Peter Dicken The Geographers and 'Globalization'
Peter Dicken is recognised as a leading world authority on economic globalization. He is Emeritus Professor of Geography in the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester, UK, and has held visiting academic appointments at universities and research institutes throughout the world. He is an Academician of the Social Sciences, a recipient of the Vitoria Medal of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), the Centenary Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and an Honorary Doctorate of the University of Uppsala. Sweden.
Background
Peter Dicken
Born 1938 (age 85) in England
Education MA (Manchester), PhD (Uppsala), AcSS.
Known for Academic Research into Globalisation
Peter Dicken is an economic geographer whose research focuses on processes and patterns in globalisation. He joined the University of Manchester in 1966 after completing an MA there. He is currently an Emeritus professor at the same university, to which he has dedicated his academic life, continuing research on global patterns of business and globalisation.
His self-described area is "the changing multi-scalar geographies of the global economy and on the structures and dynamics of global production networks, particularly the relationships between transnational corporations and states".
Career
- Academic at the University of Manchester (1966–present)
- Visiting academic professorships from universities in North America, Europe, Australia and East Asia
- Co-director of European Science Foundation – ‘Scientific Programme on Regional and Urban Restructuring in Europe’ (1989–1994)
- Consultant advisor to the UNCTAD commission on transnational corporations (1993–1994)
- Editorial positions on international journal boards
- Former managing editor of progress in human geography
- Global economic geographies of change
- Trans-national corporation's impacts within the world economy
- Economic development in East Asia – exploring business networks and production chains
- Global economic change in different economic scales – involving global to local
Awards
Dicken was awarded a personal chair in 1988, recognising the professor status of his achievements and research in economic geographies.
He was awarded the Victoria Medal of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers in 2001 for "advancing research on globalization and economic geography". He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala, Sweden, in 2002. He was also awarded the Centenary Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in 2007 for "distinguished contributions to the study of the geographies of the global economy".
Contribution and legacy
Peter Dicken's Global Shift, his most widely cited work, has sold tens of thousands of copies over the last 30 years. He has been called "one of the most influential economic geographers in the discipline over the last 30 years". His uncontroversial approach to his research is one reason his works remain so popular within the discipline. He was among the first to point to the significance of Transnational corporation (TNCs), providing detailed analysis of their role in the world economy as a barometer for global economic change.
Dicken provided a greater understanding of chains and network structures, in particular by understanding the role, locational behaviour and organisation of Japanese capital and firms in Western economies. His work on the economic restructuring of Japanese firms regarding the Just-In-Time production process is widely cited. Through his work, he was able to explain global economic change in relation to global-local dialect.
Books
- "Location in Space: a Theoretical Approach to Economic Geography", with Peter E. Lloyd, 1972 (3 editions)
- "Global Shift", 1986 (7 Editions)
Review of a Book
Global Shift: Reshaping the Global Economic Map in the 21st Century
Appendix:
Dicken, P. (2015). Global Shift: Reshaping the Global Economic Map in the 21st Century. (7th edition).
Chapter 1 What in the World Is Going On?
- Empirical
- Ideological
- Historical roots of the concept
- What is distinctive about the present context
- Simultaneity and complexity
- Embeddedness of global production/consumption networks
- The ‘Washington Consensus’
- Causes of the 2008 financial crisis
- Responses to the crisis
- Has the free market ideology been irrevocably damaged by the crisis?
- Arguments pro and con
- Does it mean the end of globalization if it has?
- Hyper-globalists
- Argue that we live in a borderless world where the national is irrelevant
- Neo-liberal faction
- Anti-globalization faction
- Sceptical internationalists
- Argue that there is nothing new about globalization; the world was more open and transnational in the past than in the present
- Globalization: ‘the qualitative transformation of economic relationships across geographical space’
- Complex and changing geographies, rather than a single global geography
- To ascribe a single cause/origin for globalization is meaningless
- The Four Tendencies
- localizing processes
- internationalizing processes
- globalizing processes
- regionalizing processes
- During the past 50 years the world economic has been punctuated by a series of crises.
- 1930s, The Great Depression (1929–1939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagion began around September and led to the Wall Street stock market crash of October 24 (Black Thursday). It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century.
- 1973-1979, Oil Crisis or first oil crisis, when the members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), led by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, proclaimed an oil embargo. The embargo was targeted at nations that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War.
