locally deleteriousinfluences (Escobar 1994; Esteva andPrakash 1998). Postcolonial theory is basedon recognizing the importance of position-ality (colonial relations) to understand suchstruggles over meaning, struggling to avoidoversimplifying this positionality into anundifferentiated state of postcoloniality(McClintock 1992).

Positionality and scale. Positionality canbe ascribed to agents at scales rangingfrom the body to the world region. To talk

of the positionality of an agent risks essen-tializing a heterogeneous phenomenon.Members of the same household typicallyare positioned differently with respect to oneanother, both within the family and withrespect to the rest of society, and such differ-ences exist among the residents of any terri-tory. An individual’s positionality variesthrough space/time, shifting, say, fromwife to corporate director and back atdifferent points in her diurnal time-geog-raphy, and depends on the scale at which itis examined. For example, a working-classhusband living in the north of Englandmay experience privileged positionality asa result of his gender and nationality butmarginalized positionality because of hisclass and regional location.

Many of the examples in this paperdwelt on the positionality of national terri-tories, running the risk of statism as well asessentialism (Taylor 1996). A multiscalarperspective on positionality is important,however. For example, the term British colo-nialism neglects the fact that the colonialproject was implemented in elite male spacesof southern England—the playing fields ofEton; the classrooms of Oxford andCambridge; and the parliamentary spaces,boardrooms, and gentlemen’s clubs ofLondon. Contemporary globalization isequated with an Americanization ofeconomic principles, financial systems,music, and movies, but it is, for example,Boston and Washington, D.C. (for neolib-eral economic policy), New York (forbanking), Detroit (for techno-music), andLos Angeles (for movies) that are therebypositioned at the center of globalizationprocesses—or, more precisely, Cambridge,Massachusetts, the Washington Mall, down-town Manhattan, black Detroit, andHollywood. These are not regarded astypically American places, and indeed areseen by many Americans as places thatundermine mainstream values. So when theUnited States successfully promotes theirglobal positionality, the form thatAmericanization takes differs greatly fromconventional constructions of the American



way of life—as right wing opponents of glob-alization are quick to emphasize.

If positionality is indeed important, thenthere seem to be no easy answers to theproblematic of globalization. These impli-cations are addressed in the conclusion, butfirst I seek to provide a glimpse into thegeography of positionality.

Wormhole Geographies

In principle, positionality can be mappedby depicting the relationships betweendifferent agents, in different places, and atdifferent scales. Mapping it onto the Earth’ssurface is far more complex, however,because there may be little relationshipbetween proximity in Euclidean geographicspace and positionality. When residents ofthe same territory share a similar position-ality, positionality can be a shared feature ofthe place where they reside. Yet, as Massey(1994) insisted, living in the same place doesnot imply a similar positionality. In addition,whereas proximity in geographic space isgenerally thought to be symmetric, posi-tionality is often an asymmetric relationship:core agents exert more influence overperipherally positioned agents’ locations thanvice versa.

How can positionality be mapped withrespect to the Earth’s surface? Any abstractdiscussion of socially constructed space/timeis fraught with a fundamental paradox. Ifspace/time is a social construct, what coor-dinate system can be invoked to describe it?Coordinate systems are social constructs,and to invoke a particular system as the basisfor analysis contributes to its reification.7 Toprovide some insight into how positionalityplays out geographically, I take the spher-

ical coordinate system approximating theshape of the globe as my reference point. Indoing so, I do not assert its naturalness,but its taken-for-grantedness. Maps of theworld are a commonly understood way ofdepicting the geographic organization ofsociety.

The relationship between positionality andphysical distance is complex. Positionalityoften leaps across space and thus cannotbe read off easily from conventional carto-graphic images of relative location. I find thewormhole to be a useful metaphor forcapturing this complexity. When two rela-tively isolated places become closelyconnected, meaning that their positionalitybecomes closely interrelated, then a worm-hole opens between them. The term worm-holes originated in general relativity theory,itself a relational approach to space/time.Wormholes represent discontinuities inthe warped space/time of the universe,portals through which it is possible totravel virtually instantaneously to a distantplace that otherwise would take light-yearsto reach. Their theoretical existence wasdiscovered in the mathematics of relativitytheory, although the same equations suggestthat their material existence is too brief forthem to be observed, let alone used for spacetravel (cf. Thorne 1994).

