Jeb Sprague
Widely cited and read by scholars and students of
globalization, Peter Dicken’s Global Shift is best known for its concise examination
of structures of the global economy. Now in its 5th edition with over 250 newly
designed figures and graphs, few texts are as effective in showing the
incontrovertible changes undergone in production, distribution and consumption.
Written prior to the crisis of recent years, it remains a useful guide for
understanding the truly global nature of today’s world economy. However, where
Dicken does a remarkable job in dissecting the structure of the global economy,
he has little or nothing to say about how the state and economic structure are
grounded in broader class and social relations.
Dicken starts, in Parts 1 and 2, by laying out
distinct ways in which scholars conceptualize globalization and the importance
of technological and networked development, as well as the role of
transnational corporations (TNCs) and national states. Part 3 describes
shifting economic sectors in the real economy: agriculture, autos, computers,
textiles and logistical infrastructure. Included within Part 3 is a chapter on
finance, but this is just 29 pages in a 599-page book. This chapter covers the
spread of financial services but has little discussion of derivatives (p. 386)
and nothing on the role of central banks or stock markets. Most importantly
though, for the purposes of this review, how does Global Shift treat the role
of social agency?
Toward the end of the book, in Part 4 ‘Winners and
Losers’, Dicken reviews some social processes, environmental crises and
conflicts unique to globalization. Citing for instance Leslie Sklair (2001),
Dicken refers to a dominant social class in globalization, a ‘transnational capitalist
class’ as the ‘the owners and controllers of the major corporations’ (pp.
442–3). But in his discussion on TNCs throughout the book Dicken never relates
this to such critical theories of class. From Dicken’s approach, TNCs are not
grounded in the social basis of capitalist expansion, with systematic and
heightened exploitation of lower income communities and the uprooting of local
cultures and environments.
Instead, Dicken focuses on the ‘potential impacts’:
transferring R&D technology, ties with local businesses and the kinds of
jobs they provide (pp. 454–73). These are very useful and important issues to explore,
but how might such a realist approach explain the social inequality and
conflict that undergirds globalization? By understanding these economic structures
from a realist perspective in which states and corporations are thought of as
rational unitary actors moving toward their own interests, economic structures
are mischaracterized as autonomous and separate from social relations. In this
approach a deeper, more critical, understanding of our world is lost. Economic
and state structures are theorized untethered from the social relations
from which they spring.
Dicken looks at a diverse array of sectors: the
development of globalized agro-industries (pp. 347–76), logistical industries
(pp. 410–32), and the complex interactions between states and corporations (pp.
232–46). Attentive to the magnitude of changes taking place, he describes
immense and unfolding global processes. The book is filled with interesting
examples: ‘in the early 1990s, there were only a few hundred thousand subscribers
to mobile systems’, yet, as he points out, little more than a decade later
there were around 1.5 billion (p. 89). Dicken provides interesting figures on
new networks in globalization, pointing out differentiation between marketing
networks of fair trade and commercial coffee (p. 351). These are helpful for
understanding transnational networks, but what does it say about how these industries
operate upon the backs of workers in the field?
Dicken usefully points out the need for
understanding the economy through ‘multiple scales’, describing as problematic the
aggregation into national-boxes of most ‘statistical data on production, trade,
investment and the like’ (p. 13). He helpfully suggests that, to escape these
boxes, we can think ‘in terms of production circuits and networks’ that ‘cut
through, and across, all geographical scales, including the bounded territory of
the state’ (p. 13). Might we also envision social relations, though hindered by
many things, as also transforming in globalization?
In theorizing globalization many scholars choose to emphasize the
geographic rather than the social basis of change. Dicken, preferring the
former as well, observes that while some cities and countries are well integrated
with globalization, others are not (p. 89). The ‘least developed countries’ are
‘not integrated into the system’ (p. 39). But here he misses what I believe is
more important: that we understand our world best by first emphasizing in explanatory
importance inequality between social groups and classes, an approach made all
the more important in globalization. Whereas worldwide different groups are
operating as bulwarks of global capitalism, such as middle classes living in
gated communities, in the ‘third world’ millions are crowded into urban slums, as others are pulled into credit card debt. With global circuits of capital accumulation
entwining the earth’s population in concomitant relations, in understanding our
material world it is all the more important to emphasize as more determinant
(of causal priority) the role of social production, and then, while also
important, uneven geographic development.
Dicken provides a valuable explanation of various
strategies and tactics that are carried out through TNCs and states, in seeking
advantages in the global market: ‘location tournaments’, ‘competitive bidding’,
‘incentivized tax structures’, while at times ‘investment capital may be
provided by host government’, with corporate taxes reduced, or as TNCs seek to
exploit national differences between states, etc. (pp. 232–46). This
manoeuvring, which he has studied in depth (Dicken, 2005, 2007; Dicken et al.,
2006), provides the reader with useful ways in which to understand how TNCs and
states are operated. But why are these state and corporate structures operated
in this way? Who are the agents operating in and through these structures?
We
need studies such as Global Shift to be connected with a critical understanding
of agency to get at how and why these structures work the way they do. In
globalization, for example, if capitalists and state elites are operating
through structures in which their social reproduction is tied to or dependent
on circuits of global (rather than national) capital accumulation, then, while
they still conflict with one another in many ways, they can share to different
degrees in overarching transnational practices and ideologies (even as national
and regional processes remain).
The point here is that the social basis needs to be
integral to any critical understanding of economic and state structures and the
changes they undergo during globalization. I realize that Dicken has written in
the past on actor network theory (Dicken et al., 2001: 101–5), but, without the
proper room here to address this, I see this as a theoretically confused
concept, understanding capital accumulation as disconnected from social conflict.
While Dicken emphasizes (rightly so) decisive changes in economic structures worldwide,
we must ask throughout: how do these changes connect with people? Why and
how do these processes and structures connect with different social strata and
classes? Such questions go unanswered in Global Shift. This said, for a realist
overview of the institutional structures of various industries and networks in
globalization, and the institutional manners in which they intersect with
states, this book remains a valuable and impressive text. Few have shown the
immensity and particularity of global capitalist production so thoroughly.
References
Dicken, P. (2005) ‘Tangled Webs: Transnational Production
Networks and Regional Integration’, SPACES Working Paper 2005-04. Geography,
University of Marburg.
Dicken, P. (2007) Global Shift: Mapping the
Changing Contours of the World Economy, 5th edn. London: The Guilford Press.
Dicken, P., P.F. Kelly, K. Olds and H.W.-C. Yeung
(2001) ‘Chains and Networks, Territories and Scales: Towards a Relational
Framework for Analysing the Global Economy’, Global Networks 1(2): 89–112.
Dicken, P., H.W.-C. Yeung and L. Weidong (2006)
Transnational Corporations and Network Effects of a Local Manufacturing Cluster
in Mobile Telecommunications Equipment in China’, World Development 34(12): 520–40.
Sklair, L. (2001) Transnational Capitalist Class.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Jeb Sprague
University of California Santa Barbara
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