avoids end-state end-of-geography ideas about
global flattening (Swyngedouw, 2004).
With a related repudiation of what she calls
an ‘impact model’ of globalization, the geog-
rapher Gill Hart’s recent work also illustrates a
fourth form of academic response to globaliza-
tion focused on how itshegemonyas a neo-
liberal discourse both works and breaks
down in practice (Hart, 2004). Hart argues
that this hegemony serves amongst other
things to make the forcedprivatizationof
public goods and spaces seem natural, and in
response she suggests thatethnographiesof
the ties between different places and people
can help denaturalize such dispossession
(Hart, 2006: see also Tsing, 2004). Such
counter-hegemonic critiques of neo-liberal
globalization discourse have now developed a
diverse set of compliementary strategies for
debunking TINA-tout inevitability ideology.
Such strategies range from efforts to chart the
emergence and marketing of globalization dis-
course as a form of ‘Globaloney’ or globalist
common-sense (Steger, 2005; Veseth, 2005),
to examinations of how it has been re-engi-
neered and spread internationally by ‘World
Bank Literature’ (Kumar, 2003), global busi-
ness schooling (Roberts, 2004; Olds and
Thrift, 2005) and business-funded think-
tanks (Peck, 2001b, 2004), to studies of its
uneven implementation in the actual organiza-
tion of business practices themselves (Dicken,
2003; Ho, 2005), to research into its impact as
aformofgeo-economicsthat shapes both na-
tional and transnational statecraft (Smith,
2002; Roberts et al., 2003; Sparke and Lawson,
2003; Hay, 2004; Jones and Jones, 2004; Gil-
bert, 2005), to feminist investigations of the
masculinismof arguments about the inevit-
ability of global capitalist penetration (Gibson-
Graham, 1996; Massey, 2005). Such examin-
ations of the performance of globalization
discourse can bring it down to size and
allow academics and their audiences to see it
‘stutter’ (Larner and Walters, 2005, p. 20),
but, just as importantly, they also clear the
way for investigations of the actualpower-
geometries of globalization in the lived
worlds beyond the buzzword and its flat-
world imaginative geography (see alsogeog-
raphical imaginary). ms
Suggested reading
El Fisgo ́n (2004).
globe A solid sphere; in geography, the
globe refers to the Earth itself or a physical
model of it (although the Earth’s actual form
as an oblate spheroid has been known since
Newton theorized it in his Principia and
French field scientists demonstrated it in
1736). The globe is a conventional symbol
of geographical science, the geographer
traditionally pictured measuring distances
with dividers placed on a terrestrial globe.
Celestial globes showing the pattern of forms
in the visible heavens have long been paired
with geographical globes. Recognition of the
Earth’s sphericity is dated to Eratosthenes
(276–195bce), but only celestial globes sur-
vive from Antiquity, and were used in Chinese
and Islamic science too. No terrestrial globes
pre-date the European Renaissance, although
it is a nineteenth-century myth that before
Columbus the Earth was believed to be flat.
Construction of terrestrial globes is de-
scribed in Ptolemy’s second-centuryadbook:
Geography, known in the West from the late
fourteenth century. The earliest existing ter-
restrial globe dates from 1492, made by a
Nuremburg merchant knowledgeable about
Portuguese oceanic navigations. Circumnavi-
gation of the globe in 1522 produced a scien-
tific and diplomatic demand for model globes,
although their bulkiness and the size required
for detailed representation of seas and coasts
severely limited their practical navigational use
on board ship (Brotton, 1997). Globe sets of
terrestrial, celestial and armillary spheres (see
cosmography) were objects of beauty, status
and display as much as scientific instruments
(cf.scientific instrumentation) in the early
modern world, and the largest globes were
made for monarchs such as Louis XIV of
France, or as publicspectacles;forexample;
in the great (‘world’) exhibitions of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. The globe
remains an icon ofpoweras much as an edu-
cational object today, signifying control over the
space that it represents. Model globes or globe
images are thus common in advertising and
entertainment as an indicator of international
reach and significance, and are used by airlines,
communications corporations and at self-
consciously international events such as exhibi-
tions, fairs and sports spectacles (Pickles, 2004).
The discourse ofglobalizationdraws on
the idea and image of the globe as a symbol of
connectedness and unity, drawing on an asso-
ciation of the globe image withcosmopolit-
anism. Since the appearance of satellite images
of Earth, ‘thinking globally’ has become a
mantra of environmentalist discourse, while
the globe has become in some respects a
banal object, appearing on balloons, key fobs
and other playthings (Cosgrove, 2001). dcoGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_G Final Proof page 311 2.4.2009 6:30pmGLOBE