THE FIFTH DIMENSION – GLOBALIZATION Session organizers:
Iris Rittenhofer
Mads Clausen
There are number of significant and influential conceptualizations of globalization in
circulation today. A vast majority of them rest on three-dimensional assumptions of territorial
places that embrace longitude, latitude and height. Places are territories governed,
administered, delineated and controlled by states, and legitimated by unifying stories of
nation. Globalization here is narrated as complex internationalizations – the distant relations
between sovereign nation states. Other conceptualizations of globalization extend beyond
three-dimensional straitjackets towards post-national dimensions. Conceptualized as
processes, globalization is neither predictable nor precise. Rather, it is uneven,
multidirectional, expanding and contracting. Beck (2000) alerts us to the limitations of
modernist understandings of globalization processes. Scholte (2000) conceptualizes
globalizing processes that contain transplanetary contact as a fourth dimension. Transworld
spaces are created when interrelated political, corporate, social or culturing practices and
products are disembedded from their original locations and re-embedded – often expressed
as glocalization (Robertson, 1995). Furthermore, globalizing processes share other
entangled dimensions, such as simultaneity, acceleration, interconnectivity, and
standardization (Eriksen, 2007). These spaces include arenas of global cultural flows
(Appadurai, 1990) impacting economies, cultures and politics, imaginary practices (like
desires and dreams) and linguistic practices (like multiple uses of ‘g-words’ in
communication). Yet, as these transplanetary contacts, flows and practices intermingle with
territorial space, the vista of a fifth dimension of globalizing processes – the creation of the
supranational space - opens. The fifth dimension is a space that cannot be reduced to
liberalization, complex internationalization, Westernization or universalization (Scholte,
2004).
We wish to investigate the following questions in particular:
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What values, interests and strategies are invested or contested in stories on space?
How do stories on globalization narrate, frame and enact the links between territorial
place and transworld spaces?
In what ways are existing boundaries redrawn, and how may emergent delimitations
of the fifth dimension be conceptualized?
This session invites papers which explore and/or chart such emergent spaces from a variety
of fields and perspectives. These may include fields such as politics, geography,
technologies, communication or business, and perspectives such as discourse or knowledge
asymmetries.
STORIES OF GLOBALIZATION: INDIGENOUS AND INTERNATIONAL TRADES IN THE NIGERIAN BUSINESS U. Ejiro O. Onomake
University of Sussex
In recent years Africa has been in the limelight due to increasing alliances with China,
particularly in the business realm. Business is expanding in various African countries and
while China is prominent, Western countries are also involved. Taking the microscope
further into this situation we must look at specific countries. In the case of Nigeria, the most
populous country in the continent, both local and foreign parties express frustration with the
lack of ease in conducting business due to high levels of corruption and the lack of basic
infrastructure. Some firms have left Nigeria while others remain and yet further, a new crop
enters the marketplace seeking to benefit from the country’s growing economy. Against the
backdrop of Nigeria there are many voices with their own stories to tell about globalization.
This paper comes from on-going ethnographic research into social relationships in the
business realm between Nigerians and Westerners (particularly those from the United
Kingdom and United States) and Nigerians and Chinese. As an anthropologist I am
particularly interested in social interaction and how people view their place and that of others
within their daily world(s). This paper explores globalization in Nigeria through individuals’
stories including shared and diverging values and interests which contribute to various
meanings of globalization. This paper also discusses how concepts of globalisation are
formed through analysis of glocalized business and social concepts.
MULTIDIMENSIONAL STORIES IN THE WORKPLACE: ROBOTS AT THE NATIONAL LIBRARY’S AUDIO-­‐VISUAL ARCHIVES, STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Rebekah Cupitt
Royal Institute of Technology
Sweden
During Winter 2010 I conducted fieldwork at the National Library's Audio-Visual Archives as
a part of my research on peoples' perceptions of robots. For employees at the National
Library, 'robots' had multiple meanings. These meanings were expressed in stories which
varied according to the place in which they were told, their audience and their purpose and
the teller.
One perception of robots saw them as exotic and foreign. This notion of robots coincided
with the general publics' opinions of robots. Global in nature and not entirely place-specific,
this perception was based on shared imaginings of an often hostile robot firmly situated in
the future. Most who had this perception of robots had never seen a functional robot. In this
case, such stories embody those emotions linked to an ephemeral phenomenon - robots.
Why did KB Avm employees who had daily contact with robots still hold this popular culture
view of robots? What role did these stories have in their understanding of robots and in what
places were they told?
Without excluding these immaterially-derived stories, National Library employees also
created highly specific and localised understandings of robots that served clearly defined
purposes. However, even these localised, situation-specific understandings were part of
broader organisational, social and political contexts which crossed traditional boundaries and
were part of larger global networks of perspectives.
These very different understandings of robots constantly co-existed in dynamic, fluctuating,
situated and re-configurable relations to each other. Their meanings, their audiences and the
ways and places in which they are told gives insight into the tensions and complexity of the
relationships between the material and immaterial, the immediate surroundings and the
more global surroundings, shared imaginings and individual practice.
