Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2008, 1, 343349

doi:10.1093/cjres/rsn023

The world is not at: putting globalization in its place

Susan Christophersona, Harry Garretsenb and Ron Martinc

a
Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, 129 Sibley, Ithaca, NY 14853,
USA. smc23@cornell.edu
b
Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, PO Box, 800, 9700 AV Groningen,

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The Netherlands. j.h.garretsen@rug.nl
c
Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Downing Place, Cambridge CB2 3EN, UK.
rlm1@cam.ac.uk

Globalization and the at earthers
Since the 1990s, the term globalization has become
an increasingly prominent feature of economic, so-
cial and political discourse, not just within the aca-
demic community, but also in the popular press and
in the world of policy making. It is, however, a notion
that is far from straightforward. Definitions and
debates have proliferated around the syndrome of
processes and outcomes alleged to characterize
globalization.1 Everyone agrees we live in a more
globalized world, but views differ as to what this
means and whether it is a trend for good or ill. Those
on the neoliberal right are typically pro-globalization,
arguing that it has opened up markets across the
globe, that it is a force for spreading opportunity
and wealth across nations and that the intensifica-
tion of competition it engenders stimulates innova-
tion and productivity. Those on the political left
tend to be anti-globalization, arguing it is a process
dominated by global corporations that have be-
come more powerful than nation states, that it
increases inequality within advanced economies
and undermines the ability of the worlds poorer
countries to improve social welfare or protect their
natural environment. To this day, debates continue
over the causes, historical antecedents and conse-
quences of globalization (e.g., Crafts and Venables,
2003; Gray, 1998; ORourke and Williamson, 1999;
Steingart, 2008; Stiglitz, 2002, 2006; World Bank,
2002, 2008).
One of the contested aspects of globalization
concerns its geographies and especially whether
globalization is rendering the significance of loca-
tion and place redundant and irrelevant. Several
writers have argued that globalizationespecially
as driven by the revolution in information and com-
munications technologies (ICT)marks the end
of geography (OBrien, 1992), the onset of the
death of distance (Cairncross, 1997), the emer-
gence of a borderless world (Ohmae, 1995), of
de-territorialization or supra-territorialisation
(Scholte, 2000) and the vanishing of distance
(Reich, 2001). The most provocativecertainly
the most colourfulof these claims is Thomas
Friedmans recent pronouncement that as a conse-
quence of globalization, the world is flat (Friedman,
2006). He contends that the ICT revolution, the
deregulation of markets by states and increasing
economic integration have contributed to a marked
timespace compression of economic processes. The
alleged result is that there is no longer any friction of
distance in economic relationships.

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Christopherson, Garretsen and Martin
It is clearly beyond the purpose of our editorial to
give a full-fledged summary of Thomas Friedmans
book. Briefly stated, in the The World is Flat
Friedman identifies up to 10 structural changes or,
in his terminology, 10 flatteners in the world econ-
omy that have all come into play over the past two
decades (see Table 1). He argues that these changes,
driven by the revolution in information and com-
munications technologies, will ensure that global-
ization will have a flattening impact on the world
economy in the years to come:
It is my contention that the fall of the Berlin
Wall, the rise of the PC, Netscape, work flow,
outsourcing, offshoring, uploading, insourcing,
supply-chaining, in-forming, and the steroids
reinforced one another, like complementary
goods. These flattening forces needed time to
start to work together in a mutually enhancing
fashion. That tipping point was reached some-
where around the year 2000 when the ten flat-
teners converged on such a scale and with such
intensity that millions of people on different
continents suddenly started to feel that some-
thing. was new. They couldnt always de-
scribe quite what was happening, but by 2000
they sensed that they were in touch with people
theyd never been in touch with before, were
being challenged by people who had never chal-
lenged them before, were competing with peo-
ple with whom they had never competed
before. What they were feeling was the flat-
Table 1. Friedmans 10 forces that have flattened the world
1. The Fall of the Berlin Wall
2. The World Wide Web
3. Workflow software
4. Uploading
5. Outsourcing
6. Offshoring
7. Supply chaining
8. Insourcing
9. In-forming
10. The steroids
Source: Friedman (2006), Chapter 2.
344
tening of the world. The convergence of the ten
flatteners had created a whole new platform.
This platform now operates without regard to
geography, distance, time, and, in the near fu-
ture, even language. Going forward, this plat-
form is going to be at the centre of everything
(Friedman, 2006, p. 205).
The basis of Friedmans flat world thesis,
then, is that there now exists a global information
communications platform that transcends distance,
place and geography, a platform that connects users
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anywhere, irrespective of their location. Yet even if
the world is becoming flatter in this sense, it by no
means follows that the global economy more gen-
erally is becoming a flatter landscape. The closest
Friedman comes to acknowledging this is when he
admits that:
not everyone has access to this new platform, this
new playing field.. When I say the world is
being flattened, I dont mean we are all becoming
equal. What I do mean is that more people in
more places now have the power to access the
flat world platformto connect, compete, col-
laborate. (Friedman, 2006, pp.205206).
Beyond this statement, however, Friedman has
relatively little to say about whether the advent of
a flat platform is likely to reduce or intensify
socio-economic inequalities among groups, regions
or countries.
The beginning of the collapse of communism
The advent of a new age of connectivity
The integration and standardization of software
Internet-based dissemination of information
Of functions to other companies
Of parts of a businesss operations to overseas locations
Horizontal collaboration regardless of borders
Synchronized commerce solutions
Searching for knowledge
Computing, file-sharing, VoIP, videoconferencing

