Territoriality in Modern Societies: The Spatial and Institutional Nestedness of National Economies

This paper presents an inquiry into globalization and regional responses. It argues that social actors are embedded in distinctive social systems of production which are societally specific. While social systems of production are constantly changing, they are not converging toward some global system. Different institutional mechanisms to coordinate relationships among economic actors, such as corporate hierarchies, states, networks, associations, class, and communities, may by found at the global level, the transnational regional level (e.g., the European Union), or at the territorial level of the nation state or subnational regions. The paper challenges the idea that globalization is the dominant force of our time, even though the autonomy of the nation state is weakening as a double shift in economic coordination is occuring at the subnational regional level, and at the transnational, regional, and global levels. As a result, economies and political actors are increasingly nested in a complex web of coordination mechanisms.