market fulfilling the conditions of perfect competition, perfect integration
and factor market equalization. Sceptics such as Hirst and Thompson
(see Chapter 3) test the evidence for globalization by comparing
empirical trends to this ideal type. Transformationalists, on the other
hand, conceive of globalization as a historical process which is ‘more
contingent and open ended which does not fit with orthodox linear
models of social change’ (Held et al., 1999, p. 11), and such changes
cannot always be fully reflected or captured in terms of empirical data
alone. Furthermore, transformationalists unlike hyperglobalists argue
that the process of globalization is a highly differentiated one in which
neither culture nor economics plays the sole determining role