- 1997-1998, East Asian financial collapse or Asian financial crisis was a period of financial crisis that gripped much of East and Southeast Asia during the late 1990s. The crisis began in Thailand in July 1997 before spreading to several other countries with a ripple effect, raising fears of a worldwide economic meltdown due to financial contagion. However, the recovery in 1998–1999 was rapid, and worries of a meltdown quickly subsided.
- 15 September 2008, the fourth largest US investment bank, Lehman Brothers, collapsed. It was an unprecedented event, heralding the biggest global economic crisis since the 1930s (The Great Depression,1929–1939). And this crisis is still ongoing. As of May 2022, parent company Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc. remained in liquidation before the Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Caretaker offices in the US and abroad have continued to oversee payments to the company's creditors.
- The fall of Lehman was highly symbolic – institution that epitomized the neo-liberal, free market ideology (“Washington consensus”); ideology of free and efficient markets: the market knew best and that all hindrances to its efficient operation were undesirable.
- 2007-2008, – economic growth rates – production, trade, investment have plummeted in mora of the developed world – Europe and North America. / Huge job losses, fall in incomes / top 1% income and wealth ha been increasing → enormous social tensions and an upsurge of popular resistance
- 2011, Occupy Wall Street, using "We are the 99%" as its rallying cry.
- In comparison, some developing countries - the so-called "emerging markets" - have experienced relatively high growth rates, leading some observers to talk of the emergence of a "two-speed world economy". But that broad-seated issues of poverty and deprivation throughout the world.
- The notion that developing countries can somehow "decouple" from the effects of financial crisis in developed countries in demonstrably far from the truth.
- During the last three decades of the twentieth century the globalisation of the world economy developed and intensified in ways that were qualitatively very different from those of earlier periods.
- In the process, many of the things we used in our daily lives became derived from an increasingly complex geography of production, distribution and consumption, whose geographical scale became vastly more extensive and whose choreography became increasingly intricate.
- Most products, indeed, developed such a complex geography - with part being made in different countries and then assembled somwhere else - that labels of origin began to lose their meaning.
- Globalisation increasingly came to seen by many as the "natural order": an inevitable and inexorable process of increasing geographical spread and increasing functional integration between economic activities. (Figure 1.1)
- In industrialized countries, there is fear – the dual and connected forces of technological change and global shifts in the location of economic activities are adversely transforming employment prospects.
- Concerns about outsourcing and offshoring jobs (India), as well as general fear that manufacturing jobs are being sucked into a newly emergent China or into other emerging economies.
- Concerns about immigration, especially among lower-skilled workers who perceive a double squeeze of jobs moving abroad, and those at home being taken by immigrants on low wages.
- Question: does the economic turmoil that broke out in 2008 herald "the end of the world as we knew it", "the end of globalisation"?, it all depends on what awe mean by "globalisation": it is important to distinguish between two broad meanings of the term:
- 1.) Empirical: actual structural changes that are occurring in the way the global economy is organized and integrated
- 2.) Ideological: neo-liberal, free market ideology of the ‘globalization project’.
- Concepts that roots back to the 19th century, in the ideas of Karl Marx
- In the light of the post-2008 crisis, many observers - even some who could by no stretch of the imagination be regarded as ideologically on the left - recognise that Marx's analysis of the development of global capitalism was extremely acute and highly relavant to today's world.
- "Globalisation" as a term entered the popular imagination in a really big way.
- Invoked by everyone; one of the most used, but also one of the most misused and confused terms.
- Hyper-globalists: largest body of opinion who argue that we live in a borderless world in which the ‘national’ is no longer relevant.
- Globalization is the new economic control – as well as political and cultural. A world where nation-states are no longer significant actors or meaningful economic units.
- ‘Global’ is claimed to be the natural order, and inevitable state of affairs, in which time-space has been compressed, the ‘end of geography’ has arrived and everywhere is become the same. ”The world is flat”.
- The hyper-globalist view is a myth; nevertheless, retains a powerful influence on politicians, business leaders and many other interest groups. A world-view shared by political right and political left. They differ in their evaluation of the situation and in their policy positions:
- Neo-liberals on the right – pro-globalizers: globalization is an ideological project that will bring the greatest benefit. Let free markets – whether in trade or finance – rule and all will be well; Human material well-being will be enhanced. Globalization = solution to the world’s economic problems and inequalities. Global manifestation of the ‘Washington Consensus’ – ideology of free and efficient markets regardless of national boundaries. Problem in their view: there is too little, rather than too much, globalization.