Globalization and place
In fact, there is a sizable body of opinion and evi-
dence that globalization is not flattening the world
economy but accentuating its unevenness. It is even
arguable whether the global ICT platform, as
Friedman calls it, is itself flat. Indeed, both the ar-
chitecture and the flows of Internet and telephonic
communication are highly spatially skewed and
concentrated, being overwhelmingly focussed on
and dominated by major global cities (see, e.g.
www.telegeography.com). In this respect, not all
socio-economic groups or local communities have
equal access to or control over this platform. Be-
yond this, what matters is whether there are forces
that channel the benefits of access to and use of
this platform disproportionately to particular socio-
economic groups and particular places (cities, regions
and countries). Even having equal access to a ubiqui-
tous and flat ICT playing field does not imply an
equal outcome among the playersfirms, work-
ers, cities, regions and countriesin terms of
wealth creation, prosperity and welfare. And some
actors and networks have more access to informa-
tion than others (Leamer and Storper, 2001, Storper
and Venables, 2004). Key factors determining the
production of wealth (investment capital, innova-
tion capacity, talented labour) are still very un-
evenly distributed among places. Indeed, those
who contest the world is flat hypothesis claim that
the geography of the global economy contains a dy-
namic of centralization and agglomeration as well
as one of dispersion. These authors claim that the
spatial agglomeration of economic activity, includ-
ing key businesses, talented labour and innovation
and creativity, is actually increasing and that the
global economy is now being driven by key cities
and mega city-regions (Sassen, 2000). According to
these observers, rather than becoming flatter, the
global economic landscape is becoming lumpier.
Further, while globalization has enabled and in-
volved the rapid rise of new national economies
(notably in the BRIC countries), it has simulta-
neously exposed other countries to worsening pov-
erty (Stiglitz, 2002, 2006; World Bank, 2002).
Though geographers have been slow to enter into
The world is not flat
the debates surrounding globalization (Dicken,
2004), they consistently emphasize that it is inher-
ently spatially uneven both with respect to its
causes and motive forces and its implications for
places, regions and countries (Harvey, 2006).
There is, then, an important debate to be had as to
whether, and to what extent, the sort of processes
identified by Friedman as flatteners are promoting
the spatial concentration or dispersion of economic
growth and wealth. As Leamer (2007) rightly
stresses in his extensive review of Friedmans book,
the claim (or slogan) that the world is flat un-
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doubtedly has a deliberately contentious geograph-
ical ring to it.2 Leamer acknowledges that the
revolutions in ICT and related systems of socio-
economic interaction and exchange increase the
freeness of trade and promote the production and
transmission of information and knowledge. In
short, they increase economic integration. Yet, as
Leamer demonstrates, it is possible, analytically, to
show that increasing economic integration can lead
to spatial agglomeration of economic activity rather
than to a geographically flatter pattern. For their
part, while accepting that the process of globaliza-
tion may annihilate space and distance, economic
geographers argue that it also heightens the role
played by place and especially place-specific
socio-cultural-
institutional factors (including face-to-face contact,
localized social networks of knowledge spillover
and other untraded interdependencies) in fostering
and sustaining the spatial agglomeration of economic
activitiesparticularly the creative and cultural in-
dustries that now dominate our major cities. In a sim-
ilar vein, Porter (1998) has argued that in the global
economy, competitive advantage is becoming more
rather than less place dependent:
In a global economywhich boasts rapid trans-
portation, high speed communications and acces-
sible marketsone would expect location to
diminish in importance. But the opposite is true.
