Geography has played an important role in the pursuit of meanings
and measurements of globalization. In particular, through its concern with understanding scale, the subject has tended to ‘avoid the notion of the global as a stage, an inert space on which events inevitably unfold’ (Taylor et al., 2002, p. 3). In work that sets out to define the ‘global’, the authors identify two central points. First, scales are relational – in other words no scale is static or pre-given and the effects of change at no one scale predetermine the impacts at another. This is particularly important in terms of the idea that the ‘global’ determines the ‘local’. Two constructs, ‘glocalization’ and ‘local-global’, are important responses
to this false dichotomy, implying that the global is constantly in a state of flux and being reconstituted from below. In other words, things are constantly being ‘rescaled’. Thus, ‘sometimes this involves processes moving to institutions “above the state”, other times to “below the state”, and through all of this the state itself is changing and adapting’ (p. 7).