Notwithstanding their apparent rarity inphysics, such space/time structures are muchmore common in our global society. CaptainCooke’s journey to Hawai’i was tedious, bytoday’s standards. Relative to contempora-neous space/time conventions, however,particularly those of Hawai’i’s inhabitants, itconstituted a wormhole. For Europeans, thepossibility of traveling so far was quiteradical, much like current views of spacetravel, and for Hawai’ians it was a quantumleap beyond dugout canoes. A connectionwas made between geographically distantplaces for the first time that transformed themovement of people, capital, and ideasbetween the two places and introduced aphase-shift in the trajectory of Hawai’i as aplace. The subsequent invention of the tele-graph made it possible for information tomove more rapidly than the body, severing


7 This paradox is common in social theory, suchas debates in feminist theory about how anydiscussion of gender is in danger of repro-ducing the very social conventions aboutgender that theorists struggle against, or concernsin postcolonial theory that the term postcolonialreifies the very historical categories it seeks tochallenge (Butler 1990; McClintock 1992).


the space/time of information from that ofhuman movement and qualitativelyincreasing the existence of wormholes. Now,communications technologies allow peopleboth to communicate almost instantaneouslywith geographically distant individuals andto be copresent in distant locations (bymeans of web cameras, television, and themovies). Such connections are unevenlydeveloped, however, because the economic,political, and cultural forces that createand reinforce presence-at-a-distance arehighly geographically selective. Contem-porary maps of telecommunications flowsshow multiple wormholes of high bandwidthteleconnectivity linking key places in theglobal economy, with few and often indirectlinkages to peripherally positioned places(Dodge and Kitchen 2001, plate 2).

The positionality of two places should bemeasured, therefore, not by the physicaldistance separating them, but by the inten-sity and nature of their interconnectedness(an insight from geography’s spatial sciencetradition of gravity and hierarchical diffu-sion models—notwithstanding critiques ofthis tradition’s spatial fetishism; cf. Sheppard1995). Like networks, wormholes leapfrogacross space, creating topological connec-tions that reduce the separation betweendistant places and reshape their position-ality. The presence and frequency of worm-holes is then a measure of the degree towhich positionality stretches selectivelyacross geographic space. We should be skep-tical of analogies with physics, however. Theconditions that create these wormholes aredifferent and much more common andpersistent than are those of relativity theory,and they imply different kinds of interde-pendencies. Wormholes are a structuraleffect of the long historical geography ofglobalization, reflective of how globalizationprocesses reshape space/time. The existenceof such wormholes may also have highlyasymmetric consequences for the places thatare connected because of the properties ofpositionality developed earlier. In somecases, often those connecting positionallyadvantaged agents, the presence of a worm-hole may symbiotically advance the

prospects of all those who are connected.Wormholes linking positionally advantagedwith disadvantaged agents may well rein-force preexisting inequities, however, at leastin the short run.

An increasing proportion of human inter-action transcends geographic space in thismanner, in ways that look different from thespatiality of conventional maps. These inter-actions nevertheless reflect, reproduce, andoccasionally restructure a consistent spatialorder, as can be seen in recent work on worldcities. Defining the status of such cities bytheir position within transnational networks,rather than by place-bound characteristicslike size, corporate headquarters, or domi-nant economic activities, one can see thatthe role and trajectory of such cities is boundup with their positionality (Smith andTimberlake 1995; Beaverstock, Smith, andTaylor 2000).

A global sense of place, the complex waysin which “what takes place . . . is . . .splayed out and unfolded across a myriad ofvectors” (Doel 1999, 7), can also be associ-ated with the creation and operation of suchwormholes. Kevin Hetherington (1997, 197)argued that places are “the effect of thefolding of spaces, times and materials.”Marcus Doel (1999, 187), drawing onDeleuze and Gauttari (1977), described thisfolding: “Rather than moving from one pointin space-time to another, . . . the requiredlocation is actualized through a perspectivaland relativized refolding of space-time’svirtuality . . . one travels faster than anoth-er’s space-time.” Positionality entails exactlythis kind of folding of space/time.

There is a danger, however, of creating afalse dualism between continuous spatialstructures and wormhole spatiality, as withLatour’s (1993) attempt to counterpose topo-logical against continuous space. Thrift(1996) argued, appropriately, for a nonrep-resentational theory of mobile practices, inwhich the lens of analysis is on thought-in-action and contingent possibilities. Doel(1999) similarly viewed the multiple possi-bilities created by the folding and refoldingof space as key to his vision of a poststruc-turalist geography with no fixed points or



ontologies. Yet while many foldings, orwormholes, are possible, only some arecreated: a geography that depends not onlyon local context, but also on broader forcesworking through and against actors andplaces. Capitalist globalization has increasedthe possibilities, but also has durabilities thatshape which possibilities are likely to betaken up. A central challenge in grasping thespatial dynamics of globalization is under-standing how these forces work, the kindsof wormholes or refoldings that are likelyto come into existence, and the places andspaces that are created by and shape furtherchange. This is the case both for those whoseek to analyze globalization and thosewho seek to change it.

Implications for Making Senseof Globalization

Paying attention to positionality can makea difference in how we think about global-ization and in strategies for altering its trajec-tory. I highlight four examples: the ongoingsignificance of space, the limitations ofplaced-based strategies for reducing globalinequality, transcending the globalization-as-modernization paradigm, and strategiesfor resistance.