2.0 – 5D NETWORK LOGIC Robert Becket
Institute of Management
Raboud University, Nijmegen
In its discussions of the dimensions of globalization, the paper brings together semiotics,
mathematics and natural sciences. It places two- and three-dimensional understandings of
globalization within modernist Enlightenment beliefs about certainty and predictability and
contrasts it against Kaku’s (1994)theory of hyperspace. A five-dimensional perception of
globalization and the perspective of new 5D network design (Newman 2010; Newman,
Barabási and Watts 2006) follows a logic of transdisciplinarity. A network analysis with
natural social design construction appears as a looming frontier for both organization theory
and for a newly self-aware global society where 5D resource allocation and justice are
critical concerns (Scholte 2000; 2004). Following the insights of Fuller’s (1979) geometric
energy patterns and Planck-Einsteins’s energetic temporal Universe, 5D visual logic borrows
the possibilities of a visualisable-calculable mathematical order to offer multiple, transparent
and accountable structures via which knowledge on globalization can be produced,
examined, reproduced and disseminated.
ECO GLOBAL CONNECTED? Iris Rittenhofer
Aarhus School of Business and social Sciences
Organic business and its many dimensions is a frequent subject for academic analysis in
peer reviewed journals across a vast variety of fields. Sustainability and globalization,
however, not only are a minor concern of this work; also there is very little systematic
address of the topics. There are references in passing but that is all. The same may be said
on research on globalization, leaving out issues of ecology and organic business. The paper
draws on work in progress that explores the space emerging when the fifth dimension and
eco-business are brought together. First, it critically analyses existing understandings of
global in international eco research. It then discusses how the conjuncture of the fifth
dimension of globalizing processes and the dimensions of eco-business analytically may be
approached and in ways that produce sustainable knowledge on business with organics.
INDIGENIOUS KNOWLEDGE AS LOCAL RESPONSE TO GLOBALIZATION IN NIGERIA/ AFRICA Geoffrey I. Nwaka
Abia State University
Uturu, Nigeria: Tradition as a Modern Strategy:
Globalization is now widely perceived in Africa as a new version of earlier forms of external
domination and exploitation. Its economic and welfare benefits are unevenly shared, and
appear to bypass or to retard progress in many countries of the developing world. But
Marshall Sahlins has rightly emphasized the need for all peoples “to indigenize the forces of
global modernity, and turn them to their own ends”, as the real impact of globalization
depends largely on the responses developed at the local level. The challenge for Africa is,
therefore, how to engage and cope with globalization and other external influences in a way
that is compatible with local values and priorities; how to strike the right balance between
global and local cultures in national governance and development – as in China and other
modernizing Asian countries.
For a long time African customs and traditions were misperceived as irrational and
incompatible with the conventional strategies of development. But the economic crisis and
policy failures of the 1980s and ‘90s, and the current threat of global recession have
exposed flaws in the Western, neo-liberal, ‘external agency’ model of development
imposed from the top by national governments and international development agencies.
Because of growing concern about widespread poverty, widening inequalities and
environmental deterioration, there is renewed interest in an alternative approach to
development which emphasizes the cultural dimension of development, and the often
overlooked potential of indigenous knowledge as “the single largest knowledge resource not
yet mobilized in the development enterprise”. This paper considers how indigenous
knowledge and practice can be put to good use in support of local governance and
development in Nigeria; how development policies and programmes can be made to reflect
local priorities, and build upon and strengthen local knowledge, capacity and organization,
especially in such vital areas as agriculture and natural resource management, law review
and conflict resolution, education, health care and poverty alleviation. Indigenous knowledge
is here used as a model for rethinking and redirecting the development process, and as a
way to involve, enable and empower local actors to take part in their own development.
The paper concludes with some general reflections on the indigenous knowledge movement
as an appropriate local response to globalization and Western knowledge dominance, and
as a way to promote cultural identity and inter-cultural dialogue on African development. It
underscores the importance of indigenous knowledge for African development discourse and
for development assistance. Development agents, researchers and donors have a lot to
learn from indigenous knowledge about locally appropriate ways of adapting to climate
change for instance, and should try to identify and tap into exiting capacities, skills and
practices rather than seek to undermine them. By building on the indigenous we can make
development more participatory and endogenous, and therefore more sustainable.
DRAGONS AND TIGERS, OH MY! THE PACIFIC CENTURY AS TRANSNATIONAL CRISIS Mads Clausen
Aarhus School of Business and Social Sciences:
That the geopolitical landscape is undergoing fundamental structural changes is a familiar
refrain in contemporary political and academic debates. As the post-war liberal world order is
rapidly reshaped by new information technologies, worldwide movements of goods, services
and capital as well as social and demographic transformations on a scale unprecedented in
human history, it has become commonplace to observe that such processes throw hitherto
dominant ideas and practices into crisis. And the state’s claims to sovereignty and the
legitimacy (and coherence) of national stories have faltered over recent decades.
Overarching geopolitical imaginaries have also come under scrutiny. Present changes and
emergent challenges are consistently linked to East Asia’s political and economic
(re)emergence, as key globalisation processes now issue from the Pacific world. The
tensions between such processes and territorial units are especially noticeable in attempts to
tackle this global power shift. This paper examines European strategies for East Asian
engagement. It proposes that such strategies – often reverting to Manichaean dichotomies
of promise and threat – constitute narrative attempts to discipline global forces and to restore
legitimacy and agency to national actors and institutions. And these strategies consistently
disregard emergent transnational politics, spaces and trajectories, instead endorsing
longstanding ‘internationalist’ conceptions of global engagement.