The enduring competitive advantages in a global
economy are often heavily localised, arising
from concentrations of highly specialised skills
and knowledge, institutions, rivalry, related
345
Christopherson, Garretsen and Martin
businesses, and sophisticated customers (Porter,
1998, p. 90).
From a theoretical perspective, a priori it is not
clear how the flatteners that Friedman talks about
will affect the growth and allocation of economic
activity across space. In modern location theory of
the sort found in the so-called new economic ge-
ography (new spatial economics), the answer to
the question of how innovations and changes in
organizational behaviour like those enumerated
by Friedman will change the economic geography
in the real world is that it depends. It depends on
the exact nature of the changes concerned, the
(initial) level of economic integration, the initial
spatial configuration of the economic landscape
and the geographical scale being considered.
Globalization as approximated by increasing eco-
nomic integration can lead to a more agglomerated
or uneven world as well as to more spreading or
a more even spatial distribution of economic ac-
tivity (Baldwin, 2006; Crafts and Venables, 2003;
Krugman and Venables, 1995). Interestingly,
however, most such models tend to predict a geo-
graphically uneven outcome. And at the other the-
oretical extreme, invoking the theoretical
apparatus of (Marxian) political economy, geogra-
phers such as Harvey (2006) see no reason why the
increasing integration and interconnectedness of
the world economy should change the historical,
law-like tendency for capitalism to develop un-
evenly geographically:
Reducing the friction of distance, in short,
makes capital more rather than less sensitive
to local geographical variations. The combined
effect of freer trade and reduced transport costs
is not greater equality of power through the
evolving territorial division of labour, but grow-
ing geographical inequalities (Harvey, 2006,
pp. 100101).
This seems to echo a similar point made earlier
by Gray, albeit from a different ideological-cum-
theoretical position, in his critical account of glob-
alization thinking:
346
[globalisation] does not require that economic
life throughout the world be equally and inten-
sively integrated. A universal state of equal in-
tegration in world-wide economic activity is
precisely what globalisation is not. On the con-
trary, the increased interconnection of economic
activity throughout the world accentuates uneven
development. (Gray, 1998, pp. 5556).
The world is not at
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This issue of the Cambridge Journal of Regions,
Economic and Society brings together several
papers stemming from various disciplines that,
while differing in their specific focus, take up the
issue of the continuing importance of location and
place in a globalizing world. What they show is that
the terrain of wealth creation, innovation and trade
remains distinctly bumpy. The papers argue that
flatness is not the inevitable outcome of the forces
that are driving the globalization process. To create
some common ground, all the papers took Thomas
Friedmans highly influential book The World is
Flat as their point of departure. In doing so, and
despite being critical of the book, the authors ac-
knowledge that Friedmans central arguments call
for a serious response. What distinguishes this issue
special is the breadth and (spatial) scope of the
analyses. This not only applies to the analytical
frameworks and methodologies used, ranging from
international economics, urban and regional eco-
nomics, economic geography and Marxist political
economy, but also applies to the spatial scales cov-
ered (global, national, regional, urban) and the rich-
ness of the examples and empirical material
deployed.
Based on both theory and empirics, most of the
authors in this issue turn Friedmans flat hypothe-
sis on its head and argue that it is as likely or even
more likely that globalization will lead to a more
spiky or bumpy world: spiky, in the sense that
at various spatial scales the geographical alloca-
tion of economic activity is likely to become
more uneven and more differentiated. This predic-
tion is not only made at the global level with

