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Review Essay – David Singh Grewal's Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization (2008)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Tiffany Wong

Extract

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Networks have been discussed extensively in different ways within social and cultural theory as well as in economic scholarship. Author of Network Power, David Singh Grewal, participates in a popular discourse by describing globalization as a series of networks of power in contemporary society. In the same year that his book was published, Grewal writes a response to these theories of a globalized “flat” society in an article for the UK newspaper, The Guardian. Entitled “The World Isn't Flat – It's Networked,” the preface reads: “Globalisation does not 'flatten opportunity in the world: rather it forces everyone to conform to an underlying standard, specifically that of the already privileged nation.” A young scholar, Grewal holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and is currently Ph.D. student at the Department of Government at Harvard University.

Type
Developments
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 9 , 01 September 2009 , pp. 1277 - 1289
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

1 See, most recently, Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: The Globalized World in the 21ST Century (2006) and Joseph E. Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, who each discuss how globalization is changing the world. In 2006, both scholars, who were interviewed by the New York Times, explained their theory of a ‘flat globalized world’ in further detail. Available at: http://select.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/opinion/25friedman-transcript.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all, last accessed 27 July 2009.Google Scholar

2 Grewal, David Singh, The World Isn't Flat – It's Networked, The Guardian, available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/29/globalisation.globaleconomy, last accessed 27 July 2009.Google Scholar

3 See, David Singh Grewal's past journal articles outlining his response to books written about globalization: Is Globalization Working?, 20 Ethics and International Affairs 247 (2006); Network Power and Global Standardization, 36 Metaphilosophy 128 (2005); Network Power and Globalization, 17 Ethics and International Affairs 89 (2003); Empire's Law, 14 Yale Journal of Law and Humanities 211 (2002).Google Scholar

4 David Singh Grewal, Network Power 297 (2008).Google Scholar

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40 Rhizomatic networks have the power to regenerate as much as they are decentralized in terms of this power. “A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines:” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Introduction: Rhizome, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 9 (2002).Google Scholar

41 Id., 21-23: “A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or end. A rhizome is made of plateaus…concepts are lines, which is to say, number systems attached to a particular dimension of the multiplicities (strata, molecular chains, lines of flight or rupture, circles of convergence, etc.)…The outside has no image, no signification, no subjectivity.”Google Scholar

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47 A polyphony (meaning ‘many voices‘) that creates a Moebius form of a network. Network as process, flow, and dynamic as formulated by Russian philosopher, literary critic and semiotician, Mikhail Bakhtin.Google Scholar

48 Grewal (note 4), 49.Google Scholar

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