- Hyper-globalizers of the left – anti-globalizers: globalization is the problem, not the solution; a malign and destructive force. Free markets create inequalities; the globalization of markets increases the scale and extent of such inequalities. Unregulated markets lead to a reduction in well-being for all, and create massive environmental problems. Then, markets must be regulated in the wider interest. Solution: complete rejection of globalization processes and a return to the ‘local’.
- Skeptical position – argue that the world economy was more open and more integrated in the half century prior to the First World War that it is today
- Empirical evidence is quantitative and aggregative, based on national stated as statistical units. Data reveal a world in which trade, investment and population migration flowed in large volumes between countries – Levels of international trade and investment were not reached again until later decades of the 20th century.
- “We do not have a fully globalized economy, we do have an international economy” – Hirst and Thompson.
- National-level quantitative data do not tell us what kinds of qualitative changes have been occurring in the global economy. Most important have been the transformation in the where and the how of material production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. (including, in particular, finance)
- Old geographies of production, distribution and consumption are continuously being disrupted; New geographies of production, distribution and consumption are continuously being created. There has been a huge transformation in the nature and the degree of interconnection in the world economy and in the speed with which such connectivity occurs, involving both a stretching and an intensification of economic relationships. The world is increasingly interconnected in significantly different ways.
- Today, we live in a world in which deep integration – organized within and between geographically extensive and complex global production networks (GPNs) – and a variety of mechanisms, is increasingly the norm. → qualitative changes
- Characteristic of a ‘Global economy’ → the qualitative transformation of economic relationships across geographical space, not their quantitative geographical spread; a syndrome of processes and activities.
- Globalizing processes are reflected in and influenced by multiple geographies, rather than a single global one: the local and the global are inseparable.
- As Figure 1.2 shows, several tendencies can be identified, reflecting different combinations of geographical spread and functional integration or interconnection rather than the unidirectional trajectory shown in Figure 1.1:
- localising processes: geographical concentrated economic activities with varying degrees of functional integration:
- internationalising processes: simple geographical spread of economic activities across national boundaries with low levels of functional integration:
- globalizing processes: both extensive geographical spread and a high degree of functional integration;
- regionalizing processes: the operation of ‘globalizing’ processes at a more geographically limited (but supra-national) scale, ranging from the highly integrated and expanding EU to much smaller regional economic agreements.
- Globalization is not an end-state but rather a complex. Indeterminate set of processes operating very unevenly in both time and space.
- The world is not flat (contra Thomas L. Friedman).
- The world is not borderless (contra Kenichi Ohmae).
- Global corporations do not rule the world (contra David Korten).
- Globalization is not always good (contra the neo-liberal hyper-globalizers).
- Globalization is not always bad (contra the anti-globalizers).
⭐ Applied Case Study:
Although the focus of Global Shift is on the present period of globalization, the book notes that it has been preceded by other periods which have certain things in common with it. In this case study, we will consider the period from 1880 to 1914, which sceptical internationalists argue constituted a more ‘global’ period than the present. As in the main text, globalization is defined as ‘the qualitative transformation of economic relationships across geographical space’, which enables the development of global production networks and reduces the constraints of physical geography on social and economic interaction.
Globalizing Technology
In technological terms, the end of the nineteenth century saw the development of steam ships which enabled the transportation of materials, goods and people around the world more rapidly and cheaply than before, paralleling developments in container shipping today (see Chapter 4). Similarly, the development of first the telegraph, then the telephone, allowed for rapid if not simultaneous communication across long distances; the first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1866, and by 1894 a sophisticated network of such cables existed. The invention of the moving picture also formed the basis for what can be described as a new media sector, with a globalizing element as such pictures could be duplicated and sold worldwide with translated inter-titles, allowing people around the world all to view exactly the same entertainment.
While technology will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, it is worth noting here that the major difference comes with regard to the speed of transport and communication. Developments in aviation make transportation theoretically much faster, and telephony and the Internet allow communication in real time, which telegraphy does not; transatlantic telephone conversation was not possible until the 1920s, when it was radio based, and a transatlantic telephone cable would not be laid until 1956. This simultaneity has an even more dramatic impact on physical geography, allowing contact in real time between people in quite far-removed locations.
