In the debates about such concepts as ‘home’, ‘place’, ‘location-locality’, identity and sense of place and so on, one of the prime contributions of geographers so far, and most particularly of economic geographers, has been to provide a kind of backcloth, more precisely an economic rationale, for some of the senses of dislocation, fragmentation and disorientation that are currently being expressed by so many.

The argument is that we are living through a period (the precise dating is usually quite vague) of immense spatial upheaval, that this is an era of a new and powerful globalization, of instantaneous worldwide communication, of the break-up of what were once local coherencies, of a new and violent phase of ‘time-space compression’.

It is certainly true that these things are going on. The world economy, and the local, regional and national economies (if one can still indeed talk of such things) which make it up, look very different from the way they looked, say, as the world emerged from war in 1945.

I CHANGES IN THE WORLD ECONOMY

The changes even in the last twenty years have been enormous. They are characterized in a variety of ways: as a move from organized to disorganized capitalism, from modern to postmodern, from industrial to post-industrial, manufacturing to service, from Fordist to post-Fordist. The frequency of use of the prefix ‘post’ indicates the prevailing uncertainty about the positive shape of the new (and indicates also, therefore, the fact that it is open to contestation), but one of the key processes universally agreed to be at the heart of it all is globalization. In spite of all the rhetoric (and to some extent the reality) of small firms and of individual entrepreneurship, of flexibility, niche-marketing and decentralization, of the potential importance of local economies and of economies of scope rather than scale, the reality is that within the economic system power is related to size. The key movers within the world economy remain the multinational, now increasingly transnational and global, corporations, and their power is increasing. The internationalization of capital is a process with old roots, but in recent decades it has increased in intensity and scope and changed in its nature.