During the 1990s, like many others, I became fascinated by the idea that social relations are in some sense increasingly global. [n The Tounst Gaze in 1990 I briefly considered how many different
places had to compete on a more global stage in order to attract tourists from all sorts of other places fUrry 1990, 2001J. Later works, such as Consuming Places [Urry ]995), brought out how
people across the world's stage are global consumers of other places and that this very importantly changes what places are like.
They are on the world's stage. More generally, Scott Lash and I ar-ralysed such global transformations through the 'end of organized capitalism' thesis. Capitalism, we argued, is shifting from an organized national, societal pattern, to global 'disorganization' flash and Urry i987, 1994).
In Economies of Signs and Space [Lash and Urry 1994) we showed that moving rapidly in and across the world are complex and mobile economies, both of signs and of people working in, escaping
from or seduced by various signs. These signs and people increasingly flow along various 'scapes', resulting in further 'disorganization' of once organized capitalist societies. It was claimed
that there is a move from the 'social' to the informational and communicational, from national government to global disorganization. Such a mobile economy of signs produces complex redrawings of the boundaries of what is global and what is local. We tried to elaborate some of the time and space changes involved in what Roland Robertson had termed 'elocalization'. |