Migration
The development of such transportation and communications technology enabled a surge in labour migration (see Chapter 10). Foner’s history of Italian labourers in New York during this period indicates that they made extensive use of transportation and communications technologies to keep in touch with their homeland (making repeated migratory trips rather than simply migrating to the adopted country for good), that they sent remittances home, encouraging the global circulation of capital, and adopted a global outlook. This is paralleled in Panayi’s study of German elite migrants in the UK, who established themselves in the financial sector and became crucial to the development of a transnational financial system, while at the same time facing prejudice from local people who evoked discourses of racism and anti-Semitism to suggest that they were encouraging anarchism and ‘stealing’ local jobs, much as anti-Islamic discourses are used in the UK today to promote sentiment against modern labour migrants.
Today’s labour migrants, however, are arguably more diverse, travel greater distances, and include a larger number of countries in their destinations (‘following the jobs’ rather than commuting between two locations). They have also been encouraged by the development of free trade areas and, in Europe, a single passport zone enabling the free movement of labour. They are also increasingly able to organize transnationally (see the case study for Chapter 14 on garment workers in Lesotho). Furthermore, today we have the development of ‘outsourcing’ jobs, in which, rather than recruiting migrant labour in a local community, companies may well take the jobs to the source of the labour.
Global Outlook
The late nineteenth century saw the rise of what is known as ‘The Age of Empires’, referring to the dominant form of global organization at the time. These empires were generally based around a European colonial nation (the UK, France, Portugal, and so forth, though the USA, towards the end of the period, began a similar colonial process). Global networks of production and consumption were concentrated in these units, with colonies providing raw materials and the colonial nation providing processing labour, and the products being sold around the empire, in a kind of combination of modern global production networks and regionalism (as production and trade are concentrated within a specific group of countries). There was also a focus on reducing time and costs and sourcing cheap labour, as Mata’s study of the Portuguese fish-canning industry around the turn of the twentieth century indicates.
Again, the main difference is in terms of the more diverse range of possibilities for modern-day networks. Whereas a colonial company was mostly limited in terms of its sourcing to countries within the empire, a modern multinational corporation (MNC) can theoretically source its raw materials and labour literally anywhere in the globe. Processing and, increasingly, services are also being outsourced to wherever the labour is cheapest, rather than necessarily following strict colonial lines. While, as the case study for Chapter 12 (Royal Dutch Shell) demonstrates, the old colonial connections often influence present-day economic systems, companies are less restricted by such connections.
Conclusions
While the sceptical internationalists are correct that the present period of globalization is not unique, there are some key differences between the previous period and this one. First, simultaneity, in that modern globalization allows simultaneous communication; second, imperialism, in that the earlier period was focused around empires while that of the present is focused around regions; and finally, outsourcing, in that modern corporations seek out the cheapest sources of labour worldwide rather than exploiting colonial ties or relying on migrant labour.
1. Were the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ‘more global’ than today? Why or why not?
2. How do developments in transportation and communication technologies encourage the rise of migration, and vice versa?
3. Compare and contrast the European Union of the early twenty-first century with the British Empire of the late nineteenth century.
4. In light of the globalized nature of society at the turn of the twentieth century, how important is simultaneity to global production networks?
Chapter 2
(to be continue..)
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Further Reading:
Foner, Nancy (1997) What’s new about transnationalism? New York immigrants today and at the turn of the century. Diaspora, 6 (3): 355–375.
Mata, Maria Eugenia (2009) Managerial strategies in canning industries: a case study of early twentieth century Portugal. Business History, 51 (1): 45–58.
Panayi, Panikos (1995) German Immigrants in Britain During the Nineteenth Century, 1815‒1914. Oxford: Berg.
Williamson, Jeffrey G. (1996) Globalization, convergence and history. Journal of Economic History, 56 (2): 277–306.
- Factmonster. Top News Stories from 1938. from: https://www.factmonster.com/year/1938
- Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy, Edition 7. from: https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=HmeZBQAAQBAJ&pg=GBS.PP1&hl=en
- SAGE Publishing. Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy ny Peter Dicken. from: https://study.sagepub.com/dicken7e
- Wikipedia. Peter Dicken. from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Dicken
- Wikipedia. 1973 oil crisis. from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis
- Wikipedia. 1997 Asian financial crisis. from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Asian_financial_crisis
- Wikipedia. Great Depression. from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression
- Wikipedia. Bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_of_Lehman_Brothers
- Wikipedia. Occupy Wall Street. from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street
- https://books.google.co.th/books?id=ucdZiLVZIpAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
- Kenichi Ohmae: Mr. Strategy and The Founder of "Reform of Heisei"