respect to between-country unevenness but also
with respect to inequalities and disparities among
city-regions.
The first three papers deal with the theoretical
foundations (or the lack thereof) of the world is flat
thesis. McCann (2008) carefully discusses how this
hypothesis should be seen from the perspective of
location theory and dismisses the claim that the
forces mentioned by Friedman could only work in
the direction of rendering geography less important.
There are sound theoretical arguments to conclude
that both a more even and an uneven spatial allo-
cation are possible: it indeed depends. McCann (see
also McCann, 2005) also points out that one should
be very careful in distinguishing among various al-
leged structural changes: while the actual transport
costs of shipping goods or information may have
fallen spectacularly, this is not necessarily true for
the transaction costs involved in making or setting up
a transaction. Rodriguez-Pose and Crescenzi (2008)
come to similar conclusions. They survey and dis-
cuss modern location theory to see whether and how
the flat prediction can be backed by theory. In the
end, the authors conclude that such a theoretical
foundation is hard to come by. The third paper by
Cox (2008) approaches the topic from a somewhat
different angle. Applying a Marxist-inclined political
economy perspective, Cox casts the flatteners iden-
tified by Friedman within a long-term analysis where
globalization and its drivers are seen as the latest
phase in a never-ending attempt by capital in order
to use space in new-and uneven - ways in order to
sustain profitable accumulation.
The remaining four papers, though not ignoring
theory, explicitly or implicitly take on Friedmans
challenge that the world is flat by looking at the
empirical evidence. They do so for different spatial
scales and locations. Brakman and Van Marrewijk
(2008) look at the flat-world hypothesis from the
point of view of the global economy. They do not
find much evidence of economic convergence be-
tween countries at the global level. In addition, they
do not find that the importance of distance in cross-
country economic relationships is falling over time.
The most prominent relationship in this respect is
(bilateral) international trade. Linders et al. (2008)
The world is not flat
also show that distance, ranging from physical to
mental distance, remains important, as well as dem-
onstrating that despite the revolution in communi-
cations, many countries still do not trade with each
other at all. Their message is that large parts of the
world economy are still rather empty. Switching
to regions, Florida et al. (2008) use a new, if pro-
vocative, data technique to show how the new
global economy consists of a fairly limited num-
ber of mega-regions that make up for the bulk of
the globes GDP, population and employment.
These regions often include (parts of) different
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countries and their rise not only suggests that
the world is becoming more spiky (instead of flat)
but also poses important questions about (re-
gional) economic policy. The final paper by Van
der Ploeg and Poelhekke (2008) moves attention
to mega-cities and to urban growth, particularly
in the developing world. Here too, and in line
with recent evidence by the World Bank (2008),
the dominant trend is one of increased urbaniza-
tion: the integration of developing countries into
the world economy seems to go along with a sharp
increase in the degree of spatial unevenness
within such nations.
After reading the seven papers that make up
this issue of the Cambridge Journal of Regions,
Economic and Society, one could argue that there
are two basic and very fundamental problems with
Friedmans book. And this criticism also applies to
other death of distance claims that foretell the end
of (economic) geography. The first problem is
a conceptual or theoretical one. The notion that
the changes or flatteners identified by Friedman
naturally lead to a flat or geography-free world is
misleading. It is very much an open question what
the impact of these changes will be. The second and
related problem is that systematic empirical evi-
dence is needed to back up Friedmans claims,
but the book simply does not provide this kind of
evidence. Taken together, the papers in this issue of
the journal go to the heart of this criticism by
addressing both problems. Having said this, the
goal is not debunk Friedmans ideas outright. On
the contrary, as stated above, his is an important
book that calls for a serious response. Many of
347
Christopherson, Garretsen and Martin
the changes and forces that are emphasized
throughout The World is Flat are clearly very rele-
vant and pose important (new) challenges for
researchers and policy makers. Friedman is correct,
for example when he points out the importance of
changes like the rise of India or China, the spatial
fragmentation of the production process through
offshoring or the lowering of transaction costs that
makes more and more services tradable. Rather, the
message that comes through from the contributions
that follow is two-fold: Friedman is wrong to equate
the emergence of a world of increasing inter-
connectedness with a flat global economy and
the empirical evidence does not in any case back
up the idea that the global economy is becoming
flat.
Endnotes
1
In many ways globalization is an archetypal fuzzy or
chaotic concept, used in different ways by different
authors and conflating several different processes and
outcomes. It is often as much a rhetoric device as it is
an analytical concept. Such fuzzy concepts abound in the
social sciences, two other prominent examples being the
notions of cluster and regional competitiveness (see
Markusen, 2003; Martin and Sunley, 2003).
2 vance in critical regional studies. Regional Studies,
Of course, the very title of the book, one assumes, was
intended to be sensationalist, as is often the case with
journalistic airport books. Friedmans sequel, Hot, Flat
and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution, and
How it can Renew America (2008), is in the same genre.
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