Globalization is profoundly affecting the lives of people around
the world. It is a set of processes in which capital, technology, people,
goods, and information move relentlessly across the inherited map of
political boundaries (Dicken, 1998; Feenstra, 1998; Mittelman, 2000),
and through which the interdependence of societies over vast distances
and ever-shortening time frames has been intensified. This compression
of time and space across a broad range of human activities has been
made possible by the dramatic decline in the costs of transportation,
communication, and production, and by changes in the formal rules that
once established substantial (though never entirely impermeable) barriers
against flows across borders (Harvey, 1989).