Contesting Hyperglobal Framings: An Analytical Approach

Since the term globalization erupted in public and academic discourses in the late-1980s, the hyperglobal perspective has been a prominent framing offered to understand global phenomena. Despite important challenges, it has remained extremely popular with its rhetoric exerting a powerful influence across the political spectrum, and in business and policy circles. This article argues that one reason for this durability is its inadvertent reproduction by the traditional understandings of “local” and “global” utilized in frameworks critiquing the hyperglobal perspective. More specifically, as scholars have noted, the global-local tends to be marked by dichotomous binaries and placed in a scalar hierarchy where the global overpowers the local. To side-step the issues emerging from the global-local approach, a conceptual rubric focusing on the “global-particular” relationship is offered as an alternative. This orientation helps prevent the importation of the dichotomous binaries and scalar hierarchies that reproduce hyperglobal imaginaries. As a result, it is easier to retain the complexity and contingency of global dynamics, and by extension, challenge hyperglobal framings. A case study of the global foreign exchange market is used to elaborate on the framework and to show why it provides a stronger point of departure for researching and theorizing globalization.