▪ Abstract  Globalization poses a challenge to existing social scientific methods of inquiry and units of analysis by destabilizing the embeddedness of social relations in particular communities and places. Ethnographic sites are globalized by means of various external connections across multiple spatial scales and porous and contested boundaries. Global ethnographers must begin their analysis by seeking out “place-making projects” that seek to define new kinds of places, with new definitions of social relations and their boundaries. Existing ethnographic studies of global processes tend to cluster under one of three slices of globalization—global forces, connections, or imaginations—each defined by a different kind of place-making project. The extension of the site in time and space poses practical and conceptual problems for ethnographers, but also political ones. Nonetheless, by locating themselves firmly within the time and space of social actors “living the global,” ethnographers can reveal how global processes are collectively and politically constructed, demonstrating the variety of ways in which globalization is grounded in the local.

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The paper considers how states and markets shape one another at the national and world-system levels and how globalization is transforming that relationship. This process is illustrated through a review of research on liberal, social rights, developmental, and socialist states in the postwar capitalist economy. These state models were reconciled with expanding international markets through a series of controls on trade and capital flows. Globalization has undermined many of these controls so that states must increasingly integrate themselves into local and global networks. States are experimenting with organizational and strategic changes nationally and internationally in order to respond to a networked economy and polity. Neoliberal institutions are the dominant force shaping the relation between states and markets in the contemporary era, but alternative state-society alliances are emerging to contest the hegemony of neoliberalism in shaping globalization.

Through a case study of the Irish software industry, this article explores how an industry and region that was ‘locked in’ to a dependent relationship of routine production within the global software production network managed to partially move up the production and technology chain to develop more sophisticated operations among foreign firms and in the Irish‐owned sector. Relations within production networks tend to become institutionalized and self‐reproducing. Firms and territories tend to remain locked in to a particular niche, in the absence of a ‘development project’ or coalition that mobilizes resources and cooperation to generate a push into a niche further up the network hierarchy. The push for moving up the network comes when a marginalized or vulnerable group within or on the edges of the network makes an alliance with supportive public agencies. Global production networks institutionalize hierarchical relations, but it remains possible for developmental coalitions to mobilize around the connections and resources within those networks to enter new niches further up these hierarchies. In practice, this requires a concerted and ongoing state policy of industrial development and innovation promotion. A partir du cas de l'industrie irlandaise des logiciels, l'article examine comment un secteur et une région ‘emprisonnés’ dans une relation de dépendance, via une production routinière inscrite dans un réseau mondial de fabrication de logiciels, ont réussi à monter dans la chaîne technologique et productive pour mettre au point des opérations plus sophistiquées au sein d'entreprises étrangères et irlandaises. Les rapports dans les réseaux de production tendent à s'institutionnaliser et à s'auto‐reproduire. Entreprises et territoires restent plutôt prisonniers d'une niche donnée, en l'absence de ‘projet de développement’ ou de coalition mobilisateur de ressources et de coopération, capable de les pousser dans une niche supérieure du réseau hiérarchisé. Cette poussée se crée seulement si un groupe marginalisé ou vulnérable situé dans le réseau ou à sa périphérie s'allie à des organismes publics d'aide. Même si les réseaux de production mondiaux institutionnalisent des liens hiérarchiques, des coalitions de développement peuvent encore se mobiliser autour de contacts et de ressources appartenant à ces réseaux pour pénétrer de nouvelles niches, plus élevées dans les hiérarchies. En pratique, cela exige une politique gouvernementale concertée et durable de développement industriel et de promotion de l'innovation.