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globalization in the face of contradictory evidence can also entail 'talking
down' the prospects for significant institiitional and policy reform within
existing liberal-capitalist political-economic frameworks.
Seventh, the proposition that globalization involves a 'mce to the bottom' as
geographically mobile capital relocates to low-wage economies, forcing
governments around the world to 'ratchet downwards' wages, employment
conditions, environmental standards and other form of regulation in order to
remain globally competitive, rests upon assumptions that are open to question.
First, as Glyn and Sutcliffe (1999) observe, it is far more cominon in the case
of manufacturing than in most service industries, where the international tradeability
of goods and services is often less marked (for example, education is
internationally traded, but less so than motor vehicles or children's clothing).
Second, economic geographers such as Storper (19973, 1997b) have drawn
attention to the extent to which such assumptions, which are central to 'New
International Division of Labour' (NIDL) and related dependency theories, rest
upon some particular further assumptions about the nature of the product
itself, the labour inputs required, the relevance of territory to its production,
and the nature of consumer demand for that product. To summarize an argument
that is considered in more detail in Chapter 3, globalization can bc seen
as generating two tendencies (see Table 2.1), one of which promotes costdriven
relocation of production. This is to be found in the industries and
sectors where global mobility is greatly enhanced by advances in communications
technology, and production has been relocating to lower-wage economies,
particularly China which has arguably become the 'world's factory' from 1980
to the present (Deloitte Research, 2003). By contrast, there are other industries
and sectors, and sub-branches within industries and sectors, where a range of
factors related to the quality and uniqiieness of both inputs and outputs sets
limits to cost-driven globalization; we will refer to this as quality-driven globalization.
These arguments will be considered in greater detail in Chapter 4. At
this stage, they are being flagged as trends within global capitalism itself that
complicate simple prognoses about the economic and geo-political implications
of globalization, of the sort developed by theorists such as Hardt and Negri.
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Theories of Global Media 63
Manuel Castells' work is, I would argue, considerably more complex and
n u a n~e dth an that of Hardt and Negri, who in effect present us with a world
where institutions, policies, the nation-state and, indeed, place itself are
becoming increasingly irrelevant as global capital has triumphed over national
institutions. There are a number of critical commentaries on Castells that it is
beyond the scope of this book to consid