First, attention to positionality suggeststhat space is not diminishing in importanceas a consequence of globalization, nor is itbecoming less important than time. Thereis compelling evidence to suggest that timeis moving faster in absolute terms and thata fixed distance can be more easily over-come. But time and space are not absolutes.There is as yet no compelling evidence tosuggest that differences in positionalitywithin our current space/time metrics arediminishing. Indeed, there is much anec-dotal evidence to the contrary—that differ-ences in access to the means of transporta-tion and communication are increasingdisparities in positionality among people andthe places where they live. Much haschanged. Some have been able to exploit thefluidity of the global economy to dramati-cally improve their livelihood possibilities,

even if the majority has not, in ways thatmake noticeable differences in the trajec-tory of globalization. In addition, the spatialscales at which major differences in posi-tionality exist may be shrinking; there maybe greater differences in positionality fromone household to the next than before,depending on who has access to telecom-munications and who does not. Thesesuggestions can be evaluated, however, onlythrough detailed empirical analysis.

Second, attention to positionality drawsattention to how livelihood possibilitiesdepend on positionality, as well as on local,place-bound conditions. The WashingtonConsensus is based on the premise thatgetting the local conditions right (imple-menting structural adjustment) is the key todevelopment and that poverty stems froma lack of local initiative. Gallup, Sachs, andMellinger (1999) highlighted certain suppos-edly fixed geographic conditions that trumplocal initiative, excluding some places fromthe benefits of globalization, but theemphasis still is on local conditions. Evenpolitical economic analyses emphasize localconditions as the key to “holding down theglobal” (Amin and Thrift 1994). Positionalityis too easily pushed aside in such analyses.Uneven development is not simply a conse-quence of local conditions because theunequal positionality of places may reinforcepreexisting inequalities. André GunderFrank (1967) may have overplayed his hand(Laclau 1971), but we cannot lose sight ofthe importance of positionality altogether.Positionality can have dramatic policy conse-quences. If positionality matters, no amountof tinkering with local conditions is sufficientto bring about development. Thus, increasedinterterritorial competition does not releasea tide that lifts all places, but it can resultin a “race to the bottom” in which the mostdesperate places compete on the basis of thesuperexploitation of workers and the envi-ronment, pulling others down with them(Leitner and Sheppard 1998).

Third, attention to positionality calls intoquestion the globalization-as-modernizationnarrative. The argument that there is a singlepath to development presumes that posi-



tionality does not matter. Massey (1999a)identified postcolonial theory as an inspira-tion for arguing in favor of multiple pathsand strategies for change, but the sentimentis much broader and stems from recognizingthe importance of positionality in general.The Marxists Frank (1967, 1978) and Blaut(1976) came to the same conclusion muchearlier in somewhat different ways: that posi-tionality too often means that progress insome places is a cause of stagnation else-where. Thus, even if all places adopt thesame approach, not all gain from it. It followsthat there must be room for different visionsof development and the good life anddifferent ways of going about achievingthem. The promotion of capitalism in a posi-tionally differentiated world cannot evenachieve the stated goals of its propo-nents—prosperity for all who are willing towork.

Finally, attention to positionality hasconsequences for developing strategies ofresistance, itself an attempt to increase thepositionality of resistors of globalization rela-tive to that of its proponents. The argumentsof the previous paragraph play an importantrole in legitimating resistance to neoliberalglobalization. Positionality is also important,however, in developing strategies of resis-tance. The successes of Seattle were a resultof the grassroots strategic manipulation ofpositionality in space/time—unexpectedlybringing novel alliances together at a criticalspace/time (a meeting of the World TradeOrganization (WTO)) and exploiting thelocal spatiality of downtown Seattle muchmore effectively than the local police.They also reshaped positionality within theWTO conference, since representatives ofprotestors were allowed into the conference.This success became hard to replicate,however, because pro-globalization forcesalso learned to strategically manipulate posi-tionality in space/time, turning the geopol-itics of resistance into a shell game.Positionality was re-created both locally,keeping protestors at a distance inWashington, D.C., and Quebec byredefining streets as international spaces anderecting barriers, and globally, by relocating

the 2001 WTO meeting to Qatar. Effectiveresistance strategies must anticipate suchmoves, so they can come up with evermore creative and unexpected reposition-ings to bring protestors face to face againwith their opponents. Third, attention topositionality is central to building thetransnational activist alliances that are neces-sary to match the transnational reach of glob-alization. Effective alliances cannot simplyrely just on scale jumping, but requirepositional acts of identifying specific groupsin particular places with whom commonground can be found. Maintaining the effec-tiveness of such networks requires closeattention to positionality: both globally, asnew allies are sought, and internally,where attention must be paid to howemergent internal hierarchies within move-ments threaten to drown their effectivenessin internecine conflict.

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the spaces and times of globalization: place, scale, networks

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